The Boss Sauce

My sons and I eat hot sauce on everything.  For beans and rice or peas and rice, I like a hot sauce like Tabasco that has a high vinegar content.  For everything else, I prefer Crystal hot sauce or Louisiana hot sauce.  We grow a lot of peppers of varying heat levels.  Rather than buy it, why not make it?  That is a very good question.

We'll make a sauce today.  One year I made a hot sauce using tabasco peppers.  Today we'll make one that has three different types of pepper.  The first being Criolla Sella.

The criolla sella pepper is a mild pepper with a smoky taste.  It originates from Bolivia.  I took a few PTO days off of work and backpacked down to Bolivia, forded 17 streams on the back of a burro, and traded with the local Bolivian villagers for a few of the prized seeds and was able to grow these.

No, that's not true at all.  It makes a better story than, "I ordered these heirloom seeds off of the Internet" and have saved the seeds every year.  The other two peppers in our hot sauce will be Anaheim peppers and jalapeno peppers.  Jalapenos are semi-hot, Anaheims are mild, and Criolla Sellas are mild and smoky.  I figured that would make an interesting flavor profile.  In looking at the colors, though.  I'm not sure this is going to make a pretty color sauce when done.

I gathered 1 and 1/2 pounds of peppers and used 6 cloves of garlic and packed them in two quart jars.

I made a brine using 4 cups water with 4 teaspoons salt and heated in a saucepan until the salt was dissolved.  When it had cooled, I poured into the jars until all the peppers were covered.  Tricia had asked for some fermentation weights for Mother's Day.  They are essentially glass disks that weigh down whatever you are fermenting so it stays beneath the level of the brine.  We gave them a test drive with this project.

Then we covered with a dishrag and put in the pantry for 5 days.

When the five days was up, I poured the pepper/brine concoction through a sieve and reserved 1 cup of the brine.  I put the peppers in a food processor, adding the cup of brine, 1/3 cup apple cider vinegar, 1 tablespoon honey, and 1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum.  Then I mixed and chopped until it was semi-smooth.

I always save some bottles just for projects like this, so we poured the sauce into the bottles with a funnel.  See what I mean about the color?

It is a little strange.

But as far as the taste, it even got a passing grade from Tricia, and she's not a hot sauce aficionado like the rest of us.  She likes it!  It has a sweet-hot, smoky flavor.  One of the four bottles is already gone and it's only been bottled for about 5 days.  I'll have to make another batch before long.  I think I'll add some additional heat to the next batch, but this recipe is a keeper.