Homemade Hot Sauce

I made almost two pints of hot sauce using three different chili peppers:  A standard Cayenne, a pepper we just call 3″ Hot, from seeds from a plant my neighbor gave me years ago, and a couple handfuls of little Thai hot peppers. The Thai peppers are the plants that look like a little Christmas tree, loaded with tiny extremely hot peppers. Normally I wouldn’t use these little peppers, and I won’t again. They are just too small to be worth the trouble. But they are hot and tasty so they made it into this batch.

Hot Peppers

I used a recipe by Emeril Lagasse that Judy found here.  I followed the recipe quite closely in both quantity and instructions, but nearly doubled everything because of the amount of peppers I wanted to use.  Here are the peppers, cleaned and ready for washing and cutting.

Hot Sauce Raw Materials

Here are all the raw ingredients: peppers, onion, garlic, oil, salt, water and vinegar.

Dangerous Fumes

We did our cooking and processing outside. The fumes from this mix are at best unpleasant and at worst, dangerous, so we welcomed the beautiful fall day that made working outside a pleasure.

Cooked Down Sauce Material

We cooked the mix down to a thick paste, allowing the liquid to  nearly evaporate.

Food Processor and Food Mill

We used a food processor to turn the mix into a puree, adding vinegar to get the sauce into a pourable consistency. Then we put everything through a Foley food mill, which removed most of the seeds and gave the sauce a nice texture.  The Lagasse recipe makes no mention of seeds, but I think most of them have to be removed to make the sauce usable.  It’s a little thicker than store-bought sauce, but since we’re storing it in an open mouth jar, that won’t be a problem as we use it up.  The recipe states that the sauce will last six months in the fridge, but in years past I’ve kept hot sauces a lot longer than that without any issues.

The sauce will age and taste better after a couple weeks, but I sampled a little and it is blistering and already has good flavor.