How to Make Your Own Hot Sauce

I love hot sauce. I mean I really love it. I'll have hot sauce on just about any kind of food there is. My girlfriend and I go through bottles of the stuff every week, and I think our joint passion for hot sauce has enabled our relationship to travel to new heights we would have been otherwise unable to reach.

That's why when I saw the Make Your Own Hot Sauce Kit from Gourmet Gift Concepts I was extremely excited to try it. I had always wanted to learn how to make hot sauce. Luckily, after the holiday season I actually ended up with two copies of the kit (more hot sauce, score!), one of which I had purchased and another of which was given as a gift.

The Make Your Own Hot Sauce Kit is pretty basic, but it serves as a good starter guide. Included in the kit you get a bunch of packages of different spices. You get three glass bottles to fill up with the hot sauce you create, as well as a small wooden stand to place them in. You also get a funnel to help pour the hot sauce into the bottles.

The best part of the Make Your Own Hot Sauce Kit though is the recipes that come with it. There are a handful of different recipes that you can use to make your own hot sauce. But really after the first time out they serve as a guide of what ingredients might work well together and how to go about the entire process.

We learned that to make your own hot sauce you have to blanch your peppers of choice is boiling distilled vinegar. This helps to release all of the spiciness and taste. You then take those blanched peppers and blend with the ingredients of your choosing. For a different approach, you can skip the blanching and opt instead to roast your peppers.

Making your own hot sauce is fun and it is actually pretty quick and simple to do. You'll just need a sauce pan to blanch your peppers and a blender to combine all of the ingredients. Blanching only takes several minutes, but if possible you should turn on your oven fan or open a window, as it will release intense steam filled with the hotness of the peppers.

Once you get the basic process down there will be an unending array of options. You can completely ditch all of the spices and recipes provided in the kit or you can continue to use them to experiment and build upon. Try different kinds of peppers, balance them out with fruits, mix your own spice blends and more. Create your own recipes and you'll always have the perfect hot sauce on hand when you need it.

If you love hot sauce, want to know how to make sauce or you just love getting hands on in the kitchen, then the Make Your Own Hot Sauce Kit is a great idea.