Sauce No. 3 - Potentially Untimely Name?

I’m a little vexed about coming up with a name for this one. On one hand, it’s suuuuuuper-spicy — nearly at spicy-just-for-the-sake-of-it levels on the Scoville scale, with no complementary flavors to back it up.

So, a part of me wants to give it a quarantine-inspired name, since it’s so dangerous… On the other hand, I don’t want to be all tacky and formally assign it a moniker like “Heather’s Quaran-Titty Sauce,” “Don’t Flatten These Curves,” or “PPE: Particularly Picante Elixer” (okay, that last one is a stretch, by why is it so easy to come up with names for this one?). Might be in poor taste. So, the jury is still out, though as always, I welcome submissions.

Anyway, the only hot sauce you can get here is good-old Tabasco, so lately, I’ve been keeping the bottles. They’re a bitch to refill, but not hard if you’ve got some patience and some wax paper. I thought it would be appropriate to have a recipe inspired by Tabasco, so I went with it. 

The last couple of sauces, I’ve mentioned cutting off the caps and pulling out the seed pods. I typically do this (WHILE WEARING GLOVES!) with a paring knife, cutting from the top, and into the pepper itself, around in a circle, until you can just pop the cap off, along with the little bundle of seeds clustered on a white cap. What you’re left with, for other sauces, is the orange flesh, with a few remnants of white ribs (the white parts of a pepper are called the placenta, technically) on the sides.

And that’s where we get down to pepper anatomy. See, a lot of folks seem to think that the bulk of a pepper’s spice is located in the seeds, but that just ain’t true. The reason seeds seem spicy is because they spend so much time hanging out next to the placenta (the white bit at the cap, and the “ribs” that go down the interior). But they only contain about 4-6% of a pepper’s capsaicin (the stuff that makes a pepper hot). Some of that heat is in the flesh, too, along with all of the flavor. But the vast majority of the spice? That’s in the placenta. And these caps you’ve been cutting out of the peppers, those white bits? They’re loaded with capsaicin.

Oh, and if you’re saying, “But Heather, you silly goose, I have a jar of those red pepper flakes I keep in my cupboard for sprinkling on top of pizza, and there are plenty of seeds in there, so it’s gotta be part of the spice?” I say to you, “oPeN yOuR eYeS sHeEpLe!!! That’s just what Big Red Pepper Flake WANTS YOU TO THINK, but it’s just FILLER, so they can SAVE MONEY and FUND THE ILLUMINATI! OPEN YOUR EYYYEESSS!!!11!!!”

Ahem. So, for this sauce, here’s what I did. I took all of the caps and seeds, and put them into a jar along with a water/salt mixture, and kept them in that thing for a month to ferment (the folks at Avery Island do this too, but they use oak barrels and keep it fermenting for years. But the idea is the same). Once they were done, I took the peppers out, strained them, and put them into a blender, along with the vinegar, and some salt, trying my best to replicate Tabasco’s 19% pepper ratio. You don’t have to ferment — it does mild-out the flavor a little bit, and cut down on the fresh-cut tang a little, which is cool, but if you’re not big into fermenting already, and aren’t looking for a new hobby, you can just skip that bit, and I won’t tell. 

Blend it up, on the stove, low boil for 20, and back into the blender. Blend again. Then… strain it through a fine mesh sieve. What you’re going to end up with is something that’s as liquidy as water, and spicy as shiiiiiit.

So yeah. Not a lot of flavor here, since it’s pretty much 80% vinegar (I use white wine vinegar myself, because there’s a bit of a floral quality to it, but distilled white is totally standard, so it’s all about taste. Plus I can’t find just regular white vinegar here, which is really weird to me?). Some people don’t like Tabasco because it’s so vinegary, but I love it, frankly. Especially for something like a soup, where you want to add some kick, but enhance the flavors with the vinegar, too. 

Here are the ratios I used: 19% peppers; 80% vinegar 1% salt (but you can play with that last one.)

Or, just steering away from the Covid trope altogether with… “Heather’s… Underboob Sweat?” Hmm. Eww. And ouch.