Hickory Smoked Hot Sauce
I used cowhorn peppers to create this particular batch of hot sauce, but you could use jalapeños, habanero, or any combination of tasty hot peppers for this. Keep in mind that the hotter the pepper, the hotter the hot sauce, so choose according to your tolerance. While it's plenty spicy, this sauce is all about flavor, not just heat. The smoke and salt add a ton of great flavor to greens, tacos, cornbread, sandwiches, soups, and, well, the list is endless. It basically improves everything except, like, maybe an ice-cream sundae.
This is a great way to preserve the current harvest. The salt, smoke, and vinegar help to keep this fresh for months in the fridge or even longer if you freeze it or properly can it.
Hickory Smoked Hot Sauce
8 cups fresh chili peppers (de-stemmed)
1 large head garlic (broken into cloves)
2 tablespoons kosher or pickling salt
1 1/2 cups white vinegar (like Whole Foods 365 brand)
1/4 teaspoon xanthan gum (optional)
Smoke chili peppers for 4 minutes using my easy and quick smoking method. Add 1/4 of the peppers to the work bowl of your food processor. Process until very finely chopped and then place them into a large, non-reactive ceramic or plastic bowl. Repeat with the rest of the peppers and the garlic. Add the salt to the mix, stir with a rubber spatula, and pack the mixture into a 1 quart glass jar. The mixture should just about fill the jar. With the top loosely set, leave the glass jar with the pepper mixture in it out on the counter for 24 hours to ferment. If the jar is particularly full, place a towel underneath it in case it bubbles over.
Place the contents of the jar back into the large, non-reactive bowl, mix in the vinegar, cover, and allow it to sit out on the countertop for an additional 24 hours to develop flavor. After that, use a fine mesh strainer to strain the mixture pressing out all of the liquid until all that's left in the strainer is dry pulp. At this point, place the strained mixture into a blender and add the xanthan gum. Run the blender continuously for 1 minute to make sure the xanthan gum is blended in well; this step will keep your hot sauce from separating in the bottle! (Makes about a quart, depending on how juicy the peppers are that you're using.)
12 comments:
sounds amazing! i'm a whimp when it comes to hot sauce though! haha
very good comment
Where did you get those small glass bottles for the hot sauce? is there a name for them?
Any restaurant supply house will have them. I think they are soy sauce bottles. They are like $1 each.
Container store sells those bottles as well.
The sell those bottles at the container store.
How long does this hot sauce keep?
I don't have a smoker and I really don't want to ruin any pots for smoking... am I able to make this without smoking the peppers? Or using liquid smoke?
You could use disposable aluminum pans. You could also make it without smoke. It'd be a good hot sauce that way too. The smoke is what sends it over the top!
I don't have a smoker but we get around it by fitting our charcoal grill grate with aluminium foil, poke holes and put the peppers on top. Always keep the bottom vent open and let the fire get going really strong (we use kiawe charcoal, a realtive to mesquite and guava wood chips... mmm). Once the peppers are in we open the top vent halfway and let um go for about 5 minutes and they're perfect.
This worked great with mild Thai chillies similar to banana peppers. Next step is much hotter Red Thai or White Laos Chillies. I used a potato ricer and cheesecloth to squeeze out the liquid which worked very well.
So I just added the white vinegar to my smoked pepper "mash" They smell so good! Rather than draining the pulp as directed, I'm thinking about putting it all in my BlendTec (after the 24 soak) and letting 'er rip. I'm ok with the sauce being thicker, but thinking it might be "untouchable" from a heat standpoint. Have you ever tried this? You seem to have this down so any comments are welcomed!
Thanks-
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