Hot and spicy food products and recipes are not all that common in Brazil. I have found that this fact comes as a surprise to many. Anyhow I am a lover of spicy foods, and while hot sauces are available, I decided to go to great lengths to make my own.
You’ll note by the title, this is a 5 star recipe. Well, that is the rating my mother gave it after making it herself, hence forth, that is no exaggeration folks!
General notes on making hot sauce
To make hot sauce, you essentially just boil the ingredients to soften them, then blend them. The salt and vinegar acts as a preservative, so it lasts a while.
Some people strain their hot sauce to make it less vicious. I think that’s a terrible idea. Why remove any part of the goodness.
Some people ferment the ingredients in a brine for a period of time as well. Allegedly it makes the flavor more complex in some way. I have never tried that, and based on the deliciousness of this non-fermented recipe, I likely never will.
I keep my sauce in the fridge to maximize safety and shelf life, but I go through batches very quickly. Sometimes my enormous habanero plant can’t keep up.
I grow my own habaneros for fun, and also, they’re difficult to find in the grocery stores here. You can find packs of hot peppers containing habaneros, but it’s always a mix. I would need to buy many packs to get the right quantity of habaneros, and I’d be left with many other peppers I don’t necessary want.
5 star habanero hot sauce ingrediants
Total prep and cook time should be about an hour.
Here is what you’ll need:
- 1 red bell pepper
- 150 grams of habanero peppers
- 1 entire bulb of garlic, and a few extra cloves
- 1 white or yellow onion
- 1 tablespoon of salt
- 2 cups of white vinegar
- 3/4 cups of water
- 2 limes
- Pinch of black pepper
- 1 apple (minus the core)
Preparation:
Deskin the garlic cloves and onion. Loosely chop the bell pepper (remove the seeds and core). Cut the habaneros in half, but leave the seeds and core for maximum spiciness. Chop the apple and discard the core and seeds.
Add the pepper, garlic, onion, habaneros, vinegar, water, salt and black pepper to a pot. Squeeze the juice of the two limes into the pot. The liquids should come close to covering the dry ingredients, or slight cover them.
Bring the contents to a boil, then simmer for 20 minutes. Note that when cooking hot peppers, spicy fumes can get in the air. You may want to do this outside on a hot plate, or inside with the windows open. I just open a window and it doesn’t bother me at all.
Let the contents cool in the pot for about another 20 minutes.
Put all the contents in a blender (do not strain out or remove any of the liquid). Blend it and bottle it.
That’s all.
It should look something like this:
You can of course scale this recipe up proportionally.
Once you get the hang of it you can swap in or out other ingredients. I have made batches with pineapple, instead of apple. I often add parsley to the recipe. Sometimes I brown the onions and garlic in a pan before boiling the ingredients to bring out the flavor a bit more. It’s very hard to mess up the recipe, so get creative and have fun!
-Sirsandals