This is my “house” hot sauce recipe. Designed to be a flexible and neutral recipe that can use any hot peppers you have access to. It has a little carrot and garlic for depth and roundness, but mostly is about celebrating the peppers. My intention is to grow hot peppers in the garden, collect and freeze them as they ripen, then process them all into sauce at the end of the season. Each years sauce will be different because of the types and ratios of peppers used, and the growing season conditions.
If you are starting from store bought peppers, simply wash them, cut off their stems, and proceed.
If you are storing home grown peppers, I start by harvesting the peppers about once a week as they ripen. I rinse them, cut off their stems, and weigh them. I will record the weight then freeze them on a paper towel in the freezer. Once they are frozen solid I move them to a freezer bag. Subsequent harvest get added to the bag. I keep all the seeds and membranes.
Recipe and Scaling factors per g of peppers (P)
- 100 g peppers (stems removed) – P
- 16 g carrot (washed, peeled, and grated) – P x 0.16
- 2.5 g garlic (rough chopped) – P x 0.025
- 75 g distilled water – P x 0.75
- 2 g salt – P x 0.02
- 50 g White vinegar (5% acidity) – P x 0.5
Protocol:
- Combine peppers, carrot, garlic, water, and salt in a pot with a good sealing lid. (You don’t want too much liquid to boil off, if it does you can add some water back at the end)
- Bring to a boil and reduce to simmer
- Cook covered for 15 minutes, being careful not to evaporate all the water
- Transfer all the cooked materials plus the white vinegar to a blender and blend until smooth.
- Strain this mixture with a coarse strainer (~1mm) back into the pot used for cooking. This removes any big eft over chunks.
- At this point use a pH strip to measure the pH of the sauce. You want it to be at 4.0 or lower. You may need to add a bit more vinegar if its 4.5 or 5.0. In my experience this volume of vinegar always got it really close. Occasionally adding 10g more (per 100g peppers) would do the trick.
- At this point the sauce is ready to bottle. I bring the sauce back to a low almost boil so its as hot as it can be going into the bottle, but I don’t want to reduce the sauce unnecessarily.
This is not a validated shelf-stable canning process, and I recommend the sauce be kept refrigerated. Throw it out if it gets moldy, releases a lot of gas, or the taste is off. In my hands it easily lasts months.
Bottling Protocol
- While the peppers are cooking, I clean the bottles with hot soapy water.
- Submerge the glass bottles in nearly boiling water and have them sit there until the sauce is done.
- Once the sauce is ready, take out a bottle with tongs and drain the water.
- Working quickly, pour the sauce into the bottle. Add the lid, and invert the bottle. This helps the hot (temperature) sauce and bottle heat up the lid too.
- Bring right side up once its cooled to the touch, label the bottle, and refrigerate.
- The first time you open it there will be a little gas escape, that’s from the hot bottling and not a sign that you have contamination.
Enjoy!
