How to Make Hot Sauce

Looking to learn how to make hot sauce? You've come to the right spot! Making hot sauce is a lot of fun and delicious too. Let Uncle Daddy show you how it's done.

Fresh or Aged?

When making homemade hot sauce you need to decide a few things. The main thing is whether you prefer sauces with aged or fresh peppers. Some of the most commercially popular sauces like Tabasco and Franks Redhot use aged peppers. However, there are some exceptionally good sauces made from fresh or even dried peppers.

How do fresh pepper sauces taste compared to aged ones? It's a bit hard to describe how someting tastes using words, but here goes. Sauces made from aged or fermented peppers have a more complex flavor than fresh pepper sauces. They also have a characteristic aroma that comes from the aging process. Sauces made from aged peppers tend to be seasoned with only salt or garlic. Other earthy seasonings like cumin, curry, and allspice are popular as well.

Some sauce recipes, especially the ones containing fruit like mangos or papayas usually call for fresh peppers. The fruity taste typically blends better with fresh peppers. Complexity can be added to fresh pepper sauces by using seasonings.

Personally, I think there are some great sauces made using both fresh and aged peppers. It comes down to your taste. If you aren't sure which you prefer there is one way to find out. Taste several of them and find out!

Heat Level

Fresh peppers are hotter than pepper mash from the same variety of pepper. This is because the aging process knocks the heat down. So if you want a blazing hot sauce stick to fresh peppers. If you want a medium sauce you can use either fresh or aged and adjust the heat level by using different quantities of pepeprs in the recipe.

Another thing that affects the heat level in a hot sauce is vinegar. You might think that adding vinegar would dilute the sauce and make it less hot, but the opposite is true. Blending in a bit of vinegar makes the sauce pour more easily, gives it a longer shelf life and also makes it taste hotter.

Level of Difficulty

Homemade hot sauces are not particularly difficult to make. That being said, fermenting your own peppers is a time consuming process. So if you are making hot sauce are are short on time I'd recommend using fresh peppers or perhaps buying pre-made pepper mash.

Hot Sauce Recipes

OK, now that we've covered a bit of background information about how to make hot sauce let's move on to the hot sauce recipes. Several recipies from various styles of sauces are given.

Return from How to Make Hot Sauce to Hot Sauce Recipes page.