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Caribbean Heat Habanero Hot Sauce

Source of Recipe

From "Not Your Mama's Canning Book" by Rebecca Lindamood


Recipe Introduction

"This is a hot sauce for real chile-heads only! It is melt-your-face-off hot when fresh, but mellows to being merely incendiary when allowed to sit for at least a week before opening. Full of fresh habanero fruitiness with just a hint of curry, this is a bottled taste of the Caribbean islands. Use this remarkably well-rounded hot sauce straight out of the bottle as a condiment or as part of a marinade for island-inspired meat dishes. This is my guys' collective favorite recipe in the entire book. They eat it in such vast quantities that it's a darned good thing it's so easy to make."

List of Ingredients

â—¦ 3 cups chopped onion
â—¦ 1 cup finely chopped peeled carrot
â—¦ 3 cups cider vinegar
â—¦ 1 cup lime juice
â—¦ 4 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
â—¦ 20 dried or fresh habanero peppers, stems removed
â—¦ 2 teaspoons curry powder


Recipe

Add the onion, carrot, vinegar, lime juice, and garlic cloves to a saucepan over medium-high heat. If you are using dried habanero peppers, add them at this point too. Cover the pot most of the way, bring to a boil, drop the heat to low and simmer for 10 minutes or until the carrots and onions are quite soft. Add to a blender with the curry powder — and the fresh habanero peppers at this point, if using — and blend until totally smooth. Exercise a little caution when opening the lid of your blender or food processor. Hot pepper fumes can, well, help you clear out your sinuses and lungs forcefully. Just don't breathe deeply over the hot, puréed sauce.

Position a fine mesh sieve over a clean saucepan over medium-high heat. Pour the blended hot sauce through the sieve, using a flexible spatula to help work it through, if needed. Return the mixture to a boil. Ladle the hot sauce into clean, sterile half-pint jars leaving ½ inch of headspace. Moisten a paper towel with vinegar and use that to wipe the rims of the jars clean. Fix jar lids in place and tighten appropriately.

Use canning tongs to transfer the jars to a canner full of boiling water that covers the jars by 2 inches. Put the lid of the canner in place, return the water to a boil, and process for 10 minutes. Carefully transfer the jars to a towel-lined counter or wire cooling rack and allow them to cool completely, preferably overnight, before removing any rings, wiping the jars clean and labeling.

Makes about 4 ½ cups



• We like to decant the contents of our jar of hot sauce into an emptied, cleaned hot sauce bottle with a shaker lid. When we don't have one handy, we pour it into a squeeze bottle so that we can squeeze it all over everything.