(Part 2) Top products from r/hotsaucerecipes

Yeah! IMHO a good hot sauce balances heat and flavor. From the look of the box, you are getting a good mix of hot, flavorful peppers. Here is a very simple hot sauce recipe. While it doesn't say it, I would recommend you run it through a fine mesh strainer and then mix in a pinch of Xanthan gum (you can find individual packets for like $0.99 in the baking isle of your grocery store). You only need a pinch - a little Xanthan gum goes a long way.

Personally, I would avoid the extracts. They add heat without bringing anything else to the party. Of course, if heat is your endgame it will definitely get you there.

Just in case you are looking for some additional sauces, Da Bomb is really, really spicy. My personal favorite (balancing flavor and heat really well, IMO) is Zombie Apocalypse.

Hope this helps!

Purchased this book a while back and they have a section on types of hot sauces, typed up below:


Louisiana

With a razor-sharp heat, these sauces are simple bends of cayenne or tabasco peppers, vinegar, and salt. The salt and chilli peppers are mashed and aged 1 - 3 years, then blended with vinegar. Occasionally xanthan gum or other thickeners are used. Popular Louisiana-style brands include Crystal, Frank's RedHot, Tabasco and Trappey's. Louisiana hot sauces have a relatively thin consistency, with the good ones being more flavorful than merely a spicy, salty vinegar. They needn't be refrigerated.

Hawaii

"Chilli pepper water" is made with whole chillies, garlic, salt, water and sometimes Hawaiian ingredients such as ginger and lemongrass.

Central America and The Southwest

In Central America as well as the American Southwest, you'll often find sauces that are distinguished by the use of a particular chilli (chipotle, New Mexico red, habanero, or cascabel) and earthy ingredients ranging from tomatoes and pumpkin seeds. In New Mexico, most traditional dishes are served with red or green chilli sauce, which flavours meats, eggs, vegetables, breads and burritos. New Mexican-style chilli sauces also differ from many others in that vinegar is used sparingly or not at all. In southeastern Mexico, habanero sauces are as common as ketchup.

West Indies or Caribbean Style

A culinary melting pot, Caribbean cooking has been influenced by colonists from Europe, African slaves, and natives. One island may feature French cuisine, while the next island a half hour away by sail may be English, with Indian influences. Anything goes, but the flavours are always big and the fire hot from the habaneros or Scotch bonnet peppers. With chillies giving the sauces the top fruity notes, each island - indeed, each kitchen - has its own homemade concoction. Jamaican sauces, for example, often blend Scotch bonnets with jerk seasonings and tropical fruits like tamarind or papaya. Puerto Rican sauces float hot chillies and garlic, and maybe a few garden herbs, in vinegar for a pretty pique. As hot as the equatorial sun, island varieties include Susie's hot sauce from Antigua, Sauce Ti-Malice from Haiti, Baron hot sauce from St. Lucia, Pickapeppa from Jamaica, Bajan Pepper Sauce from Barbados, Bello Hot Pepper Sauce from Dominica, and Matouk's from Trinidad.

Asian

Thick and pasty, Chinese chilli sauces include chillies and often garlic and fermented soybeans, and they are used either as a dipping sauce or in stir-fries. Chilli red oil, a distinctive Sichuan flavouring, is made by pouring hot oil into a bowl of dried chillies. The finer the chilli is ground, the stronger the flavour. Ground chilli is commonly used in western China, while people in northern China cook with whole dried chillies. In Indonesia and Malaysia, thick, pungent sauces (called sambals) often feature ginger and garlic. In Thailand, many dipping sauces contain chilli peppers. Nam phrik is the generic term for a Thai chilli dip or condiment made with fish paste, garlic, chillies, and lime juice. Sriracha sauce is a sauce of chillies, vinegar, garlic, sugar, and salt that is found in Thailand and increasingly in the United States.

