It turns out making your own hot sauce it stupidly easy and fun to experiment with. Equipped with only a blender, some brightly colored peppers and standard cooking supplies, my brother and I made killer sauce. The consistency ended up similar to restaurant-style salsa, but that was okay for our purposes as we ended up “testing” an entire bag of chips on it. We made a few batches using a highly-improvisational approach to our culinary endeavor, mostly varying the amount of citrus and spiciness.
For those who are interested, here’s a list of the ingredients we used:
- A can of tomato puree. This is what gave our sauce the salsa-like consistency. We used the whole can, mostly because we had no idea what we were doing, but you can use less.
- An assortment of spicy peppers. Go to your local grocery store, find the pepper section and have a blast. Our general rule was to use large, flavorful peppers for the base flavor (Like jalapenos and Anaheims) and add habaneros to adjust the spiciness. For the record, six habaneros is fine if you want to sweat like you’re sitting in a steam room.
- About one quarter of a large sweet onion. We were going for something that was a little sweet and spicy, and the sweet onion was perfect for this.
- As much garlic as you can stand. We used a combination of fresh cloves and the minced kind you can buy in a jar.
- A couple limes, juiced. You don’t want to blend up the actual lime pulp. This will make your sauce nasty. We learned this the hard way. Blech. At this point some people might have figured out that we don’t cook things very often.
- A bit of brown sugar. I contended this was the secret ingredient that was going to make the sauce come together. My brother was skeptical but willing. We both decided that it made us look like we knew what we were doing a little bit more.
- Fresh ginger. I don’t know if you could actually taste this in the end, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
- Tiny amount of salt. You might even be fine without adding any salt, depending on how spicy you’ve made it and your preference for sodium.
- Two whole tangelos. This is where we got bold. We didn’t want to make any old hot sauce – we wanted someting unique. Something with zing. Unlike the limes, all we did was peel the fruit and throw them in, pulp in all. You might think this sounds disgusting, but it made for a very sweet and tangy flavor. Highly optional, but highly recommendedd.
- A little bit of olive oil. Please see my note about adding brown sugar and the illusion of knowing what we were doing.
After blending all the ingredients together, we poured in some white vinegar and let the whole mess simmer on the stove for about twenty minutes. Unless you like eye-burning, peppery clouds of suffocating hot sauce steam to waft through your kitchen and home, you should probably cover the pot and turn on the vent. Again, something we learned through trial and error.
The combination of tomato puree and tangelos resulted in a very orange-colored sauce – think a slightly brighter shade of Cholula. It had a very sweet initial taste followed by what I’ve dubbed the “habanero bloom” followed by profuse sweating. Six habaneros might have pushed it over the comfortable boundaires of “spicy” and into the realm of a kind of spirit quest aiding halucinogen, especially when you were tackling it more like a salsa than condiment. But hot damn, it was tasty.
Our next hot sauce experiment is going to revolve around a tomatillo base intead of the tomato puree to see if we can get a lovely green color.
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