Hot Sauce

• 2 lbs of peppers
• white vinegar
• ¹⁄₄ cup sugar (or salt)
• chopped, peeled garlic

WARNING: If you are using truly hot peppers, habanero, scotch bonnets, or anything of that ilk, wear gloves for most of this process, and be careful not to do stupid things like rub your eyes with your gloved hands. There’s nothing quite like putting hot pepper juice directly into your eyes. With that warning out of the way:

First, wash the peppers and cut the stems off. Make sure to cut and entry into the body of the peppers so the expanding gas in the peppers doesn’t cause them to explode. Blacken the peppers on the grill, or put the peppers on a cookie sheet or in a lasagna pan and broil in an oven. Turn them every few minutes to make sure they are evenly cooked.

Once the peppers are cooked, cut them up into 1 or 2 inch chunks and put them in a saucepan, along with the white vinegar and sugar (or salt). The vinegar shouldn’t quite cover the tops of the peppers. Turn the stove on low heat and let the vinegar and peppers start to simmer together.

Now, you can add the garlic to the mix. I used peeled, chopped garlic, and a lot of it. I have experimented with adding tomatoes, onions and even frozen pineapple, so have fun with this. This is where a lot of the secondary flavor of the hot sauce is going to come from.

Let the whole mix simmer on the stove for at least 30 minutes. Ideally you’d let it cook for a couple of hours, but I’ve gotten acceptable results at anything over 30 minutes. Once it’s cooked, throw it into a blender and mix it down to the desired consistency. Depending on how much vinegar you used, the sauce will be thinner or thicker. I like it to be more like salsa than Texas Pete, so I try to use as little vinegar as possible.

Once it’s blended, put it into jars and into the fridge. It will keep for a month or so in the fridge, and is good on just about anything.