Okay, I know I’m going to be sorry because this is my last “get out of jail free post” I had saved up in case I was in a bind, but I’m kind of in a bind.  So here we go with another hot sauce.  Plus, you can’t have too many hot sauces anyway. This is made from the Indian Jwala finger peppers that MaryKate sent me from Seattle in the fall.  I wanted to find an authentic Indian style hot sauce for these peppers, but didn’t really find much out there. So instead I made a curry inspired hot sauce. This is great for bumping up homemade curries, kormas, or dals. I used my DIY Curry Powder for this recipe, but any safe curry powder you have would be fine. If you can’t get your hands on fresh Indian Jwala finger peppers, any red chili pepper would be fine, such as red cayenne peppers or Fresno peppers.

The other nice thing about making hot sauce is that you get two products for one.  When you strain out the skins and seeds during the process, you can dry them in the oven or the dehydrator and get a nice crushed pepper mix to use in other spice mixes, rubs, or other recipes. No waste!

Curry Spiced Hot Sauce

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Great sauce to use to bump up the spice on curries, kormas and dals.

• CourseCondiments

Servings	Prep Time
12 ounces	15 minutes

Cook Time	Passive Time
10 minutes	2-4 weeks

Servings Prep Time 12 ounces 15 minutes

Cook Time Passive Time 10 minutes 2-4 weeks

Curry Spiced Hot Sauce Print Recipe Great sauce to use to bump up the spice on curries, kormas and dals. CourseCondiments Servings Prep Time 12 ounces 15 minutes Cook Time Passive Time 10 minutes 2-4 weeks Servings Prep Time 12 ounces 15 minutes Cook Time Passive Time 10 minutes 2-4 weeks

Ingredients

Equipment

• 1 wide mouth pint jar
• 1 glass fermenting weight or 4 ounce canning jar
• 1 airlock lid for mason jar
• 1 blender
• 1 small sauce pan
• 1 kitchen scale measuring ounces

Brine for Fermenting

• 1 quart spring water (not tap water, it will interfere with fermentation)
• 1.8 ounces sea salt

Hot Sauce Ingredients

• 1 cup Indian jwala finger peppers washed and destemmed
• 1 clove garlic peeled
• 3/4 cup apple cider vinegar divided (Bragg’s is most tolerated for those with corn allergies)
• 4 ounces tomato paste (I used my homemade tomato paste)
• 1 cup onions, chopped
• 1 Tablespoon curry powder
• 1 teaspoon garam masala, ground
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 Tablespoon brown sugar

Servings: ounces

Instructions

Fermenting the peppers

1. Make brine by mixing spring water and salt in a container until salt is dissolved.
2. lace peppers in pint jar and add glass weight or 4 ounce jar. Add brine until the weight is covered with brine by at least half an inch, or cover with brine and add 4 ounce jar full of brine to weight down peppers making sure that all peppers are submerged in brine. Place airlock on jar and add brine to airlock to seal.
3. Let ferment for 2 to 4 weeks at room temperature, checking daily to make sure the brine levels are okay. You may need to add brine as time goes on as the peppers must stay submerged at all times. If the peppers do not stay submerged, they could develop mold and you’ll need to throw it out and start all over.

Making the Hot Sauce

1. Once your peppers are fermented, remove the airlock and and glass weight or glass jar. Drain brine. Place the peppers in a blender with the garlic clove and a 1/4 cup of the apple cider vinegar in the blender.
2. Blend until the peppers are pureed, but not until the seeds have disappeared if you have a high performance blender. You want to leave the seeds whole enough to strain out.
3. Once you have pureed your peppers, place the puree in a fine mesh strainer over a bowl and use a spatula or the back of a spoon to press the liquid in your puree into the bowl, leaving the seeds and skins of the peppers behind. (Hint: dehydrate the seeds and skins remaining in the oven at the lowest temperature you can or in a dehydrator to make pepper flakes to use in other recipes).
4. Place the remaining ingredients (onions, tomato paste, 1/2 cup of apple cider vinegar, curry powder, garam masala, salt, brown sugar) and the strained pepper mixture into a sauce pan and simmer until the onions are soft.
5. Rinse out your blender container, and place the contents of the sauce pan into the blender and blend until completely pureed. Once pureed, return the mixture to the sauce pan and bring to a gentle boil for 2 to 3 minutes.
6. Remove the sauce from heat and let cool before placing it a container to store in the refrigerator. Use it on everything.

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Pink Grapefruit Sarit Gat Hot Sauce

It’s cold here. We had that ridiculous storm, there’s a ton of snow (literally and figuratively) outside. So hot sauce might make it all better, so I’m sharing one of the hot sauces I made from the peppers MaryKate sent me from Seattle in the fall. She sent me some Sarit Gat peppers, which according to a seed catalog, is a native to Kosovo. Sarit Gat peppers are apparently known and available in Europe but they don’t have much a presence in North America. The peppers are uniform, canary-yellow, and have the approximate heat and shape of a cayenne. I ended up pickling some, dehydrating some as whole chilies, and I set up some to ferment. (Because they also seem pretty rare, I also saved a bunch of seeds, we’ll see how it goes in the spring.) When it came time to make a hot sauce, I thought about yellow hot sauces I had seen in the past, but didn’t feel like making a mango or pineapple based sauce. And then I remembered the Marie Sharps Habanero Grapefruit Pulp Hot Sauce that I used to buy in the time before the corn allergy and decided to try to make something similar. It was a great flavor profile. The citrus in it was great on almost anything.

