Bill's Homemade Hot Pepper Sauce

Perhaps you are like me and enjoy adding a little (or a lot) hot pepper sauce on your food. These days there are many varieties to choose from, but are you aware that hot sauce is easy to make? The next time you pick up a bottle, look at the ingredients and you'll see that the primary ingredients are hot red peppers, vinegar and salt. These three ingredients are easy to find at the grocery store. And if you enjoy growing vegetables like I do, you can easily and inexpensively grow all the hot peppers you need during the growing season to make a few bottles or more of sauce. This website provides a hot sauce recipe that's quick, tasty, and inexpensive to make. This recipe will fill a 12 oz bottle. You might have a little leftover.

Ingredients

About two cups of red hot peppers (add more if you want a thick sauce), coarsely chopped and lightly pressed into the measuring cup. I use homegrown peppers and remove the top stem. Remove the seeds and white "veins" inside the pepper if you want a nice red sauce. You can leave the seeds and veins in the peppers if you don't want to do all that extra work.

3/4 cup of apple cider vinegar. You can try white vinegar and it will create a sharper taste. I have tried an equal mix of the two.

1 to 3 teaspoons of sea salt.

1 tablespoon of brown sugar or honey.

1 to 4 cloves of garlic, chopped.

IMPORTANT: When chopping hot peppers be very careful! If your fingers touch the chopped pepper and then you later rub your eye or other sensitive spots on your body it will burn! Some use gloves when preparing the peppers. I use a knife and fork to cut the pepper open and remove the seeds by scraping them out with a spoon. My hands almost never touch the cut portions of the pepper.

Equipment you will need

One 12 to 14 ounce glass bottle (a used, but clean hot sauce or soy sauce bottle and cap with a ~1/2 inch opening works well)

A blender

A funnel. Here is a link to buy one made from glass: http://www.sciplus.com/p/GLASS-FUNNEL_40059

A glass or ceramic bowl that is microwave safe

A microwave oven

IMPORTANT: You want to use equipment that will not react with the pepper mix. Glass and ceramic materials are good. Metal and some plastics need to be avoided as much as possible as they may react with the mixture and ruin the flavor.

Putting it all together

First sterilize the bottle and cap by boiling them in a pot of water. See my link below. Add all the ingredients to the blender and blend on high for about a minute or two. When done, let it rest a few minutes or more to let any bubbles settle. Next, add the mixture to a glass or ceramic bowl. Cover and microwave on high for up to 8 minutes or more to get the mixture to just over 160F.

After removing the bowl from the microwave you will likely see some bubbles on top of the mixture.. You can wait awhile for it to settle down (try mixing it gently with a folk) or just go ahead to the next step.

Using a sterilized funnel, poor the mixture in the bottle, seal it, and place it in your refrigerator. Some recipes call for you to wait a week or so before use (to improve flavor), but I often can't wait that long and sometimes use the sauce as soon as it has cooled down. This recipe should stay fresh and not spoil for about a month or two if you keep it refrigerated. I usually consume a 12 ounce bottle in less than a month. Like I said, I like hot sauce. If you want your sauce to last months before spoiling, heating the mixture to a hotter temperature (190F for 5 minutes) and using more vinegar to lower the pH will help.

I have used mostly Cayenne and Kung Pao peppers to make my sauce. The heat from these peppers is less than what you would get from say, Tabasco sauce, but you get a nice taste of the peppers and garlic. I have noted that the vinegar and pepper mash will sometimes separate with the vinegar at the top of the bottle. This can be remedied by simply shaking the sauce before use. I have also decanted off the vinegar, put it in the blender with more peppers, mixed it all, and then poured it back into the bottle. Making a very thick sauce will also solve this problem.

NOTE: I highly recommend you experiment with the ingredients and preparation methods. Change the measures of ingredients I've listed here and add others to enhance the heat, flavor, texture, and color to your needs and taste. As an example, I have increased the heat of my sauce recipe by adding in just one or two Habanero peppers per bottle. I've tried adding in some rice vinegar and it gives a nice taste to the sauce. And lately, I make sauce with extra peppers, giving it a thick consistency that's similar to ketchup. It tastes great.

