Make Your Own Hot Sauce

Start off safe with Cajun Garlic Lover’s Sauce or Easy Going Achiote or jump right into Tropical Storm or Flaming Fruit Sauce for a real lip melt-down. Or come up with your own mild or maniacal blend. Test the bounds of hot sauce technology with this red-hot kit!

Includes: 6 spices (allspice, black cumin, curry powder, achiote, Jamaican jerk, ginger), 3 bottles, instructions with pepper glossary, recipes, and handling and safety tips.

Commercial Hot Sauce Manufacturing

There really are as many variations of Hot Sauce as there are cooks who make the sauce. But Tabasco® brand hot sauce is one of the oldest in the world, and best known commercially produced products. TABASCO® brand products are produced by McIlhenny Company, founded in 1868 at Avery Island, Louisiana, and still in operation on that very site today.

The Company's roots were actually cultivated a few years earlier, shortly after the McIlhenny family returned to the Island from self-imposed exile during the Civil War. According to family tradition, founder Edmund McIlhenny obtained some hot pepper seeds from a traveler who had recently arrived in Louisiana from Central America. McIlhenny planted them on Avery Island, and then experimented with pepper sauces until he hit upon one he liked.

Since Tabasco® sauce is the longest continually produced hot pepper sauce, let's start with their procedure, which the McIlhenny Company has used for more than 125 years. After harvest, whole tabasco chiles are crushed in a hammer mill; salt is added in the amount of 8 pounds of salt for every 100 pounds of chiles. This mash is placed in Kentucky white oak barrels with salt-sealed wooden lids that have tiny holes which allow the gases of the peppers to escape during fermentation. The wooden tops are secured and placed on the barrels with stainless steel hoops (iron hoops disintegrate in the air of the salt and pepper mash).

Each 400-pound barrel is aged for three years, allowing the carbon dioxide to be released for the first two years. After this time, the salt topping hardens and naturally seals the barrel after the fermentation process ceases. The mellowing and aging process is called steeping, permitting the flavors and color to intermingle and mix naturally. The barrels are uncovered and oxidized mash is removed from the top of the barrels. The mash is inspected for aroma, color, and moisture. Upon being accepted under McIlhenny standards, the mash is pumped into large blending vats and mixed with distilled, all-natural white vinegar in the ratio of two-thirds vinegar to one-third mash. (Before being manufactured with commercial equipment, the blending process was referred to as "pounding," where the pepper mash was pushed manually through a strainer, where the vinegar was added, with a flat-headed "pounder". This was a very time-consuming process and took a lot of manual labor to do large quantities of sauce.)