So I gave it a whirl. The grapefruits I had in the house were pink grapefruits so that’s what I used, but if you want a more “yellow” and a less sweet sauce, you could use white grapefruits.

The other nice thing about making hot sauce is that you get two products for one.  When you strain out the skins and seeds during the process, you can dry them in the oven or the dehydrator and get a nice crushed pepper mix to use in other spice mixes, rubs, or other recipes. No waste!

Pink Grapefruit Sarit Gat Hot Sauce

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Another hot sauce reminiscent of one of Denise’s commercial favorites in the time before corn.

• CourseCondiments

Servings	Prep Time
12 ounces	15 minutes

Cook Time	Passive Time
10 minutes	2-4 weeks

Servings Prep Time 12 ounces 15 minutes

Cook Time Passive Time 10 minutes 2-4 weeks

Pink Grapefruit Sarit Gat Hot Sauce Print Recipe Another hot sauce reminiscent of one of Denise’s commercial favorites in the time before corn. CourseCondiments Servings Prep Time 12 ounces 15 minutes Cook Time Passive Time 10 minutes 2-4 weeks Servings Prep Time 12 ounces 15 minutes Cook Time Passive Time 10 minutes 2-4 weeks

Ingredients

Equipment

• 1 wide mouthed pint jar
• 1 glass fermenting weight or 4 ounce canning jar
• 1 airlock lid for mason jar
• 1 blender
• 1 small sauce pan
• 1 kitchen scale measuring ounces

Brine for fermenting

• 1 quart spring water (not tap water, it will interfere with fermentation)
• 1.8 ounces sea salt

Hot Sauce Ingredients

• 1 cup hot yellow chili peppers (I used Sarit Gat eppers, but you can use habaneros or another yellow chili)
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 grapefruit Peeled and the pulp removed from the section membranes
• 1 lime, juiced
• 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar (Bragg’s is the safest for those with corn allergies)
• 1 cup chopped onions
• 1/4 teaspoon sea salt

Servings: ounces

Instructions

Fermenting the Peppers

1. Make brine by mixing spring water and salt in a container until salt is dissolved.
2. Wash peppers and cut the stems off so that the seed cavity is visible. Placed washed peppers in pint jar and add glass weight or 4 ounce jar. Add brine until the weight is covered with brine by at least half an inch, or cover with brine and add 4 ounce jar full of brine to weight down peppers making sure that all peppers are submerged in brine. Place airlock on jar and add brine to airlock to seal.
3. Let ferment for 2 to 4 weeks at room temperature, checking daily to make sure the brine levels are okay. You may need to add brine as time goes on as the peppers must stay submerged at all times. If the peppers do not stay submerged, they could develop mold and you’ll need to throw it out and start all over.

Making the Hot Sauce

1. Once your peppers are fermented, remove the airlock and and glass weight or glass jar. Drain brine. Place the peppers in a blender with the garlic clove and the grapefruit pulp.
2. Blend until the peppers are pureed, but not until the seeds have disappeared if you have a high performance blender. You want to leave the seeds whole enough to strain out.
3. Once you have pureed your peppers, place the puree in a fine mesh strainer over a bowl and use a spatula or the back of a spoon to press the liquid in your puree into the bowl, leaving the seeds and skins of the peppers behind. (Hint: dehydrate the seeds and skins remaining in the oven at the lowest temperature you can or in a dehydrator to make pepper flakes to use in other recipes).
4. Place the onions, lime juice, apple cider vinegar, and 1/4 teaspoon of salt in a small sauce pan and cook over medium heat until the onions are soft. Once the onions are soft, place the contents of the sauce pan into the blender and blend until smooth.
5. Place the onion puree mixture back into a sauce pan, and add the strained pepper and grapefruit mixture and bring to a gentle boil for 2-3 minutes.
6. Remove the sauce from heat and let cool before placing it a container to store in the refrigerator. Use it on everything.

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This month, we were aiming to be inspired by what’s growing where we live. For Denise, this means what her garden is producing. For me, it means actually making time to go to the farmer’s market. I love the farmer’s market, but I’m rather lousy at managing to go shopping at a specific time every week. I’ve managed to make it about once a month so far this summer.

At the end of August, we have everything up here. The first thing that drew me in was basil, which I love, but most often ends up in pesto, which I don’t like much. Since we also have amazing stone fruits, I decided to pair basil with late summer plums and make a sauce. This sauce tastes like summer to me, and while it’s not a flavor that would pair with most vegetables perfectly, it seems to pair perfectly with pork and chicken, if you eat meat, and would likely be great on tofu and tempeh as well, if you eat soy products. It might also be good on sweet potatoes, but I haven’t tried it. I appreciate how fabulously easy it is to make dinner more interesting with a good sauce.

