Hot sauce

I love hot food.  The hotter it is, the better the food, thus I have a lot of interest in hot sauce.  Now hot sauce is pretty cheap and there are a million varieties, but it is fun to try to make stuff at home.  Also, I keep eyeing the bags of Scotch Bonnet peppers at the Caribbean grocery and thinking what I could do with them.  One or two are easy to use.  20 not so much, except via hot sauce.

So the last time I tried to do this, I used apple cider vinegar.  Poor choice.  It was too tangy and sweet.  Some people like sugar and fruit in their hot sauce, but I like salt, vinegar, garlic and lots of heat.  Otherwise, the hot sauce was Trini-style, with chado beni (similar to cilantro), mustard, and two heads of garlic.  The garlic was actually worse than the peppers.  Raw garlic burn my tummy like the dickens.  It needed a couple of weeks to mellow before it was edible.

I kept the sauce in a mason jar, which was a bad idea as well.  The sauce stuck to the lip of the jar, dried, and got gross.  Much better would be to put it in a tapered jar.

This time I am started with a recipe from my brother's Jamaican cookbook.  It's a bit odd and I plan to split it in half and modify one half.  I am not sure why you don't puree the veggies, but we'll see how it turns out.  At 5 days, it is actually turning pretty good, if colorless.

Basic Hot Sauce:

1 carrot, finely diced
1 white onion, finely diced
4 Scotch bonnet or habanero chilies, thinly sliced
2 cups white vinegar
2 cloves garlic, pressed

1) Put everything in a jar.
2) Age one week, agitating once in a while to mix.

Day 5.  Still basically colorless.  A little cloudy from the minced garlic.

Day 7.  Filtered off the solids.  Cloudy yellow.

I tried to puree the vegetables, but they really didn't liquify.  It's kinda gross to have hot sauce with a bunch of debris at the bottom, so I just tossed it.  When I made my Trini hot sauce, I was able to get a pretty homogeneous sauce, so I suspect that soaking the veggies makes them less willing to puree.  No matter.  Interesting, while perusing Jungle Jim's, I noticed some hot sauce that looked just like mine - clear.  Some of the color might just be cosmetic.

The flavor is pretty good, with very hot pepper flavor and rich vinegar bite in balance.  I considered adding some mustard to some of it to make it Trini, but I haven't done that yet.  What do I do with a cup of hot sauce now?  Next post, the answer.