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Hope you find this helpful! The book has a variety of recipes that covers each of the above styles, with some of the recipes being readily available [here.](https://www.chilipeppermadness.com/chili-pepper-recipes/hot-sauces/)

I used to use my food mill &/or Ninja stick blender, but I got this inexpensive blender on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00HSI1Y6G/ref=dp_olp_new_mbc?ie=UTF8&condition=new and its been great. I'd love a vitamix, but I dont have the room or the wish to spend the $$.

By lactose, do you mean lactose sugar? Lactose sugar doesn't contain any live cultures (I mean there may be some dormant wild yeast/bacteria in there), so that's just going to add more food for whatever eventually takes hold of your ferment - wild yeast, Lactobacillus on the peppers, etc.

If you mean pitching Lactobacillus cultures, yes that would work and probably help a bit. Something like this would work well (it's what I use for kettle-souring beers), but a healthy ferment consists of several species of Lactobacillus, and you may get less than optimal results relying on a single strain. Some good literature on this available here, but doesn't appear to be full-text :(

Another solid option would be to pitch a little bit of brine from a previous ferment, especially kraut brine which will have a nice mix of all the good Lactobacillus spp.

Liquid whey should work too, but I've never tried it myself.

Hey, thank you. I use star-san for everything (https://www.northernbrewer.com/products/star-san). A little bottle lasts forever for hot sauce purposes. It's a product used heavily for bottling in the home brewing industry. You can throw the glass, plastics, whatever in it and it's much quicker and easier than being heat processed.

These are the shrink caps I used, they were pretty good: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TG0XZF2/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I use a small mesh strainer basket that I set over a small pot and push all my sauce/mash through. My results have been so spot-on with a store-bought quality I'm kind of blown away.


I bought these for general purpose straining and they have been perfect! I even use them for rinsing rise and other things like that. They work great for more than just sauce!

I blend it in a food processor first but then I pass it through one of these:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001I7FP54/

It does a PERFECT job.

If it's too thin afterwards (rarely the case) I'll put it back in a sauce pan and reduce it.

Don't, it's a bad idea for this. This is a good set up for making a gallon of hard cider, mead or beer. But OP is going to spend a good hour or 2 trying to get those peppers out. Also there is no way to weigh it down because of the cone shaped interior, and you can not fit anything in the tiny hole that work anyway. So, mold it a high probability.

But, for other fermentation purposes (i.e. mead), this set-up is fine and you can get one gallon carboy just by buying some decent apple cider and resuing the jug. The other parts are simply a rubber stopper and an airlock..

I came across these bottles on amazon (link). I think there are plenty of similar options.

This is my first time using them, so I can't speak much to durability. I can say that having condiment bottles with tops that snap closed are much more useful than the ones with pointed nozzles. I've had an issue with losing caps on the pointed ones.

The stuff I got was off of amazon and had the amounts on the bottle. NOW real Food Xanthan Gum Powder,... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0014UH7J2?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

I usually only use a teaspoon for a whole blender full and really stabilizes and holds the sauce together nicely even when it’s high texture/chunky sauce

Omega also makes commercial kitchen grade blenders that are similar spec to the Vitamix (3hp motor). But they will often sell for half the price ($220-$250 instead of $450-$500), and are frequently on sale.

Another cheaper option is to get an Indian brand "mixer grinder". The mixer grinder is a workhorse in an Indian kitchen, along with a pressure cooker, because of the daily need to grind lots of stuff for meals (chutneys, curry powders, curry pastes, dry spice grinding etc).

They are not 3hp motors but 1hp but are very well built and reliable and in most cases, a 1hp or 700W motor is enough and gets the work done. But they cost $100, which is significantly cheaper than the commercial grade blenders. And with every day use (literally), most will last for years in a home kitchen. Here are some options:

• Ultra Stealth
  
  
• Butterfly
  
  
• Prestige Manttra
  
  
• Preethi Steele

Don't buy strips, a cheap meter is more accurate and will serve you over time.

If you PH is higher than you want, pop it in the fridge

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VSJUICM/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I just got this Ninja system because my food processor just took a dump, and for the smaller blender cups since I have a lot of small batches going on for experimentation. Once I get my recipes dialed in, I'll absolutely be getting a Vitamix for my bigger batches.