Hotsy Totsy Redux. A really Saucy sauce.

The Manly Spouse's brother has a neighbor who grew a ton of Serrano peppers last summer. Really. We had a bucketful sitting out in the garage. A five gallon bucketful.

"Should I throw them away?" my spouse asked. "Nooo", said I. I'm sure I can think of something to do with them.

Over the weekend I decided enough of them had finally turned a nice orangey-red to make some really saucy hot sauce. Here's what I did.

I picked through and got all the ones with color in them, about a pound. A nice four or five handfuls anyway.


I washed them and sliced away the yucky bits and threw them into a big pot. Then I smooshed three or four nice fat garlic cloves and threw them in too. I added two cups full of plain white vinegar and about a tablespoon of salt, set the pot to simmering, and left the room.

I have an electric stove, so it takes awhile for stuff to heat up, and I only turned the burner up to about four. In about an hour the peppers felt soft, so I turned off the heat and left the room again.

A couple of hours later, when the peppery mixture was cool, I pulled out my trusty 50-year-old Osterizer, and dumped everything in there and turned it on to the "liquefy" setting for a few minutes.

This brought Manly Spouse into the kitchen for a sniff, and then a taste. We had a brief discussion on whether I should strain it, and decided not to. The seeds give you your heat, and the folks around here who love hot stuff like it really hot. So, really, there was nothing to discuss; we were just being polite.



See the seeds? Zowie!

I funneled it into little jars and put it in the fridge. The little research I did on making hot sauce indicated that some steeping, or aging, is necessary. Like two weeks.

Did you know that some folks, and websites, claim that green chilis are hotter than red ones? I still had about half a bucketful so what the heck!



I started the whole process again.







There were a lot more of these peppers, so I used my mother's old VitaMix. This is only about half of it.






Ta Da!

Whether this turns out hotter that the sauce from the red peppers remains to be seen...in two weeks.

By the way, I don't know of you can tell from the photos, but it is pretty thick. I left it that way, but if you try this and you want it thinner, just add more vinegar.

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Location:Omaha