The pickled chillies contained the three habaneros that were ripe at the time, but there were dozens more coming along. Even with our love of chillies, you only ever use a maximum of two for a recipe, so we were clearly going to have an excess of habs soon!

This was clearly a great opportunity to try making our own hot pepper sauce. And of course we’ll need a vehicle for the sauce, so a great opportunity to make more beef patties with the frozen filling from our first batch.

The original hot sauce we’re trying to recreate is Encona West Indian Original Hot Pepper Sauce. This lists its ingredients as:

• Habanero Mash (64%)
  • Habanero Peppers
  • Scotch Bonnet Peppers
  • Salt
  • Acetic Acid (aka vinegar)
  • Water
• Acetic Acid (aka vinegar)
• Salt
• Onion Powder
• Mustard
• Modified Maize Starch
• Xanthan Gum

Caribbean Pot and All Recipes have recipes that are similar to this. Both include garlic, which we approve of. Both are missing mustard, so we’ll be adding some mustard powder to our mix. We like the idea of coriander, so we’ll be taking that from the Caribbean pot version. Plus they both contain extra chillies, so we’ll be adding whatever extra chillies we have lying around.

Both recipes need at least 20 chillies, and this weekend I had a quick harvest, and we have enough!

So our sauce will contain:

• 1 tsp vegetable oil
• 1 onion (the garden ones have run out…)
• 6 garden garlic cloves
• 25 garden habaneros
• 2 garden jalapeños
• 1 scotch bonnet (found in the bottom of the fridge)
• Some pickled red jalapeños that need using up
• Some pimentos (cherry peppers) as we have some
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp mustard powder
• 300ml water
• Handful of coriander, roughly chopped
• 2 Tbsp golden caster sugar
• 300ml white wine vinegar

So mise en place, with the chillies being chopped while wearing gloves to avoid any issues.

 The onions get softened in the oil, then the garlic and chilies and added to fry to a bit.

Then the water, salt and mustard powder goes in and it’s simmered for 20 minutes.

Then it gets blended with the coriander & sugar, then vinegar getting blended in too.

After the vinegar was added there was quite a lot of it!

We only have one Kilner jar left after all our pickling… so I needed another jar. So I grabbed an old mayo jar and sterilised it along with the Kilner jar, and poured the cooled sauce into the hot jars.

Yeah… There’s a reason you buy special heat-proof jars apparently!

Anyway we had a taste of the kitchen top, and it taste great; although just two dabs of my finger was too hot for me! So we probably didn’t need a second jar anyway (at least that’s what I’m telling myself!).