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Famous Hot SauceI love hot peppers. Dried and ground, or made into hot sauce, they can put zing into meals all year long. Last winter I decided to figure out to make the perfect hot sauce. Which is to say, instead of buying bottles of Tapatio's Salsa Picante, or Sylvia's Restaurant Triple Strength Hot Sauce, I'd make my own - and better than theirs. I'd gotten a new food dehydrator last fall and used it to dry hot peppers and other garden produce, so I had all the ingredients. I made some dynamite sauce, so hot peppers are getting some prime real estate in our garden this year.Peppers are easy enough to grow. Don't give them any nitrogen fertilizer or you'll get lots of leaf and few peppers. Scratch in some wood ashes, and leave them alone. Plant them close together, say 12 inches apart. Don't water them once they are established, even in dry times. They'd rather be growing in Mexico, after all. The heat of peppers is measured in Scoville units, named after Wilbur Scoville, an Englishman who developed a numerical rating scale for pepper heat, presumably based on the amount of capsaicin in each. Capsaicin is the compound that produces the zing in peppers. The seeds of hot peppers are much hotter than the flesh, so if you're looking for a mildly hot pepper, discard the seeds. One of my favorite peppers is the Hungarian wax. As hot peppers go, it is one of the mildest, and one of the most productive. According to my Fedco-Seeds catalog, nighttime temperatures can affect how hot peppers will be. I've noticed that sometimes slices of Hungarian wax peppers can be used raw in salads, while other years -with different growing conditions -they're too hot for that, and better used in spicy cooked dishes, chopped fine. A jalapeno grown in California will always be hotter than mine. Scoville ratings are usually given as a range. Hungarian Wax peppers are from 300 to 700 units, cayenne or jalapenos in the 3,500 to 6,000 range, while habaneros can be a blistering 200,000 to 350,000 units. I've never grown habaneros because they are so hot they obliterate the taste - and my tongue. You can hurt your fingers just handling them. Chefs wear gloves to handle them, and even the smallest speck rubbed into an eye is dangerous. The key to a good hot sauce is flavor. Anybody can make a sauce HOT. I wanted to make a sauce with some kick, but something that really tastes wonderful, so I included other vegetables, not just peppers. I wanted to be able to make a pot of beans I can serve to anyone, but then be able to spice it up with hot sauce that would make a California taqueria proud. Dehydrating the peppers, carrots, tomatoes and garlic is easy: cut into sections and dry in an electric dehydrator. I dried my peppers seeds and all since I'd be grinding them up and diluting their zing in the sauce. For tomatoes, I used Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, my absolute favorites, and just cut them in halves before putting in the dehydrator. Carrots and garlic are still a little rubbery when dry. I ground everything into fine powders (using my coffee grinder) so they'll stay suspended in liquid. I ground the peppers first- that way other ingredients pick up any bits of hot pepper, reducing my chances for getting a really "hot" cup of coffee.
Henry's Cornish Hot Sauce (no patent pending)
Processing garden produce for later use is time-consuming, whether canning sauce, freezing, or dehydrating - but worth every minute of it. And dehydrating food intensifies the flavor - our cherry tomatoes are like nuggets of summer. This year I'll also dry lots of carrots, hot peppers and some garlic and onions. And who knows? Maybe I'll start my own business and get rich selling hot sauce. Henry Homeyer is the VT/NH associate editor of People, Places and Plants magazine. His website is www.gardening-guy.com. He may be contacted at gardening.guy@valley.net, or P.O. Box 364, Cornish Flat, NH 03746.
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Last update: Tuesday, May 16, 2006 at 7:40:41 AM. |
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