I love hot sauce, I want to try them all. Give me a sauce with some body, decent heat, something that’s bursting with the flavor of the peppers featured within. I’ve wanted to try my hand at creating a hot sauce recipe that fits these criteria. I’ve also wanted to create a sauce that contains only peppers that I grew from seed. Summer of ’20 was spent practicing my pepper growing methods, there were almost too many jalapeños come harvest time.
This year I figured I would try to grow some more interesting peppers and create a series of sauces with them. The chili pepper planning process for Summer ’21 began in the dead of winter, December 2020. It started with a seed purchase from a certain website that shall not be named but is clearly visible in the image below. The initial seed order for this year included the following:
- Numex Twilight
- Cajun Belle
- Magnum Orange Habanero
- White Habanero
- Fatali (My favorite!)
- Red Scotch Bonnet
- Picante Calabrese
- Tobasco
- Cayenne Purple
The seeds were started in February under grow lights in a warm environment, they grew up indoors until late May. In Montana it doesn’t stay warm enough overnight to leave delicate plants outdoors until May, this doesn’t leave much time at the end of the summer season to allow the peppers to fully ripen on the plants before it starts freezing overnight again.
Peppers were mostly harvested in early September, time to make some sauces. I looked over many different recipes and techniques used to make a hot sauce that fits my needs and ended up with a few random recipes that turned out pretty good.
Credit to Grace for designing the beautiful labels! The prototype looks really nice and would fit in with other sauces on store shelves everywhere.
