Making Homemade Tabasco Pepper Sauce (Part Two)

In mid October we posted an entry here: Making Homemade Tabasco Pepper Sauce (Part 1) where we showed you how we harvested and processed some tabasco peppers in order to make our own HOT SAUCE.  This was a first for us.  We normally purchase the Tabasco Brand Pepper Sauce made not too far away from us down on Avery Island, but decided it would be fun to try our hand at making our own.

When we last left you, it was October 11th and we left the peppers in a sealed jar in the refrigerator where it was to sit for 3 weeks and 'steep,' similar to what you'd do with tea. On November 3rd, Benjamin and I decided that our pepper sauce was ready to be strained and bottled.

Steeping pepper sauce from Oct 11 to Nov 1

When we popped the top off the jar, the spicy hot aroma filled our noses.  Tricia actually sneezed.  It was a very thick consistency.

Opening up a jar of liquid heat

In order to strain the seeds out of the 'mash,' we used a fine-screen sieve with a measuring container underneath it.  I poured a medium amount onto the sieve and Benjamin used a spoon as a pestle to work from side to side, pushing the liquid through the screen and into the container.  The idea was, the liquid flows and the seeds and some of the skins stay behind.

Working the mash through the mesh

We did this in numerous batches.  As we completed with one batch, we'd remove the mash and put it into a bowl.  I was going to put it immediately into the compost bucket, but Benjamin suggested that we put it all in the sieve one more time and squeeze out the remaining sauce.  It was a good idea as we probably recovered another cup and a half of sauce.  Then we through the mash in the compost bucket.

Seeds and skins of the peppers

And here is the final product - pureed tabasco peppers that steeped for 3 weeks in the fridge after being cooked in a little water and vinegar - our own tabasco pepper sauce!  Only a few ingredients: tabasco peppers, salt, water and vinegar. 

Ready for bottling

We use hot sauce a lot, especially on beans and rice or rice and gravy, so we have saved our hot sauce bottles over the year in order to reuse them to bottle our own homemade hot sauce.  We got out a funnel and (appropriately) our first bottle, which turned out to be Tabasco Brand pepper sauce.  The real Tabasco Sauce is aged in oak barrels for 3 YEARS with salt mined from a local salt dome.  Ours only aged 3 weeks in a glass jar and probably won't have near the richness in flavor, but we'll see.

Working the bottling shift at the local pepper plant

Here is our finished product.  Looks very nice, doesn't it.  Looking at the brilliantly bright red coloration of the pepper sauce, you would think that we added some artificial colorings to the sauce, but we didn't.  This is natural colorings from the red skins of the tabasco peppers.

Three bottles of homemade tabasco pepper sauce

So this little experiment wouldn't be complete if we didn't have a taste test. Benjamin and Tricia both declined, so I picked up a blue corn chip and dipped it into the sauce the remained in the glass container after bottling and put it in my mouth and crunched on the sauce-dipped chip.

Nothing at first but the taste of corn and the coolness of the sauce.  And then...  The heat on my tongue was like magma leaping from an erupting volcano and landing on my tongue.  I ran to the refrigerator and promptly downed a couple of glasses of cold water (milk would have been better) in order to ameliorate the flaming condition of my burning tongue.  Soon the burning stopped, leaving behind a hot, spicy flavor on the back-end.  There was no vinegar taste - just pepper.  I think a few drops of this on rice and beans will do the trick.  If it remains too hot, I can always dilute somewhat with some additional vinegar.

From what I read, if I store these three bottles in the fridge, they'll keep indefinitely for spicing up anything.