Since last winter was the warmest winter ever and spring started in late February around here, my peppers and tomatoes went in early. My poblano and banana peppers already have leeetle babies in their flowers. My new experimental peppers, Caribbean Hots, are lagging behind but I’m still thinking ahead. Hot sauce!
I’ve made a few homemade hot sauces and, frankly, I wasn’t very happy with them. Especially the fancy ones with mangos and extended, complicated cooking techniques that included cheese cloth.
There is one hot sauce recipe that I’ve stuck with. It’s simple and tastes mighty fine. I’d like to post it and ask you guys how you’d change it to make it better.
Also-- your recipes. Easy, hard-- as long as it comes out good.
My hot sauce: Dice a half an onion, 3 or 4 garlic cloves and an inch of ginger. Mince your peppers. I use whatever peppers I’ve got my hands on. 12 medium sized jalapenos and one poblano makes a spicy hot sauce. Not super hot but not Frank’s non-Hot.
Heat a tablespoon or two of oil in a medium saucepan and soften the veggies (but not the ginger). Throw some salt in there. When the the stuff is nice and wilted add the ginger and two cups of water. Let it boil. Let it boil and boil until almost all the water is gone.
Put the boiled mess in a blender with a cup of white vinegar.
I grow and or buy all sorts of peppers but l prefer the hotter ones. I put them in a food processor/blender and add just enough vinegar to make a slurry. I wash em and cut the stems of but I leave the seeds/insides. Throw in about 1/6 or so by volume minced garlic. Its interesting to see how the peppers have different flavors in addition to different heat levels. Its sorta subtle but its there. And I much prefer to make my habanero and jalapeno sauces out of well rippened red ones rather than the more typically available green ones. And roasting the peppers before processing them also yields interesting results.
I’ve experimented with adding paprika, chili powder, dried red pepper, various black peppers, curry, molasses, and a bunch of stuff I forget at the moment.
One time I made this great sauce. A random collection of a dozen different peppers. God knows what spices. The cool thing about this sauce was you ate it and it was kinda hot. Then the heat kept build and building and you started to think OMG this is gonna get bad. Then it faded away…
I’ll never be able to recreate it.
All I can add is ‘Run far, far away from any recipe that asks you to boil the sauce after the vinegar is added’. Talk about tear gas, holy crap!! Thought my roommates were gonna kill me, and my eyeballs and lungs wished they would!
I thought this was going to be about recipes for food using hot sauces. 
Can we expand to that? 
Interesting that you made your own though.
Thanks, Big Girl, I’d like to see some recipes, too.
I once made a hot sauce from a recipe. One used a tablespoon of this stuff in other sauces. I bent over the blender to smell it, and my face looked and felt sunburned.
I wish I could find the recipe.