Mentoring a fellow hot sauce enthusiast!

This Summer, I had someone approach my table at the farmer's market and they talked about how they wanted to try making their own craft hot sauce, but they had no idea where to begin. I typed up a quick guide on my personal process and sort of how I ended up using it. I wanted to share with all of you what I shared with my loyal customer!

A bit of background - without doing any research whatsoever, I took a bottle of hot sauce from the grocery store and wrote down the ingredients. Note that in any food product, the ingredients begin with the highest content and descend to the lowest concentration ingredient last. My goal was to try to replicate this recipe. This particular recipe was a pretty traditional style vinegar-based hot pepper sauce like Frank's Red Hot, Tabasco, or Cholula. This style of hot sauce, as the name implies, uses vinegar as a main ingredient. TWO main reasons this is important -

1. Vinegar creates acidity and tanginess that helps to bolster a flavor profile

2. Vinegar acts as a preservative, and preventing bacterial/microbial growth from occurring,

Most vinegars have a 5% acidity, and you'll want to choose one with that stated on the label or else you might not get the preservative action you need. You can worry about your end product pH level later when you get more serious or when you're thinking about selling your product to other people. That brings me to my next point about this particular process -

• This kitchen experiment creates what is classified by the FDA and USDA as an "acidified food product". Meaning, you're taking a low-acid food product, adding an acid such as vinegar or citric acid, and bringing the pH below 4.6. They established that a pH of 4.6 is safe for shelf stability because it will prevent the most dangerous bacteria from growing - Clostridium botulinum - which causes a life-threatening illness called botulism.

Again, you probably won't need to worry about this yet unless you plan on keeping your sauce on the shelf for an extended period of time, or selling to other people.

Back to my kitchen experiment -

I simply got handfuls of the ingredients needed from the store, a piece of paper, a pencil, and measuring cups/spoons. Each ingredient went into the blender. I kept track of how much of each ingredient I added on my paper, and then blended it together. Prior to cooking it, I would taste it. Depending on its flavor, I would add more ingredients until it started to taste more like the sauce I was trying to replicate. Do not forget to write down and record exactly what you added as you go along. Once my blended mixture tastes how I want it, I placed it into a large pot, covered it, and brought it to a boil. You'll want to get a thermometer. My favorite is a candy-grade thermometer that sits in the pot and shows me the temperature in real-time. I'll bring it to >180 F but not higher than 212 F because you'll boil off a lot of water at this temperature. Maintain the sauce >180 F for at least 5 minutes to kill any germs - this is the FDA's standard. You are allowed to boil it longer if you'd like, which can be useful if you need to thicken the sauce a little by boiling off water. Remember RECORD how long you boiled for and at what temperature because this information will be crucial for when you go to cook this recipe again!

Ok, so now you have piping hot sauce ready to be placed into a container. As someone who is just getting started figuring out a process, you will probably want to start with a glass jar. Whichever container you use, you will want to do what is called a "hot fill and inversion" filling process, meaning you need to fill your container while it is still >180 F, so depending on how long it takes you to fill, you need to either start at a higher temp like >205 F, or just keep heating it on low heat while you fill your container(s). When a container is filled, you should invert the container upside down and hold it there for at least 5 minutes to sanitize the head space area. Usually when I fill my bottles, it actually looks like I'm over-filling and not leaving head space (ideal is 0.5 - 1 inch), but the sauce might have micro bubbles depending on your recipe's ingredients, and then will actually condense down after setting for a day or two. I find that my recipes that I use xanthan gum or that are naturally thicker, usually have more bubbles.

Creating your own unique recipe

This is the fun part. What I did was I basically took my first experimental sauce's recipe, and swapped certain ingredients that would behave similarly. For example, change the type of vinegar from white to apple cider to give it a fruitier flavor. Or you can change around the spices/herbs. There's no wrong option when you're experimenting, and the most important thing is to record what you're doing so that it's reproducible.

My new recipe creation has a few basic steps:

1. Choose a fruit or vegetable to act as a base. This should ideally be something with some thickness once pureed, because I personally don't like making sauces that are too loose and watery. This base will need nearly the same amount in weight (I measure in grams on a scale) as your vinegar. Other good bases are tomatoes, tomatillos (for a verde sauce), carrots, guava or mango, etc. Get creative! You also can skip this component and shoot for just something like a bunch of pureed peppers, or do something like orange juice. Keep in mind what thickness you want to end up with!

So if you use 1,000 pumpkin, you want nearly 800 - 1,000 grams of vinegar. This can change depending on a few things like the pH of your base (pineapple vs. tomato vs. pumpkin etc.) but you probably don't need to worry too much about this yet. Just add almost as much vinegar in weight as our base, and titrate until you reach your desired flavor.

2. Choose your hot peppers. I like to choose what are easily available, so you'll find me using a lot of habaneros and serranos. Most red and orange peppers share a similar flavor profile - think red bell pepper vs. a green bell pepper. Green peppers give you a more bitter, green, crisp, natural, grassy flavor. Something like orange habanero gives you more of a fruity and floral flavor. Combine the two types and you get a full-bodied profile, similar to a blended whiskey vs. a rye or scotch. I generally determined the amount of peppers by adding them, tasting it, adding more, repeat - until I get the spice level I want. Careful, it's actually easy to under-spice your sauce because the heat can build on your tongue during this process. When in doubt, add more.

3. Choose a prep and cook process. I like using a large food processor, large blender, and an immersion blender. All of my ingredients get boiled together. This process is simple, effective, and easily reproducible so that I don't end up with any inconsistency. Feel free to roast your peppers or other produce to give it a slightly smokier flavor profile because that can make a big difference.

4. Salt. Salt is crucial because like vinegar, it unlocks flavor, AND it acts as a preservative to prevent microbial growth. There's a fancy thing called a water activity test that you don't need to worry about until you get serious, but it essentially measures how available water is for bacteria to use for growth. Salt will make water less available for bacteria to use, so add salt! Careful, iodized salt contains sodium bicarbonate, which will raise your pH level. You can even use things like soy sauce or fish sauce as your salt depending on your desired flavor!

5. Add water if your sauce is too thick but you don't want more vinegar. If it tends to boil off too much, add water. Remember though, water will likely raise your pH, and you need to keep it below 4.6. Don't go too crazy with trying to make your sauce acidic. Too low of pH might be shelf stable, but it can also become less useful on your plate if it tastes like pure spicy acid.

6. Add spices like garlic, cumin, celery seed, black pepper, etc. Wing it! It's fun to experiment. Fresh is always better - peel some garlic or some ginger. It goes a long way.

7. I recommend using xanthan gum to make the sauce more cohesive. It's gluten free, vegan friendly, and might have a bad rep because it is often used in mass-produced and processed foods, but it is perfectly safe to eat. It will help your sauce from pesky separation when sitting for a while, and makes it easier to dip things into or to successfully apply it to the food. Again, I don't like watery sauces because they just end up making your food soggy.

This is really just the surface to crafting hot sauce, and like I mentioned, there's many different ways to process. I think the way I described is by far the best for beginners, but many people love making fermented sauces, for example.