Easy Homemade Hot Sauce

With this easy homemade hot sauce you can approximate one of the world’s tastiest hot sauces, Tabasco sauce, right in your home kitchen. A simple hot sauce recipe.

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by AdobeStock/Rasulov

With this easy homemade hot sauce you can approximate one of the world’s tastiest hot sauces, Tabasco sauce, right in your home kitchen. A simple hot sauce recipe.

You’ve no doubt seen the iconic bottles of Tabasco sauce at your favorite diner or greasy spoon. Tabasco is the brand name for a hot pepper sauce produced on Avery Island, La. Ever wondered how it’s made?

Although the recipe for the original sauce is top secret and, as legend has it, guarded by an army of 10,000 ravenous crayfish somewhere deep in the bayou, the ingredients list is surprisingly short: peppers, vinegar, salt. The one ingredient that doesn’t appear on the label but should is “time.” Tabasco sauce’s deep flavor comes from its three-year fermentation in white oak barrels. (Vegetable ferments are based on the science that the veggies contain benign microbes that will flourish under the right conditions, and suppress other microbes that cause spoilage.)

While reproducing the exact flavor of Tabasco sauce is difficult to do, you can approximate it in your kitchen using freshly picked hot peppers. The original recipe calls for Tabasco peppers (Capsicum frutescens var. tabasco), but you can use any type of hot pepper you like. I make mine using a jalapeño variety, which is milder on the official Scoville spiciness scale but more than hot enough for most palates.

How to Make Hot Sauce

  • Updated on Aug 27, 2022
  • Originally Published on Jul 22, 2011
Tagged with: DIY recipes, easy recipes, hot sauce, recipe
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