Homemade Hot Sauce

Who doesn't like hot sauce? 

The problem is, most commercial hot sauces are either "too hot" or "not hot enough" for most folks.  Solution?  Make your own!!  Let's do this!

Check out this picture.  Look carefully.  What does it contain?

Most of you probably said, "Peppers, garlic, vinegar, and some white stuff."  WRONG!!  This picture has everything you need to make any hot sauce you could ever want.  Every hot sauce you've ever tasted has these five things:

• Heat
• Flavor
• Preservative
• Tweaks
• A Name
  

Now, there's a formula here that will guide you to making amazing hot sauce that will save you time, money, hassle, and excessive preservatives.  

FOR EXAMPLE, here's how I used the formula to create one of my favorite sauces, "The Vampire Killer:"

For HEAT, I wanted a sauce that would register a 27 on a heat scale of 1-10.  So... I used 8oz of Carolina Reapers!  These are the hottest peppers on the market!  For FLAVOR, I chose garlic.  I love garlic!  Since I'm bringing so much heat to the bowl, I wanted to make sure the garlic flavor came through so I peeled and used the cloves from 1 whole bulb of garlic, per reaper pepper pod, or 9 bulbs in this case!!  For a PRESERVATIVE, I used 3/4 Cup Vinegar.  Apple cider vinegar, to be specific.  When it comes to TWEAKS, I try to keep it simple.  In this case, I added some sugar because sugar hits your tongue first, bringing the heat in later.  I wanted that.  I also added salt to enhance the flavor a bit.  Finally, added just a tsp of yellow mustard as a catalyst to merge the garlic oils and juices from the peppers.  This will keep it from separating in the jar.

Then what?  Simply put it all in a blender and hit the button!!  Liquefy everything and then WALK AWAY!  Give it at least an hour to settle down, or you'll mace your whole kitchen.  I'm not kidding.  The first time I ever did this, my wife and I couldn't go back to that part of the house without a legit respirator!

I buy my little hot sauce jars from Amazon, and I use gloves, and a small kitchen funnel to fill them.

The only thing left from the formula is a good name.  For this, given the amount of garlic I used, "Vampire Killer" seemed a good name.  

Please find some other examples/recipes/formulas that I've used, below:

Hula Holla!  A sweet pineapple hot sauce that is a hands-down favorite of our local firefighters:

Heat - 10oz Habanero Peppers

Flavor - 1 whole fresh pineapple

Preservative - 1/2 cup Apple Cider vinegar

Tweaks - 1/4 Cup Sugar, 1 Tsp Salt, 1/4 Cup Coconut Milk

 

Chugga-da-Milk!  An insanely evil sauce that is probably "Too hot" for most normal people

Heat - 8oz Carolina Reapers, 8oz Thai-chili pods, 8oz Ghost Peppers

Flavor - 1 whole honey-crisp apple

Preservative - 1/2 cup distilled white vinegar

Tweaks: 3 tsp salt