An Interesting Hot Sauce to Make at Home

Speaking of bird peppers....

I have a book on mail order sources for southern [United States]
cooking/eating supplies, called "True Grits". In one of their
little recipe side-bars they suggest the following [paraphrased]:

Strain a bottle of Key West lime juice through a clean T-shirt.
Add a couple of bird (or other small very hot) peppers, 1 teaspoon
salt, and a little freshly ground black pepper, and cork the bottle.
Let sit in a dark place for about 2 weeks; the juice will turn a
nice amber color. Decant into a bottle, put the lid on, and punch
holes in the lid. Sprinkle on fish, veggies, or just about anything
else.

I'm trying this right now, but I believe I screwed up. I didn't
have any fresh small really hot peppers, but rather than going
out to get a habaņero like a good boy, I used 3 dried arbols.
They don't seem to be doing anything, so I think tomorrow I'm
going to remove them (they are still staying dry and floating
nicely) and put a quartered haban~ero in their place.

If anyone tries this successfully, let me know. When I was
growing up, we grew an unknown variety of VERY hot pepper.
Later experience leads me to believe that these were related
to the long dark green Thai peppers that are so hot. My dad
would put several of them in a small jar of vinegar, and a
couple of months later we'd have pepper sauce to sprinkle on
black-eyed peas -- yum!

I like vinegar-based HOT sauces sprinkled lightly on peas,
but North Carolina BBQ *sucks* (apologies to anyone unfortunate
enough to grow up in Vinegar Hell). That particular cuisine
isn't even worthy of Texas Pete! But if you leave off the
vinegar mixed with vinegar, cut with vinegar, and colored
with orange vinegar, the smoked pork itself is *AWESOME*.

Enough non-pepper rambling!

Curtis Jackson	cjackson@mv.us.adobe.com (preferred)
                  or	dod721@aol.com


Date: Sun, 19 Jun 94 23:40:39 PDT
From: cjackson@mv.us.adobe.com (Curtis Jackson)