Feeling hot, hot, hot

A friend once said to me that Mexican food is like painting by numbers. By this he meant that it’s difficult to mess things up, so long as you have the correct paints / ingredients.

I was thinking of Ronan’s assertion last week as I sat down to a big chilli bowl with rice, sour cream, avocado, lettuce, salsa, beans and spring onions.

All the paints had been assembled and I created a veritable masterpiece in the bowl, forking various combinations of ingredients into my cake-hole with wild Mexican abandon.

One of the ‘paints’ I didn’t mention however, is for me, one of the most important: Hot sauce.

Whilst my own version of chilli con carne is a supremely tasty meal, I always have a bottle of some kind of hot sauce on hand to spike things up if and when required. This hot sauce is especially important when you have to make your chilli purposely mild so that it can be eaten by the little humans.

To date, the year of Our Lord 2023, I’ve been through every bottle of hot sauce imaginable. From srirachas to Tabascos to Frank’s to Cholulas to harissas to The Sauce Shop to Enconas to Reggae Reggae to Nando’s to Lee Kum Kee – basically if I see a new hot sauce on the market, I buy it, just to see what it’s like.

Some are better than others, of course, although if a bottle doesn’t court my fancy, there’s never a repeat buy. Generally speaking though, I always have a bottle of sriracha and Cholula in the fridge to help spice things up when the occasion requires – but I’m always on the hunt for more.

Apart from helping to paint the chilli bowl picture, hot sauce in its varying guises also adds a certain je ne sais quoi to my lunchtime sandwiches and even, my bowls of soup of an evening. To paraphrase Levi Roots, it helps put a little music in my food.

However, as you can see from the picture, I have finally taken the plunge and made some hot sauce of my own – although, having said that, as tasty as it is, you wouldn’t exactly want to plunge into this stuff. Easily, by chance more than design, this is the hottest hot sauce I have ever tasted. The thing was, I reckoned that since I was going to make hot sauce, I might as well make sauce that was hot.Which is why I used Scotch Bonnet chillies.

THE HEAT

So-named due to its supposed resemblance to a Scottish tam ‘o shanter bonnet, these bad boys are at the upper end of the Scoville Scale, the calibration which measures the hotness of any pepper. To put the Scotch Bonnet into context, a common bell pepper is zero on the scale. A common jalapeno is around 3,000. But a Scotch Bonnet can be as much as 350,000 Scovile units. Outside of ordering a Ghost or Naga chilli online, a Scotch Bonnet is probably the hottest thing available in our local shops. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not really into food sadism and I don’t want my hot sauce to hurt but rather, I like a goodly portion of background heat, which is why I’ve had to use Michael’s Signature Lava Sauce sparingly.

WARNING

As I’d never made hot sauce before, I didn’t really know what to expect. However, during the cooking process, when my sliced chillis were frying, I put my head over the saucepan and inhaled. This resulted in a three-way fit of hiccuping, coughing and sneezing and this lasted longer than was entirely pleasant. Also, and I know this from first hand experience, down a scant teaspoon of this stuff and even a pint of milk isn’t going to help.

A drip here and a drop there not only adds zing to proceedings, but there is also a definite freshness with home-made sauce which is often missing from the shop-bought bottles. In fact, my virgin run at hot sauce has been such a success, that the aforementioned hunt for different bottles might be at an end. Home-made sauce is hotter, fresher, fruitier and more than anything, there is a certain satisfaction bordering on smugness to be had from crafting your own hot sauce.

INGREDIENTS

10 Scotch Bonnet, stems removed and sliced. If you don’t want it super hot, remove the seeds. I left the seeds in.

1 red bell pepper, de-seeded and diced

half an onion, finely chopped

3 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped

1 tbsp of vegetable oil

big pinch of salt

half a pint of water

2 tbsps of distilled white vinegar

1 heaped tbsp of caster sugar

THE PLAN

Add the peppers, onion, garlic, oil and salt to a saucepan and fry over a medium heat for about five minutes. Add the water and bring to a simmer and let it bubble away, stirring from time to time for about 20 minutes or until the bell peppers are cooked through. If it gets a little dry, add another dash of water. Ideally you want it a little loose or the resultant sauce will be too thick.

Remove from the heat and then blend until super smooth. Stir in the sugar and vinegar and that’s it.

Ideally, you’ll want to taste it at this stage, just a drip on a spoon to see what it’s like. Just make sure to have the milk at the ready.