In 2020, when the cold weather returned, I harvested many unripe green Big Thai peppers. I cut off the tops and dried them out in the oven (170F for about 9 hours) on three large baking sheets. I then ground them up in a food processor and made ~24 ounces of dried hot pepper flakes. They tasted great! Check Youtube videos on how to do all this.

Growing Hot Peppers and Varieties

Growing hot peppers is not hard to do. I grow them using organic methods in my vegetable garden. You can grow them successfully in a large pot with good potting soil and some organic fertilizer. They do best with 6 or more hours of sunlight. To make at least few 12 ounce bottles, you will need to grow about 3 or more plants depending on the variety you decide to grow. Unless you grow more than about 5 plants, it's unlikely you will harvest enough peppers at one time (and keep them fresh) for one 12 ounce bottle. So each time I harvest a few peppers, I remove the seeds, stem, and veins and freeze them in bags. For the 2010 harvest, I have harvested and froze enough peppers, to last me (1 bottle/month) until the 2011 harvest.

Just about any hot pepper should make a great sauce. Here are some hot pepper varieties I have grown and my observations:

Cayenne - Prolific, long thin (2 to 5 inches) red pepper. Pepper walls are thin and seeds can be hard to remove. I have grown these successfully in pots and from seed, but the yields were less. Easy to find at garden centers either as seeds or plants. Many commercial hot pepper sauces use this or a similar variety.

Cherry Bomb - Shaped like a big cherry (up to 2 inches wide). Has thick walls. In my garden, it ripens faster than Cayenne's, but is not as prolific. The pepper stem and seeds are very easy to remove compared to Cayenne and Kung Pao peppers. These peppers are hotter than I expected. I have made a bottle of sauce from just these peppers and it tasted great.

Kung Pao and Big Thai - The peppers are thinner and longer compared to the Cayenne pepper and the plants are big (biggest of all in my garden). They ripen later than the Cayenne pepper, but yields are high. The heat is slightly less than Cayenne's (in my opinion). Compared to the Cayenne, the seeds are harder to remove.

Jalapeno - Not as hot as the varieties above (again, my opinion). They grow 2 to 3 inches long with thick skins It's a smaller plant and yields are less than what I have gotten from the other varieties. While most people eat these peppers green in color, I am letting these peppers ripen to a red color. This means the pepper is staying longer on the plant and it tends to get cracks and blemishes. Like the Cherry Bomb pepper, it's easy to remove the seeds and veins.

Habenero - In late 2011, I pulled the seeds from a store bought Habanero pepper and planted a few in a large pot the following Spring. I got one plant and it produced 9 bright orange-red peppers. The next summer, I bought a packet of seeds and grew a number of the plants and have continued to do so each summer since then. Yes the Habenero is very hot, but they have a wonderful aroma and sweet-hot flavor. The peppers grow to about 2 inches in diameter with a gnarly appearance, which is common for this pepper. The seeds are easy to remove. I sometimes add one or two in when I make a bottle of sauce to get extra heat and flavor.

Bhot Jolokia (Ghost Pepper) - In 2012 a friend gave some of these peppers to taste. I kept the seeds from them and the following Spring got one to grow into a plant. I had it growing in a pot and eventually got one small orange-red pepper, which I ate in very small amounts. Like the Habenero it has a great aroma and a nice fruity taste when it first enters your mouth. But after that, incredible heat hits your palate. When Autumn arrived, I brought the plant inside for the Winter. If I get peppers from it again, I might add a small amount of one to a bottle of sauce to really kick up the heat and flavor.

Odd hybrids - After chopping peppers, I collect the seeds and grow them the following year. Sometimes I get some kind of odd hybrid. I have been growing a pepper from collected seed that seems to be a hybrid or cross of a Jalapeno and a Cayenne. They taste rather good and have good heat. Some of these experimental plants produce peppers with no heat and/or have a rather bitter flavor. Yet it is fun to experiment.