Recipe : Homemade Hot Sauce

Two jars of home made hot sauce. Mouth watering just looking at them.

Ok. We love hot sauce. So maybe in order to be more specific, we should call this recipe "Home Made Hot Sauce I" because there are plenty of delicious ways to mix one of these up.  This one was just packed full of flavour and enough heat to get you sweating in the face when you use it to dip your pizza in. 

Mouth watering yet?

Some of the fresh and local peppers I used for my recipe.

The Recipe

Any Pepper Hot Sauce

made from fresh local peppers sourced at farmer market

great recipe because its so simple it will work with any mixture of peppers

The Ingredients

Peppers, as many as you have

Garlic

Ginger

Honey

Vinegar

Salt

Water

The Process

Step 2 : Taking all the tops off.

1. Wash your peppers
2. Cut the stems off
3. Preheat oven to 425 F
4. Prepare a half clove of garlic per cup of peppers. (Just peel it)
5. Toss Pepper and Garlic in oil. Place on baking sheet
6. Bake in oven. (Approximately 30 minutes) 
7. Remove when garlic is softened, and the peppers are each covered by about 10-20% of charred burned areas. Or when all the peppers have become a soggy lifeless mess.  If you don't reach a browning stage. 
8. Place in a heavy bottom soup pot. 
9. Add a few extra cloves of garlic to the pot, add some ginger. 
10. Add water, may not be needed if the pepper flesh is already sitting in its own juice.  Water is mainly there to keep it from burning, drying out and sticking or scorching to your pot. 
11. Add salt. More than you think it needs.  This is a sauce that is used more like a seasoning, so a little extra salt helps give it that punch you expect.  It's still better than most commercial hot sauces which are probably half salt. 
12. Cook down for half hour
13. Keep it from drying out by periodically adding some more water, or some more vinegar. Either works.  If you like a thinner hot sauce (a la tabasco) you may want to start adding some vinegar now.
14. Blend with a hand blender.  Add vinegar to help get the peppers to blend. 
15. Force through a sieve into a bowl. 
16. Whatever doesn't pass through, blend again on its own. 
17. Force through sieve again. 
18. Repeat until basically all seeds are blended up and you have a smooth pasty sauce left. 
19. Season with vinegar to taste.  I like plain white vinegar. But white wine can do well, red wine can do well, vegetable vinegars can work, it is all to taste there. 
20. I like my hot sauce only just a little bit thinner than ketchup, so the amount of vinegar will vary with taste. 

Cooking down in the pot, notice the burnt bits

Cooking down in the pot, notice the level of liquid.

Pushing through the sieve. 

Voila! Hot Sauce!