Adventures in Hot Sauce Making

Yeah, I know it's been over a month since I've posted anything--believe me, I've tried, but wasn't quite feeling the inspiration. Don't get me wrong, the kitchens at Ham Sandwich, Inc. have been hard at work the past month churning out homemade BBQ sauce, brandied peaches and plums, an obscene amount of baked goods, and a damn delicious pork shoulder--but writing down my assorted adventures was feeling a bit trite, even forced. It happens.

Fortunately for you folks at home, I tackled the new and mildly dangerous land of hot sauce this weekend, and am pleased to say that I survived to post about it, with all my mucous membranes intact. Yay!

See that rounded red pepper in the foreground of the picture above? That's a fresh, evil Naga Jolokia Ghost Pepper, one of four given to me by a former coworker as obsessed with food as I am. (Shoutout: Lauren, you'll be sorely missed around here!)

See the jalapeño tree in the picture below? If I had a more recent photo, it would show a 5 foot tall plant covered in red, ripe jalapeños. It was like a south-of-the-border Christmas tree and something had to be done with the presents. Hot sauce it was.

I picked about a pound of jalapenos off the tree, then pulled out the assorted red peppers (hot, sweet, unknown) I'd been collecting in my fridge, including one jolokia. Because I'm: 1 ) impatient and 2) lazy, I decided to stem and de-seed said peppers sans rubber gloves. Please note that pretty much any and every site that tells you how to make hot sauce encourages the wearing of gloves when handling peppers, and they're right--really, you should. I'm a good example of how NOT to do things (see previous post on jolokia shooters), but figured that my non-patented, two fingers-of-my-left-hand-pepper-hold/slice-and-scrape-with-the-knife-in-the-right-hand technique would keep my contact with searing capsaicin to a minimum. Surprisingly, it sort of worked, and while the tips of my left fingers experienced a slight tingling sensation for about a day, it was nothing I couldn't handle.

I waited until the last second to deal with the Jolokia, convinced it was a time bomb of death waiting to melt the flesh off any uncovered extremities. Since I'm not a complete fool, I did improvise a glove out of a plastic grocery bag when stemming and de-seeding, as it measures one million on the Scoville scale (a green pepper measures zero, a jalapeño, about five thousand). I tossed it into the processor unscathed.

What I couldn't handle was the roasting of peppers in a hot, dry skillet. Those juicy slices of fire hit that pan, started steaming, and the next thing I knew my kitchen was filled with a chokingly hot haze of vaporized capsaisin. Cue me: cursing, eyes watering, gasping and stumbling out onto my back patio. Thankfully, my neighbors weren't around to witness the insanity, and for the rest of the cooking process I kept the door open, and the stove fan on.

After roasting the peppers to a slight char, I pureed them in the food processor with enough apple cider vinegar to bring them to a nice consistency, some salt, and about a half cup or so of sugar--enough to allow me to taste something other than heat. Pretty good.

I poured the puree into the skillet and let it simmer for a minute or two to bring all the flavors together--the picture kind of looks like a lake of fire you'd see in one of Dante's lower levels of hell--then water-canned it, resulting in about one and a half pints of sauce. And so, with that, I joined the ranks of my brother and other chili-heads, producing the one and only (and very limited edition) "Caught Red-Handed" hot sauce.

Who has the cojones for a taste-test?