What's your favorite hot sauce? [And hot saucing]

I really don't have a strong opinion one way or the other about physical punishments, and have found that people who do often don't have kids. There's nothing that works for everyone.

As far as hot sauce: I went through pretty much every novelty hot sauce at one time or another in New Orleans, and my top choices -- depending on what I want and what I'm using it for -- came down to Louisiana, Tabasco (especially the Chipotle), sriracha, Pickapeppa, and Crystal.

My favorite treatment for the unruly: Wrap them up tight in a big bathtowel and flick water in their faces. Stuns 'em like you wouldn't believe. Works best with a full-blown temper tantrum. My daughter still remembers (with a smile) the one time it happened to her (she's 23).

I vote for sriracha. I also like Indian hot lime pickle, though it's too chunky to be a sauce, more like a relish.

http://www.davesgourmet.com/insauces.html (notice the danger warning on the website!)

Normal everyday eating around here is Sadie's hot salsa.

http://www.salsasetc.com/catalog/s-504.html

sriracha is good on almost everything

and Melinda's habanero has some nice flavor without habanero death

OK, so I made a fermented sauce with is year's chilli yield.

Here's the harvest; about 3/4 of a kilo. Lots of varieties including Peruvian lemon drop, habanero golden sun, superchili, Krakatoa, prairie fire, Zimbabwe black and Jamaican red.

https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5606/15616657940_c014750fc7_z.jpg

So it gets chopped up along with some onion, garlic, mustard seeds, caraway seeds and black onion seeds.

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7519/15803064712_cce09f4ed8_z.jpg

Then I added some salt and a bottle of sweet wine. Then waited, and waited...

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7510/15801488895_02c0cae376_z.jpg

oh man, this is awesome.

After a week or so you start to get bubbles forming around he peppers. This is of course good, as it means the fermentation has started. It also becomes bd, because the fermentation starts to produce bits of decay and the top gets covered daily in a light white mould. Advice varies between skim it off and stir it in - I did somewhere inbetween and lifted the worst off then made sure what was left wasn't lying on the top. Pretty sure your commercial suppliers like Tabasco just stir it on it there and rely on the straining to take it out.

Anyway, after a while you begin to see signs of progress in the liquid and it takes on some kind of colour and cloudiness.

https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5606/15799575971_71fd9b8bb7_z.jpg

Advice seems to be 4-6 weeks ferment. I was checking the condition of the chillies and by the end of week 4 they were pretty much liquidised; you could squeeze them to nothing between your fingers. The onion and garlic were still pretty solid. There were still some indications of fermentation going on but the final addition of vinegar (I used cider and white wine vinegars, mainly because I'd underestimated how much liquid I was going to get and everybody agrees on 50% by final volume) stops that so...

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7498/15799563131_824283796c_z.jpg

Again, there was conflicting advice. Some have used food mills, I used a stick blender then passed through a cheesecloth. Which left me with this:

https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8254/15616591780_3da8f2e0fa_z.jpg

In total, 3 1/2 litres of sauce and three jam jars of pulp residue, which I've mixed with olive oil. The sauce does settle out quite quickly, so needs tipping up before use, but it's quite a Louisiana/SC vinegary product with all the heat right at the end. Which there's a big old chunk of. I. Really quite happy with the results I think although between how much of this I made, the dozen jars of chilli jam and the Tupperware of end of season peppers I'm still both working through and still adding to slightly makes me think I had maybe a couple too many plants.

looks great - think I love the colours more than anything

you're the sauce boss! <3