Sriracha Sauce via Hot Sauce!

     We have just been pepper fabulous all season in the garden. The cayenne came up late, but boy howdy did they make up for lost time. Naturally, we turned to the book Hot Sauce! for a recipe to burn through the inventory. Since Sriracha is one of my favorite sauces, we figured we would pull the recipe from the book to try. With a little doctoring we came up with a sauce that I feel is superior to Huy Fong Sriracha. That's a big claim, but I'm sticking to it. The recipe below is showing double the amount listed in the cookbook. We found out the hard way that even though the book says their measurements yield one cup, we called bullshit. We needed to double off everything to come up with a half pint. One warning, if you choose cayenne peppers it will be a Colossal Pain In The Ass to seed them; wear gloves unless you're a fan of screaming a lot. As always, any notes or changes are in blue.

Sriracha
via Hot Sauce!

Ingredients
(this recipe will yield 1/2 pint of sauce)

• 2 cups assorted fresh red chiles (habanero, jalapeno, serrano, and/or cayenne), stemmed, seeded and chopped (we use cayenne. If you choose cayenne, you're in for some work. Seeding them is fairly labor intensive. Make sure you wear some rubber gloves)
• 6-8 garlic cloves, chopped
• 4 tablespoons white wine vinegar
• 2 teaspoons sugar, plus more as needed (we used 3 teaspoons total)
• 1-2 teaspoons salt, plus more as needed (we used 2-1/2 teaspoons total)

Directions

1. Add all of the ingredients to a food processor and pulse until blended. Taste and adjust the amount of salt or sugar if needed (we felt it was needed. The adjustments are listed in the ingredients section)

   

   For added fun, leave the access chute open when you do this
   and see who can stay in the kitchen the longest!

2. Transfer the mixture to a saucepan and simmer over medium heat for 5 minutes, or until the sauce loses its raw vegetable smell.
3. Let cool, then pour into a bottle (we bottled it hot since we planned on water bath canning for long term storage. We processed half pint jars for 15 minute. As always, please consult the National Center for Home Food Preservation for more information. I won't be held responsible for you poisoning yourself)

Good times!