Adventures in hot sauce making

I haven't been so great with the posting lately, but with the new job and returning from vacation and whatnot, things have been a bit busy. In the frenzy of preserving before I left for SE Asia, I had to figure out what to do with that abundance of peppers I was accumulating. Seth and I decided that jalapeno hot sauce would be the fate of the spicy ones.

We went with this recipe from allrecipes.com.

1 tsp vegetable oil
20 fresh jalapeno peppers, sliced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup minced onion
3/4 tsp salt
2 cups water
1 cup distilled white vinegar

In a medium glass or enamel lined sauce pan over high heat, combine oil, peppers, garlic, onion and salt; saute for 4 minutes. Add the water and cook for 20 minutes, stirring often. Remove from heat and allow mixture to cool to room temperature.

Transfer the mixture to a food processor and puree until smooth. With the processor running, slowly add the vinegar.

Pour into a sterilized jar with a tight lid. This sauce will keep for 6 months when stored in the refrigerator.



The chopping process should definitely be done with gloves. We thought immediate hand-washing would be enough, but we both regretted this decision hours later when our hands were still tingling. We weren't sure how many seeds to include, so we ended up deseeding about half of them.



I'd also advise making sure your kitchen is VERY well-ventilated when you're cooking this! The effect of simmering jalapenos for 20 minutes was much like slowly pepper-spraying the kitchen. With the windows open and the fan on, we still had to vacate the kitchen for a while.



We ended up with 2 cups of delicious hot sauce in the end though, which obviously made Seth very emotional (nothing to do with all the pepper in the air).