The Hungry MouseFiery Green Hot Sauce
What do you get when you combine mashed chilis, white vinegar, and a little salt? A homemade hot sauce with super-fresh, vibrant flavor that beats the pants off of anything store bought. At least so says the Mouse.
Some things are too good to resist. For those of you who don’t know me that well, I should preface this by saying: I have a serious make-your-own streak in me.
From hot cocoa, to marshmallows, to all different kinds of liqueurs, if it can be made at home, chances are I’ll be interested in giving it a shot.
Why bother?
The simplest answer is: Because I can. Making stuff is always at least half the fun for me. I’m one of those folks who truly loves to play with my food.
So, all that said…last month, I kept going back to a recent issue of Saveur, which has a mouthwatering recipe for a Tabasco-y sounding, white vinegar-based hot sauce.
My only problem? I couldn’t find red chilis anywhere in Boston. I did get my paws on some beautiful jalapenos and serranos, though, so I used those and improvised a green hot sauce.
And man, is it hot!
Jalapeno Peppers
Serrano chilis
This hot sauce is very thin and has a clean and true jalapeno flavor. Serranos, which are a little hotter than jalapenos, give the sauce a fiery boost and deepen the chili flavor.
I have a pretty big kitchen garden in the summers, and I can’t wait to make hot sauce from my own peppers.
Hot sauce is personal: Pick your own peppers
I used a mix of jalapenos and serranos this time. Mainly because I like those flavors a lot, and I found super fresh peppers. By all means, use a combination of any chilis you like.
Keep heat in mind. (i.e. Don’t use 100% habeneros, one of the hottest peppers out there, unless you’re shooting for a melt-your-face-off hot sauce.)
Not sure which peppers are hot and which are, well, not? Look them up on the Scoville scale, a standard heat index for peppers.
Fiery Green Hot Sauce: The basic technique
Here’s the basic technique. Use a ratio of 1 pound of chilis to 2 cups of white vinegar.
+Chop and salt the peppers.
+Age mixture for 2 days.
+Add vinegar.
+Age another 5 days.
+Strain and bottle.
Read on for a step-by-step photo explanation of how to do this.
Fiery Green Hot Sauce
.8 lbs. jalapenos
.2 lbs. serrano chilis
3 Tbls. kosher salt
2 cups distilled white vinegar
Fiery Green Hot Sauce: Wash and chop your chilis
Grab your peppers. Rinse them in cold water and wipe them completely dry.
Cut off the stem off of each pepper.
Discard all those stems.
You’re going to use the rest of the whole pepper: flesh, ribs, and seeds.
Toss all your peppers into the bowl of your food processor.
Add the salt to the bowl.
Cap your food processor.
Turn your machine on and process until the peppers are finely chopped.
You want it to be chopped to a pulp, like this:
Scrape the chopped peppers out into a very clean bowl.
You should have a mound of pepper pulp plus some liquid. That’s just fine.
Fiery Green Hot Sauce: Let the salted chilis ripen for 2 days
Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap. Set it in a cool dark place to ripen for 2 days.
Fiery Green Hot Sauce: Add the vinegar to the salted chilis
After 2 days, uncover the peppers. The mixture will be thicker and have less liquid than it originally did.
Transfer the chilis to another, larger (and super-clean) bowl.
Add the vinegar.
Whisk to combine well.
Your hot sauce should have about this consistency:
Cover it tightly with plastic wrap. Set in a cool, dark place. Let age for 5 days.
After a few days, your hot sauce should start to darken. After 5 days, my hot sauce looked like this (not nearly as vibrant, but man, is it good):
Fiery Green Hot Sauce: Strain and bottle your hot sauce
After 5 days, you’re ready to strain and bottle your hot sauce. Set a strainer over a large bowl.
Pour the hot sauce through the strainer.
All your solids will wind up in the strainer.
Press the chili pulp with the back of a spoon to smoosh out any remaining liquid.
The hot sauce in your bowl should look about like this:
Set a funnel in the top of a clean bottle or jar. (I saved and used the bottle from the white vinegar.) Ladle or pour the hot sauce slowly through the funnel into the bottle.
