KATHLEEN, Ga. — Throughout February, we've featured restaurants serving up some of the hottest dishes in Central Georgia. Now, we're taking a different approach and showing you the process of actually making your own hot sauce.
Tyler Adsit is a business operations manager at Robins Air Force Base and he says there's always something he's "getting into."
A few years ago, he and his friends started experimenting with using his abundance of peppers to make salsa, hot sauce, or to add flavor to a meal.
He says making hot sauce was something "easy" since he already had a garden, peppers, and most of the equipment needed at home.
Not only is he a lover of spice himself, but he shares his sauce with his friends and family.
In the past two years, Adsit has branched out to different peppers like Carolina Reapers -- the world's hottest pepper.
They're so hot that to boil them to make hot sauce, you have to be outside, fully clothed and covered, and wearing a respirator. He says the vapor coming out of the packager made his skin hot for a few days.
He also grows jalapeños, habaneros, ghost peppers, cayenne, red, yellow, and green bell peppers, and smaller snacking peppers.
"I always enjoyed various types of hot sauce... seeing how hot they can be, or how flavorful they can be," he said. "I really enjoy making different flavors."
Last year's season left him with 80-90 pounds of peppers to freeze.
Adsit starts with seeds and follows the process all the way through to bottling and sealing the sauce to give away.
"I definitely have friends that are like 'that wasn't hot enough'... 'what can we do to make it hotter,'" he said. "I make and then I immediately give away, because I have no interest in eating something that hot."
Adsit wants to obtain a business license to sell at craft fairs. He got his ServSafe certification and once he gets is license and cottage food permit, he'll be ready to go!
MAKING YOUR OWN HOT SAUCE
Adsit begins with the seed. He grows on mats until the last frost, and then he plants in his garden around Easter. He says it takes around two to three months until fruit begins to show. Around October is when he sees the last of the peppers, up until the first frost.
Once he picks them, he brings them inside for a nice vinegar bath to clean them. When he makes the sauce, he wears gloves to cut them up. He adds ingredients like garlic, onion, vinegar, salt and pepper. He says most of the time he cooks with his "heart" instead of looking up a recipe, but he recommends using a recipe if it's your first go-round.
He then boils the ingredients in water for about 20 minutes. Depending on the batch size, this could be more or less. Once the water is strained out, he pours the mix into a blender. You can also use an immersion blender.
Once pulverized to the max, Adsit makes everything "counter safe," which means the sauce can be kept "out of refrigeration for a certain amount of time." Adsit uses pH strips to make sure all of his sauces can be kept out on the counter until opened. Then, he uses packaging equipment to get the sauce into sanitized bottles. After that, it's time to place the reducer, cap, seal, label and deliver!
MYTH
Some people are under the misconception that the seeds are what makes a pepper hot. We're here to tell you that's just not true. While the seeds may have some capsaicin, the chemical that makes peppers hot, on them -- they don't contain any inside of them. Capsaicin is actually in the whitish membrane pepper innards, which you can remove to make the pepper milder in most cases.
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