I finished off a standard sized Tabasco bottle this after noon, and before throwing it away decided to wash it out and try making my own pepper sauce. I got out the spice grinder (a small coffee bean grinder dedicated to spices) and threw in two small dried habanero peppers, one dried chipolte pepper, and about a teaspoon each of black pepper kernels, and red (pizza style) pepper seeds. I ground all this into dust and using a funnel put it into the Tabasco bottle which it filled about 1/3 of the way up. I then added some inexpensive, black balsamic vinegar I keep around for salads. I then capped the bottle and shook it like crazy until all the pepper dust was in suspension.
I let it sit and then came back about 4 hours later and shook out a few drops. Disappointingly, the vinegar liquid really didn’t have much pepper flavor, the wetted pepper dust that immediately settled out of the liquid drops was where almost all the pepper “kick” was located.
How can you get a pepper sauce where the pepper flavor is in the liquid solution like Tabasco?
I’ve never attempted my own, but I imagine a blender or food processor would have to be involved, to give the pepper sauce some body. Then you could add the vinegar, but you can’t just have dried ground peppers.
Official McIlhenny Tabasco sauce is fermented and aged for three years in oak barrels. A rough recipe for it is found here: Homemade Tabasco Sauce.
It’s quite difficult to make a decent sauce starting from dried peppers as, no matter what you do, dried peppers just don’t want to grind up fine enough to form a stable emulsion.
You can make quite a decent sauce by chopping up, boiling, and pureeing fresh cayenne peppers in vinegar. However, it still tends to separate unless you puree the heck out of it, and boiling destroys some of the capsaicin. You can get around the separation by adding a small amount of cornstarch (Agar or gaur gum, if can get them) at the end of the boil. To get a stable emulsion without boiling or gums, you’ll need a homogenizer. I’ve built a rotating blade homogenizer for my roto-zip, and it produces a lovely, maximally hot, non-separating sauce. Sadly, I’m nearly out of it for the year, as last summer was horrible for growing peppers.
If you’ve got an excess of dried hot peppers, try soaking a bunch of them in a jar of olive oil for (at least) several weeks. The capsaicin is oil soluble, and you will end up with an interesting hot oil for marinades and cooking.
Remove the stems and seeds from your dried peppers, and flatten them out. Heat them on both sides in a hot pan - just until they flatten and heat a little, you don’t want to burn them. I put them in the pan, flatten with a spatula, hold them there for about 5-10 seconds, turn it over and do the same thing.
Do that to about 4 ounces of dried peppers. Put them in a bowl, cover with boiling water, and allow to sit for about 30 minutes.
Remove chiles from water, reserving about 2/3 - 1 cup of water. Put chiles in a blender, add a little of the reserved water, and blend until smooth. Add more water if you want a more liquidy sauce, less if you’d rather have a paste.
Press the mixture through fine mesh strainer to remove the skins. There you go, your hot dried chile sauce.
Of course, this is just a stepping off point - it’s rather bland. Add seasonings, either now or before you blend, including all or some of the following:
garlic. You can roast it along with the dried chiles
salt
you can use stock or beer instead of water when blending the chilies
I’ve never had any luck using dried Cayennes or Thai, Athena. Don’t recall if I’ve followed that exact procedure though. I’ll give it a try when next I have a bunch.
Along the same lines. Take a 750ml bottle of cheap-to-fair vodka. Have a couple of shots to make some room in the bottle. Quarter lengthwise 4 fresh jalapenos and shove them in the bottle (you may need to sixth them if they are big) and a couple smashed cloves of garlic. Let sit for a couple weeks in a cool dark place, then strain to another bottle. Use it in sauces and for deglazing pans. I think it is hotter than the pepper oils you can make, but it also gets the fruitiness of the peppers.
Oh, forgot to add, when you make a big pot of chili, and you are done browning your meat, deglaze the pot with the vodka. A lot of the frond is alcohol soluble, which is why wine is used in Frace and Italy.
Never tried to make it, but I got it in mind to one day try the real McIlheny technique.
I’m thinking I’ll use a sealable 5 gallon food bucket/container. Grind a couple of bushels of peppers (I’m thinking of a proprietary mix of peppers…that’ll be my secret in this recipe.), adding a heaping handful of salt for every gallon of peppers, covering the top of the peppers with a wax paper round and sealing the bucket tight.
I’ll let that sit in a cool dark place for a year and finally mix the mash with white vinegar (maybe 3 to 1?) and bring to a boil (I’m thinking of adding garlic at this point, I thought of adding it to the initial mash to age, but thought that might give it an off taste, or the garlic’s oils might go rancid.) and then strain the resulting elixir from the solids and bottle. I’m thinking of throwing in some tiny, fresh, whole, thai birds eye chilis to the bottles of sauce too, an added zing and good to pull out and eat as a condiment with meats and what have you.