Cap your hot sauce with a tight-fitting lid. Keep in the fridge for about 6 months or so.
The hot sauce will separate a little in the fridge. Just give it a little shake before using.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
40 Comments on “Fiery Green Hot Sauce”
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Yummmm-ooooooooo! I too love making my own goodies! Care to share what you put in your “kitchen garden”? Thanks!
Wheee! Thank you!
Oh gosh, the kitchen garden varies from year to year. I don’t start my plants from seed, so it really depends what kind of seedlings I can get my paws on.
So…Last year, I did a few different varieties of tomato. The Husky Cherry Tomatoes were the most robust tomato plant I’ve ever grown. I also grew jalapenos, habaneros, long Italian peppers, cayenne, bell peppers, and a whole mess of herbs. I planted beans and pumpkins, too, but they didn’t take as well.
Oh and mint. I had an out-of-control mint patch.
Cheers!
+Jessie
First of all, this sounds great! I love hot sauce, I grow chilies, and it’s easy.
Second, your pictures are awesome! The one of the hot sauce pouring into the funnel where it looks like a green vapor is wicked-cool!
Thanks, Haley!
Let me know what kind of peppers you use if you give it a whirl. I can’t wait to make a red version.
+Jessie
Nice! I’m also the make it yourself type, I’ll totally have to try this. I love a good hot sauce.
Oh definitely give it a shot, then! Just a warning: it’s very thin, kind of on the level that Tabasco is thin.
Cheers!
+Jessie
Jessie,
This is fantastic!!! We love hot sauces and use jalapenos in about every dish at every meal. I am serious.Breakfast in omelets, lunch in salads and dinner chicken or a salad again.
This is great !!!!
Thank you Thank you Thank you
Ha! We’re on the same page lately, you and I.
Hope you guys like it!
+Jessie
Now that is something I have always wanted to try, but never found as good of instructions as you have created! Now, I have to go ahead and do it.
Oh hooray, then! So glad it’s helpful. Let me know how it turns out!
+Jessie
My husband will love this sauce. I might even add some jabaneros for him to make it extra spicy but I’m not sure I would be able to handle it myself
Yay
Yeah, I think when I get around to making a red version, I’m definitely going to toss in a habanero or two. They’re so hot, but so good.
+Jessie
That is so brilliantly green it almost seems fake. Reminds me of green jello and all those wonderful kids drinks that turn your mouth a glowingly nuclear shade of green for hours.
Wheee! Oh, don’t you love the green color? Man, I was bummed when it got darker as it aged. I was hoping for a bottle in just that shade. Sigh.
+Jessie
Oh, I can’t wait to make this! I’m so addicted to hot chile sauces, I make almost every one I come across.
Question, if you don’t mind – what kind of knife is that in the picture where you’re cutting off the pepper’s head?
Thanks so much, Vicki! The knife is made by Kuhn Rikon. They’re nonstick coated. (And come in a bunch of colors.)
Here you go:
Kuhn Rikon Paring Knife
Cheers! (And I’d love to know what your favorite hot sauce is!)
+Jessie
I had no idea there were non-stick knives. Must have.
My current favorite hot sauce is a Cascabel chile & sun-dried tomato one, found the recipe @ Mental Masala. But my favorite changes frequently
I made a sauce like this one time, but I think I should have used a different type of pepper. It was SMOKIN’ hot. I meant for it to be used on eggs and such, but as it turned out, its best use was probably refinishing furniture.
On gardens, last summer we did tomatoes, bell peppers, and herbs. The basil was off the hook. I thought I’d never use it all. Still smells vaguely like pesto around here…
Heee! Yeah, it is really hot stuff.
I’ll bet you could make a really good sauce, though, using mostly milder peppers (maybe Poblanos or Anaheims), with a few hotter ones thrown in for heat.
And your garden sounds wonderful! Basil is so wonderful when it grows like crazy like that.
+Jessie
YUM!!! Thanks!
Oh my…this looks really potent.
YEP! That’s pretty much the way we do it in Texas and Arkansas.
And thanks for using a recycled bottle to store your sauce!
Great photos, by the way.
