Another batch of hot sauce

End result: 5 bottles of yum

My second sauce of the year is made very similarly to my first sauce, but the ingredients were whatever I had on hand. That is: about a dozen small Serrano peppers, a dozen very small Jalapeño peppers, a half dozen Golden Cayennes. All peppers were a range of green to fully ripe, because you don’t get to be picky with a home garden. To build a sauce with a very distinctive character, you’ll want to stick to all ripe or all green, but I don’t have that luxury. I also added half an onion and about a pound of my Sungold cherry tomatoes, which are ripe at a bright orange, so the sauce has a distinctly orange hue.

The Science of Making Hot Sauce

My approach to hot sauce is definitely looks like neither science nor art, but rather like throwing a bunch of stuff in a pot and seeing what happens. Turns out pretty well, most of the time.

Making hot sauce is actually quite easy. I use peppers grown in my garden, but peppers from the grocery store or farmers market work too. In this case, since my peppers are getting a slow start this year, I mixed my own peppers and grocery store peppers.

Here’s a simple recipe that I used for my first batch of hot sauce this season: