Tabasco Sauce Recipe

While at our neighborhood farmer’s market I noticed a friend selling a bag of tabasco peppers.  I really wanted to make tabasco sauce this year, but my plants are still about 5 inches tall so sadly I don’t expect to get any peppers from them.  But since the market was almost over and no one else showed any interest in the peppers, my friend gave them to me and in return I would make us some hot sauce.

While looking around for recipes I stumbled upon this site that has several different tabasco pepper recipes.  Apparently the real Tabasco sauce is still made by taking tabasco peppers and salt and letting the mixture ferment for 3 years in oak barrels.  It’s pretty cool they still use this technique, and don’t have to add anything else except some vinegar, so you can really taste the pepper.

I didn’t want to wait 3 years for our sauce so I went with the 1947 Tabasco Sauce Recipe.  I can’t remember what tabasco sauce tastes like exactly, but mine turned out sweet and spicy.  I’ve been putting it on all kinds of food; veggie burgers, eggs, soups, etc.  I would definitely use this recipe again.  Here is what I did…

To start, I had way more peppers than the recipe called for so I adjusted the recipe accordingly.  I ended up with about 150 peppers.  I pulled the little green caps off them, and I saved the seeds from the largest peppers by slicing them down the middle and scooping the seeds into a bowl.

 

 

 

Then I peeled 4 big garlic cloves and put them in a pot with my peppers and 4 cups of water.  I let the peppers and garlic simmer until they were tender.  Maybe there is a better way to do this, but this stage was pretty intense.  The hot pepper fumes filled the house and made our eyes water.  Once I put a lid on the pot and got all the fans going it became bearable, so I would recommend doing this from the beginning.

 

Once everything was nice and tender I put the mixture in a blender.  Then I dumped the pepper mash through a strainer over a bowl in order to keep the seeds and skins out of my sauce.  I put the liquid back into the pot and added: 4 tbsp sugar, 2 tsp salt, 4 tsp wasabi powder, and 4 cups of white vinegar.  The recipe calls for horseradish and hot vinegar, I didn’t have either so I substituted these ingredients for wasabi (since it’s similar to horseradish) and white distilled vinegar.  I let this mixture simmer for a while until all the ingredients were blended together.  Then I poured the sauce into mason jars and immediately through some on a sandwich!  Adds great flavor, I just don’t know how long it’s going to last because we can’t stop eating it!