Homemade Hot Pepper Sauce

Winter is officially coming here in Toronto now. As my last post in November about my little garden, I had to harvest all the peppers even though they were still green. Just a couple of them were ripe. The bad news is that I’m not very good at eating spicy food and all people I know couldn’t even eat as spicy as I do, LOL. That’s why two big bags of green hot peppers have been in my fridge all the time. I guess they should weigh around 5 pounds (or say 6 pounds at maximum). A month has passed by and I don’t think they can stay there in the fridge forever. Well, I have to do something with them. I thought about pickling them but still too much. Finally, I came up with the idea to storing them as sauce; require less space and easier eating in a long time. And the good news is that it was not too hard to do homemade hot pepper sauce at I thought.

Here is the simplest recipe I have

• Around my 5 pounds of big green hot peppers (well, make less if you wish, I have to do with this amount since no other choices for me J )
• 8 table spoons of sugar
• 2 table spoons of salt
• 2 or 3 table spoons of vinegar
• 2 table spoons of white wine (as strong as possible)
• Around 2 or 3 pounds of ripe tomatoes
• A small branch of ginger root
• 6 or 7 garlic bulbs

1. Remove stem and wash hot peppers out
2. Cut tomatoes a half or quarter and remove seeds
3. Slice ginger root as thin as you can, no need to be pretty
4. Remove garlic skins and wash them
5. Put hot peppers, tomatoes and ginger slices into a big pot. Pour water into the pot to cover around a half of the inner.
6. Simmer the pot on stove at low heat until everything is soft (I cooked around 30 minutes)
7. Use a blender to blend at high speed all garlic cloves and the pot’s inner (include the water) together until they turn like sauce (Be careful to not burn your hands if you’re operating with the hot food.)
8. In a big bowl, mix the sauce with sugar, salt, vinegar and white wine
9. Put the pot on the stove again and simmer the mixture to sterilize for long time storing later. Cook until you the sauce looks like paste (I simmered around 45 minutes). Remember to cover the pot since the sauce may splash all over your stove.
10. Turn of the stove and let it rest
11. When the sauce is cool, put it into jars, tightened them up and store for around one to two months. Refrigerate the jar after opening to eat.

Here is my final result (don't bother with the brands on the jars J)