Day: October 21, 2014

See, hot sauce is pretty forgiving. Use fresh, spicy chiles and enough vinegar, and you’ll create a condiment that will set your mouth aflame in just the way you like. You’ve got four elements: chiles, acid, aromatics (carrots, onions, etc.), and salt. Get roughly the right proportions of each, and you’ll wind up with something downright edible, and maybe even quite tasty.

I set out to create one sauce that would follow simple principles: fresh ingredients you actually want to taste (carrots, onions, and two kinds of chiles, one hot, the other not so), simmered in a bath of white vinegar, puréed into a crimson slurry. Oh, and no added sugar.

When you make a hot sauce this way, the most tedious part is prepping the ingredients. I shredded two fat carrots before getting bored and deciding to simply put everything else—i.e., two sliced red onions, kosher salt and a pound of red jalapeños (the kind used for Sriracha) and red habaneros—in a pot with a quart of white vinegar and turning the heat to medium-high. Once that had simmered for a little while, I poked in my stick blender and blitzed everything into a liquid. Done! Well, not quite. The liquid was, you know, liquidy—not so much a sauce as a drizzle. Of course, it was bubbling in a pot on the stove, so I just left it there to slowly reduce, knowing that the cooking process would also temper the heat of the chiles.

[Note: article edited from a Bon Appetit article]