August 2011
8 posts
Working with dried chilis and hot sauce...
The impetus:
I had a couple bags of dried chilis hiding out in my fridge from last year’s harvest. I’d completely forgot about them until I was in there rummaging for something else. I harvested a bunch of my Jalapeno bushes last year when the peppers were bright red. I saved most of them and ran them through my Great Smokey Mountains locker-style BBQ smoker using apple wood to...
A few musings on hot sauce consistency
The last few batches of Louisiana-style pepper sauce I’ve made have been very simple - just plain vinegar and cayenne peppers as the base ingredients. However, the consistency varies wildly based on the ratio of peppers to vinegar, and of course the potency of your food processor.
Let me explain. When your sauce is predominately peppers the consistency is obviously going to be thicker...
Taking the Basic Cayenne vinegar sauce up a notch
For this sauce I’m using much less peppers than I have for the last few, mainly just because only half of the next batch of cayennes on my plant have turned red and ripened. Normally this would mean I’m going to have less sauce, but not tonight. Tonight I’m making a pepper vinegar very much akin to Tabasco, but hopefully a little more complex. It’s going to be thin but...
Quick picture on the growth progress of my...
What you’re looking at is 3 plants in a pot - the holy grail of hot peppers, the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T - which this year unseated the Naga Viper (ghost pepper variant) as the world’s hottest pepper. They’re a long-growth pepper with two primary uses: boat paint additive to keep barnacles off, and bear mace. I plan on making hot sauce out of them when they’re ripe....
Working with high capsaicin content peppers.
For tonight’s experiments in hot sauce making, I’ve chosen to do a habanero pepper sauce 3 ways. I figure this will be a good way to learn what to look out for when my Trinidad Scorpion plants finally start making peppers. In the pictures you’ll see orange habaneros, “red chili peppers” (I’ll have a whole rant dedicated to grocery store chili pepper naming...
Pickling Jalapenos
As cool as the pepper sauces are, I had some left-overs from the garden that I wanted to try some experiments with. If you’ve grown Jalapenos before, you know that they make peppers like crazy… faster than I can keep up with really. So I like to harvest them when they’re green and pickle ‘em. I also had some cucumbers that I wanted to do the same with. For the jalapenos, I...
Basic Cayenne Pepper sauce... w/ 'froof'
This is a twist on the last recipe I posted about. I took the same route, using Cayennes, but added a bit of ornamentation. Same pepper mash technique, just used garlic cloves in the boil and apple cider vinegar instead of distilled white; and a few extra goodies in the end puree - smoked paprika, cumin, lime juice, and onion powder. Here are some pictures of the end result, and of course the...
Basic Pepper/Vinegar using Cayennes.
In this installment I’m making a quick Cayenne pepper/vinegar sauce. Cayennes are known for being very thin, having very little fruit, a TON of seeds, and a large area of waxy skin. Not very conducive to making a sauce… or are they?
Oh sure, you could cut them open, remove the seeds by hand, carefully filet the fruit off the waxy skin for the base sauce… but this is way too...
