Make Your Own Hot Sauce from Scratch!

With the abundance of hot peppers in the potted veggie garden that I've had growing this summer, I was trying to figure out ways to use them all before they went bad. I use them regularly in stir fries, pasta sauces, and salsa, but I still had so many peppers! I decided to try my hand at making my own hot sauce and it was a spicy success! After scouring the web for various hot sauce recipes, I decided to go with one that seemed relatively easy to make and one that included ingredients that I already had on hand. Plus, this one included a bit of chipotle, which is always good!

I used the recipe from Veg Obsession with the peppers that I had in the garden. You could really use any type of hot pepper - some will be hotter than others. I used a combination of Cayenne Peppers and Five Colour Chinese Hot Peppers - maybe between 30 and 40 in total, since the Five Colour peppers are smaller in size.

Ingredients:
24 hot peppers, any variety
1/3 cup onion
1 bulb garlic
1 carrot
2 tbsp dried chipotle pepper
1/2 tsp salt
white vinegar
apple cider vinegar

Directions:
Slice off the tops of the peppers. Peel the onion and the garlic cloves. Chop the onion and carrot into big chunks. Throw everything into a large pot. Cover almost entirely with a mixture of white vinegar and apple cider vinegar (about 95% white vinegar and 5% white vinegar). Simmer the mixture on low-medium for 10-15 minutes.

* Note - the hot peppers caused some spicy fumes to rise up out of the pot...and they seemed to fill the entire kitchen and living room, too! It actually made me cough. So, I would recommend some sort of ventilation if you're using really hot pepper...once I opened the window, everything was fine!

Remove the veggies and place in a blender with a little bit of the vinegar in which they were cooked. Blend until smooth.

Pour the blended veggie mixture into a saucepan. Add the vinegar that they were cooked in before little by little until it reaches the desired consistency. I ended up using all of the vinegar in the hot sauce. Add the dried chipotle flakes and salt. Simmer and stir for a couple of minutes and pour into bottles.

This amount made two bottles of hot sauce and I'm storing them in the fridge. Put on everything and enjoy!