Let's Make Some Pepper Sauce

Making pepper sauce is not a difficult thing to do.  The recipe is simple: peppers and vinegar.  How much of each should you use?  You should use enough peppers to completely fill the bottles or jars you have and enough vinegar to do the same.  You can get fancy and spice your finished product up a little by adding a clove of garlic or some onion or even some herbs from your kitchen garden, but there are no real secrets here.  It is a simple old sauce that all of us in the south grew up with.  It is the perfect complement for peas or  mustard, collard or turnip greens and it is a great substitute for the salt we all use too much of.  Now here is how I do it:

Pick enough hot peppers to fill the bottles you have.  So, you say, I didn't grow any peppers this year.  So what, I say.  Go to your local grocer or farmer's market and by a pound or two.  They will be good and when you are using the sauce later in the year and on into the new year you will hardly remember that you had to buy the peppers.

I save the bottles from Bull Sauce or Crystal Sauce which we use a good deal of around this house.  Some people use pint jars and that is fine but, in my family we always bottled our sauce in small shaker bottles we had collected from friends and neighbors.  

What you will need:

• Vinegar--either distilled or apple cider...I alternate and sometimes combine them
• Fresh peppers
• Bottles 
• Funnel
• A chopstick for arranging your peppers in the bottles.
• Optional -herbs to "fancy-up" the flavor a little bit. I am a purest...nothing but vinegar and peppers for me.

Here are the steps.

Begin by heating your vinegar on the range top.  Some folks don't heat the vinegar but this is the way my Granny did it and that is the way I do it.  She said it made the flavor of the peppers stronger and who am I to question her.

1. Take your peppers inside and turn on the radio or the cd player or some source of music or sports so you can listen while you are performing the mindless task of making pepper sauce.
2. Wash the peppers in cool water to remove all dust and debris from the garden.
3. Pinch the stems from the top of the peppers ( to make the sauce hotter, pinch the stems and caps from the peppers as shown in the picture below.  You can also poke several small holes in some of the peppers to allow the vinegar to soak up some of the heat from the membrane and seeds on the inside.The more you do this way the hotter they will be.)
4. Push the peppers down into the clean bottles  (if you have multi-colored peppers be sure to alternate them. Your pepper sauce will be as pretty as it is good. 
5. Pack the peppers in the bottle tightly enough to fill the bottles up but not so tightly that the vinegar will have no room.  After all it is the vinegar that you will be using on your veggies...not the peppers. Use the chopstick to arrange and situate the peppers in the bottles.
6. If you are satisfied with the way your bottles look then it is time to take your funnel and fill the bottles to the rim with vinegar.
7. Wait a few minutes and top them off since some of the vinegar is going to fill the "opened" peppers.  
8. You are done...cap the bottles and place them in a cabinet for use in the cold winter months. 

These bottles will be pretty enough to leave on the table all of the time.  Maybe you will want to display them in your kitchen or give them an gifts.  That is up to you. 

IMPORTANT NOTE:  When you use all of the sauce out of a bottle don't throw it away.  Refill it with vinegar and move it to the back of your shelf for aging. You can do this multiple times and will be just as good as the first time you tasted it.

There are two ways to make your sauce hotter. One is t poke small holes in the peppers befor  you put them in the bottles and the other is to pinch the tops off of about half of the peppers.  Both ways accomplish the same thing.  The vinegar will be allowed to flow in and out of the peppers gaining the heat from the membranes and seed inside.

Hot Peppers packed in the bottles, waiting for the vinegar to be added.

The finished product...ready for bottle caps (all photos are taken with myiPhone). 

Until next time...John