I’ll have to try this aged and uncooked sauce. I make a cooked hot sauce that I prefer unstrained. I like to use hot cherry peppers, because their fleshy nature gives the final sauce a lot of fruit/ pepper flavor. The recipe I use is adopted from Tyler Florence’s *Fire Water* at foodtv.com :
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/tyler-florence/fire-water-recipe/index.html
It’s a very pretty (and thick) sauce when made with cherry peppers and left unstrained.
K
Thanks for stopping by.
Let me know how you like it. It’s very thin and vinegar-y. And thanks so much for the link! I like this green sauce, myself, but The Angry Chef prefers a thicker red sauce. Can’t wait to try it.
Cheers!
+Jessie
Now that we’re on a fixed income recipes like this are a Godsend. Thank you.
The only problem was that the sauce gave my husband heartburn.
Wow !! thais looks really good..i too love making my own everything when I have the drive to tho…n I will certainly try this…love the green..Thanks so much for sharing…here we also pickle our chillies…just slice them slantwise and soak them in vinegar and a littl salt and keep in a jar..but I dont like them much..much prefer sauces.
Great recipe, great site, and love the photos.
As you mentioned, it separated in the fridge, but I found a way around that. I added 1/8th teaspoon of Xanthan Gum (amazon.com or a health food store) slowly while mixing with a hand blender, and now it all stays together.
Hey Chris,
Thanks! (And thanks for stopping by!)
Thanks so much for the tip!
+Jessie
I recently made my own green sauce too! I used my own thai chilis that never fully ripened before the cold hit. I added cumin, garlic, basil, and half a green apple. It’s so good that I’m just searching for foods to use it with!
Oh neat! So cool to make it with chilis you grew yourself. Sounds great! Love the addition of apple!
+Jessie
I am making this recipe for my husband. So far so good. Should it sit in the fridge for 6 months before he eats it??
This recipe is great. The flavor is spot on, and gives me something to do with the rest of the peppers from my garden. You can only eat so much salsa! I just made a batch with a LB of peppers from my garden and it was great. I did want to thicken it a bit so after the steps listed here I heated it to a simmer killed the heat and added a cornstarch slurry. It didn’t seem hurt the flavor or appearance. Now it is perfect flavor and consistency. THANKS for the recipe!
I have a questions. What is the reason for straining it? Could you leave all the seeds and pulp in it if you wanted to, making it more of a thicker/chunkier sauce? This recipe looks fantastic, I am definitely going to try it with all Serrano’s.
Hey HM,
It’s been five days (actually six!), so I’m going to strain my sauce. But do you have any suggestions for the leftover solids, instead of just throwing them away (::gasp!::)??
My jalaps are homegrown so I take pride in all of my product and want to “use every part of the cow.”
Thanks!
MarcusD
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I will make this! It looks great! I have so many peppers on my serrano and jalapeno plants though that I could make this and another variety. I have quite a few red serranos that I thought would be fun for a red sauce. Have you made one of those yet?
Hey my sauce has developed some white build up on the bottom of my jar. Is this normal? or is it mold? any input would be much appreciated
i should mention the sauce is less than 1 month old
Brian that is likely yeast.
as a first attempt I pureed 1 pound of leftover jalapeños with 3% salt by weight and enough water to whirl it up into a slurry. This went into a quart mason jar with some folded over cheesecloth as a covering and placed in a dark cupboard. It fermented quite rapidly and after a few days I had to knock it on the counter to get it to resettle. Ultimately I left this for 30 days without messing with it even when I saw some mold growing on the top. I then lightly scraped the mold off and placed the thickened mixture in a blender with 3 cups of white vinegar and about a tablespoon of kosher salt. Whirled that up and then strained it through a cheesecloth. The smell is amazing and as fresh as the day I started. Taste is of piquant jalapeños. Amazing. If I can get my hands on some fresh cayenne I may never buy tabasco sauce again (which is a badass product on its own and hard to beat!). I won’t tell my friends how green sauce is made. Let them figure it out…
This hot sauce is pipin hot and my family always eats hot food thanks a lot.
Just finished processing about a pound of serranos and some salt. Can’t wait to get the finished product.