Making Your Own Hot Sauce...

Hello everyone! We're back with the much anticipated entry on making hot sauce! It's been a while since we posted and this entry was promised a while ago, but life sure has a way of throwing us curve balls and keeping us busy!

Here, at Make Your Own, we love researching and finding ways to make 'stuff' our own way. The hot sauce recipes we came up with have been tested, re-tested and tested again. We made mistakes and the end product is our Make Your Own Hot Sauce Kit, which can be found by clicking here.

Now, I'm going to hand things off to Carol, our resident hot sauce maker. She has some tips and tricks to making hot sauce and what to avoid!

Hi! I'm Carol, and I've been working at Make Your Own for several years now. Coming up with the hot sauce recipes was a fun time! I spent a lot of time testing the formulas and tweaking the recipes. Below, I've listed some things to keep in mind when making hot sauce.

The directions in the kit instruct you to mix the dry ingredients with the liquid, then heat the mix. The timing on that can only be approximate, because we don't know how much wattage your microwave has. Our ancient one here at the store takes about twice as long as the fastest one available now. (Would you believe almost 4 minutes for a cup of tea? Bless its little heart, slow but sure.) We tested the directions on a 900 watt microwave.

Anyway, the idea is to heat the mix to hot, but not so hot that you couldn't drink it. (Tip: don't consume the 'hot' hot sauce as a drink.)  That's around 125F. After you stir everything up again, heat the mix to ALMOST boiling, around 180F to 200F. Please let it cool down before bottling, if there's a spill, you really don't want almost boiling hot sauce on you or anything else.

If you decide to use fresh hot peppers in your hot sauce, good for you! Please send us pictures of the flames coming out of your ears! We put dried, ground peppers in the kit because we can control the "heat" and it's a lot safer.

           You MUST WEAR RUBBER GLOVES if you are chopping up fresh hot peppers.

We learned the hard way. We also cautioned a friend who is proud of both his garden and his Harley, and still got a phone call that evening, "My hands are BURNING. The emergency room said there wasn't much they could do...HELP!"

A pepper burn is a chemical reaction, an oil that sinks into your skin. When it starts to  "tingle" it's too late. (We tried original Dawn and mechanic's glop degreaser to ease the burn and get rid of the oil, but those only work if the skin isn't tingling yet.). The only thing you can do is soak the skin in cold water until it gets numb, about 10 minutes, take hands out until they start to tingle again, and repeat soaking. This is really annoying to do for 24 to 48 hours and it's hard to get any sleep.

Well, that's about it! The most important thing is to have fun! Doing it yourself can be quite rewarding and homemade hot sauce makes a great gift! Enjoy!

Thanks Carol! I hope you all enjoyed the tips and tricks above for making hot sauce! Our kit comes with everything you need to make 6 different types of hot sauce! You only have to provide measuring cups, mixing bowls and water. Don't forget to check the kit out here.

Don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter to stay up to date on everything happening at Make Your Own!

Up Next: Making Mustard...