Hot Sauce Recipe

Here’s a really straightforward recipe for making an absolutely delicious hot sauce in your own kitchen from scratch. After the recipe I’ll show you how to bottle in like the pros do, using Woozie bottles.

Ingredients
1 pint of tart cherry juice or juice your own fresh cherries
4 medium carrots, around 3/4 LB
12 red peppers*
2 cups white vinegar
1 cup fresh lime juice
4 sun dried tomatoes.
1 cup brown sugar
1 red bell pepper

1 tsp Kosher salt and ground black pepper
* – you can use any type of pepper and just simply gear it to your required level of heat. I used Trinidad Scorpions and get a good heat level but not something that will burn you or cause you intestinal discomfort. Remember that you’re diluting the heat by adding the other non-heat ingredients, so need to factor that into your pepper selection also.

Preparation -

Dice the carrots and peppers into small cubes and simply add everything except the apple cider vinegar into a large saucepan and bring to a steady boil. There’s no reason to remove the pepper seeds unless you want to save them for growing. The seeds don’t have much heat, or flavor, but they can add a nice aesthetic touch to the finished hot sauce.
Cook the ingredients on a steady simmer for 30 minutes, then blend. You should blend in batches and be careful when blending hot liquids as they can expand and cause the lid to blow off your blender, in rather dramatic fashion. It can be dangerous, so always place a towel over the lid of the blended when blending hot liquids.
Return blended sauce to pan and bring to boil cooking for a further 10 minutes. Add the apple cider vinegar a couple minutes before the end, then it’s time to test the PH*

* To test the PH you’ll need to buy some PH testing strips with a range that covers 2 through 7 in at least 0.5 increments, preferably 0.1. You can also buy a digital PH tester, which is a good investment if you plan on making more sauces in the future. Just remember that PH testers need to be calibrated using two separate solutions, which obviously need to be purchased. The cost for the tester and testing solutions can be around $50 for the cheapest available, whereas testing strips should set you back around $10 for 100 or thereabouts. When bottling for none refrigerated storage you should aim for a final PH (acidity level) of less than 4.6. I always aim for just under 4, to be on the safe side. The low acidity prevents the development of bacteria in the sauce. If you can’t get the acidity low enough then it will need to be refrigerated and discarded within a couple weeks of opening. There are other ways to reduce PH without adding vinegar, most commonly ‘fermenting’. But this tends to be a little complex for the beginner to attempt.

So you have your sauce on the stove with a gentle simmer and you’ve checked your PH, so you’re ready to bottle. Now you can do this in a variety of ways. You can use small airtight containers (Tupperware) and the sauce will last OK in the fridge for a few weeks. But who’s going to get through a couple pints of hot sauce in two-three weeks? So you could freeze some of it, again, in small batches, so when you bring one out of the freezer you won’t have too much on your hands and it won’t spoil.

You can also pack into glass mason jars, called ‘canning’. I tend to prefer this method for making true sauces, but with a ‘hot sauce’ it’s used more as a condiment and needs to be packaged in small bottles and in a way that will last. So I prefer to use glass ‘Woozies’. Woozie bottles are the standard sauce bottles that most of your common hot sauces are packaged into. They tend to be 150ml, though Tabasco use smaller bottles and Frank’s use larger bottles!

I always shoot for the 150ml size and you can find them easily enough, just Google “glass woozie bottles’ and you’ll find options for buying as few as 12 bottles, with caps and shrink-bands for the neck, for around 70 cents a piece.

You need to follow established practices for sterilizing the bottles (or mason jars). You can buy chemical cleaning/sterilizing agents but I prefer to wash them in the dishwasher, dry on a full heat cycle, then place them in boiling water. Also remember to wash and boil any utensils that you use for packaging, including the bottle caps and restrictors.

So start to prep your bottles so they’ve spent at least 5 minutes in boiling water when your sauce is ready for bottling.

Once your sauce is ready, it should be at a rolling boil for at least 1 minutes, lift your bottles out of the boiling water, ensure they are completely emptied of water and set them upright on a clean and level surface. Now fill your bottles using a sterilized ladle and funnel. If you have a ladle with an accurate scale it’s good to use it, since you won’t have to worry about over or underfilling the bottles. Over-filling can be a real mess and under filling can end up with a contaminated product. Always fill about half way up the neck of the woozie.
Fill the bottles and attach the caps loosely. I then like to place the bottles upright into the boiling water for 5 minutes before removing from the water and tightening the caps fully. Once the caps are tight, invert the bottles and leave for a minute or so to ensure the inside of the cap is free from any bacteria.

Once the bottles are cold you can attach your own labels, and for a good professional finishing touch, use shrinkwraps for the caps.

I like to spend some time making my own labels and giving the bottles a special finish! You can do this easily if you have access to a printer and some graphic design software like Photoshop or JASC Paintshop etc. You can even take your label files to FedEx/Kinko and they’ll print them for you on quality label paper.

Here’s a couple designs that I’ve used in the past -

As you can see, some fun can be had with your hot sauce label designs and graphics. Though the above labels look as though they are used for a commercial hot sauce / powder product, they are not, they’re just for home use and to pass around friends.

Now here’s a picture of a finished batch of the Cherry sauce listed at the start of this article. Note the nice deep rich color of the hot sauce. It has a wonderful consistency, not too thin, not to thick.

Who wouldn’t be happy with the above!

Good luck with your hot sauce making and if you have any questions, just ask.