A couple weeks ago I made a good batch of pepper sauce, which we’re still working on consuming. That batch was made out from peppers we found in the reduced-price produce aisle at the grocery store. They’re tasty, but not my absolute favorite flavor.
I think Justin would agree that our favorite flavor is cayenne. It’s spicy, but not too spicy. It’s flavorful, but not overpowering.
In the summer, we grow cayenne specifically for sauce. In the fall, we collect the most ripe peppers, pot up the plants and bring them home for “overwintering.” This fall was pretty warm, so we had a good bunch of peppers that had grown, but not ripened on the plant.
I keep the overwintering plants all over the apartment, not too terribly close together because of aphid infestations. Peppers are notorious aphid carriers, and aphids love to jump around from plant to plant. For some reason, though, the aphids don’t seem to bother any of my plants other than peppers. This year, as an experiment (and as for lack of space) I placed six pepper plants in different parts of the apartment. Three are in north-facing windows (two next to each other, another a bit further back); one in an east-facing window and two in a south-facing window. The only plants that have had aphids so far are the south-facing plants.
Anyway, I digress. The whole point of this post is to talk about harvesting peppers in mid-January in NEW ENGLAND, yo’s. I finally had enough red peppers to make a small batch of beautiful cayenne pepper sauce.
I don’t know what it’s called when you add water to a sauté; maybe it’s still called a sauté. Whatever it’s called, I did that with
6 good-sized red-to-green cayenne peppers,
half a small onion
one enormous clove of garlic plus one regular sized clove, left whole
1/2 tsp kosher salt
until everything is soft, maybe about 10 minutes? Then I blended it in the food processor and added:
1/4 cup organic apple cider vinegar
and poured the mixture back into the pot. Because ACV can be kind of a strong taste, I “rinsed” the food processor bowl with:
a couple tablespoons of distilled white vinegar
and set the mixture to boil for a minute or two. Because not all of the peppers were bright red, my sauce was kind of light, on the more orange side than red. People that know me know how important aesthetics are to me, so I added
1.5 tsp ground paprika
to the mix and then tasted it. Then I had Justin taste it. We agreed it was tasty, so we bottled it up and let it cool.
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