Hot Sauce!

If you recall a post from a few months ago, we had a bumper crop of peppers this year, including cayennes.

What better to do with excess cayennes than make hot sauce? I made two different batches. One was intended to mimic Frank's Redhot, while the second would be a bit more custom. Here is what the peppers looked like. Some of the peppers had fuzzy mold inside. I'm wondering if this was because I left the peppers that ripened early in the season on the plant rather than taking them off? Anyway, here is what it looked like when I was chopping them up.

I found a recipe online that said it was a copycat recipe for Redhot, so I decided to start with that. The recipe is quite simple. Pepper, vinegar, garlic, and salt. Boil everything together for a while, then put them in a blender and strain the resulting liquid. I got about 8 fluid ounces from the recipe. Using small pieces of bread to dip in the sauce, I decided that it had too much vinegar, not enough salt, and the vinegar flavor didn't seem quite right. It wasn't necessarily bad, but I also wouldn't say its all that great.

For the second batch I decided to use more salt, less vinegar, and use half apple cider vinegar. In addition, I used more salt, more garlic, and added a bunch of black pepper. Unfortunately it didn't work out too well. There wasn't enough liquid so I put in some water, but it ended up too liquidy. Somehow I managed to put in too much salt also. Its a shame, too, because if it wasn't for the excess salt/water, I like the underlying flavor of that batch quite a bit.

I didn't have any empty hotsauce bottles around, so I put the sauces in 4 oz. jelly jars. Makes it a bit inconvenient for using it. Here is what the final product looked like.

Here is a visual comparison of the two homemade sauces along with Redhot and a random hotsauce that I happened to have at the time. This is after letting the sauces rest for a few weeks.

Both homemade batches are slightly hotter than the commercial sauces, but not overwhelmingly so. The vinegar flavor in first homemade sauce seemed to mellow a bit in the jar. It tasted reasonably good, though it didn't have a lot of depth of flavor. The second batch continues to be too watery and salty, but the underlying flavor is quite good. With less salt and water, I think it would be right there with my favorite commerical sauces like Redhot and Cholula.

With very good (and reasonably cheap) commercial hotsauces widely available, I don't see a lot of reason to keep trying to make my own hotsauces. However, I do plan to grow at least one hot pepper plant next year since they are great for throwing in stir-fries and other dishes.