The sauce takes about 40 minutes to make, but most of that is just cooking over low heat. You’ll end up with something of a consistency of a thin ketchup, a fruity acidity and very lightly floral (basil) flavor.

For condiment month, I really wanted to make a barbecue sauce. I’ve tried a handful out here on the west coast, but nothing I’ve loved. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve had a favorite in years, except for the family secret sauce of my old neighbor. And since he isn’t giving it up, I was thinking maybe I don’t need one favorite. Maybe I need that six pack of possibilities you get at a BBQ restaurant. This is one of that six pack.

I’d set out to make a mustard-y sauce, though I ended up at a different destination. That’s how sauce works! I made a crock pot of caramelized onions (if you like onions and you’re not doing this, you really should!), and before I could freeze the extras, I realized that they would be an excellent base for a sauce. We used this on pulled pork (also done in the crockpot) and it was an excellent match. I think this sauce would also be good on chicken, though I haven’t yet tried it. I would personally want a more tomato-based and acidic sauce for beef.

Basically you puree this sauce and then thin it down to your desired consistency. My onions had only olive oil and salt in them. I did use prepared mustard and ketchup — Maille Dijon is my go-to mustard (mainly because I visited one of their stores in Paris in 2010, where they have mustard on tap and it was amazing. I find mine at most grocery stores, both here in Seattle and back in New Hampshire.) For ketchup, we just buy one of the organic lines that uses sugar rather than corn syrup. If corn is one of your allergens, likely you haven’t found safe ketchup or mustard, but you likely have learned to make them. As with all recipes, make sure your ingredients are safe-for-you.

The only other interesting ingredient in here is the michiu, a Chinese cooking wine that’s close to 20% alcohol, but more importantly, about 15% salt. You can replace this with any rice wine, or even a rice vinegar, but then taste it and add salt to your taste. This is the primary salt in of this sauce.

So, I’m still working on a corn-free, dairy-free, and coconut-free safe-for-me caramel that doesn’t have dates in it because (a) sourcing wheat-free dates can be hard, and (b) I freaking hate dates (I know, that’s weird). In the meantime, I’ve been making do with this Vanilla Pear Caramel Butter that I canned up in the fall. It’s amazingly amazing. However, for those of you who aren’t into canning, making 7 eight ounce jars of something that you need to store in your freezer may not be the way to go. So I’m cutting back the recipe for you, so that you can store it more easily, if you can keep from eating it that long. If I weren’t canning it, I’d freeze it up into some of those large silicone ice cube trays (no affiliation with Amazon) which hold about half a cup.  That way, once they’ve frozen, you can pop them out into a safe-for-you zip top freezer bag and you can grab a cube to defrost whenever you need it.

It’s unbelievable on chocolate cake, or any other dessert that just needs a bit of caramel sauce. I may or may not have just eaten a couple of spoonfuls when I needed a treat, since candy is nonexistent for me unless I make it. I suppose I could make some claim about it being “healthier” because it’s fruit, but it’s still got a fair bit of sugar in it, so that negates that idea. Also, it’s for dessert. Live a little.

Vanilla Pear Caramel Butter

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Great caramel sauce desserts

• CourseCondiments

Servings	Prep Time
1.5 pints	20 minutes

Cook Time	Passive Time
20 minutes	6-8 hours

Servings Prep Time 1.5 pints 20 minutes

Cook Time Passive Time 20 minutes 6-8 hours

Vanilla Pear Caramel Butter Print Recipe Great caramel sauce desserts CourseCondiments Servings Prep Time 1.5 pints 20 minutes Cook Time Passive Time 20 minutes 6-8 hours Servings Prep Time 1.5 pints 20 minutes Cook Time Passive Time 20 minutes 6-8 hours

Ingredients

• 3 1/2 pounds pears peeled, cored, and chopped
• 1/4 cup water
• zest of half a lemon
• juice of half a lemon
• 1 1/2 cups brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (I make my own with vanilla beans and vodka made from potatoes, as most commercial extract contains corn)
• crock pot

Servings: pints

Instructions

1. Place pears, water, lemon zest, and lemon juice in a nonreactive stock pot. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Once you’ve reached a boil, reduce the heat and and simmer gently, stirring occasionally, until the pears are soft (about 20 minutes).
2. Using an immersion blender, blend until you have a texture like apple sauce. Don’t complete liquefy the pears.
3. Place the pear mixture into a slow cooker. Add the brown sugar, and mix until the sugar is dissolved. Prop the lid of the slow cooker open with a wooden spoon, and let the mixture reduce on low. Depending on the size of the slow cooker this will go faster or slower, it make take as long as 8 hours. Check it every two hours to see how it’s doing and stir it. The finished pear butter will be thick and hold its shape on a spoon. Stir in vanilla extract.

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