Sauce No. 1 - Name to come...

(note: hot sauces should usually have funny, flirty, tongue-in-cheek names. But I’m actually kind of terrible at coming up with those... so if anybody has a fun idea for a name for this sauce, drop it in the comments!)

My absolute favorite hot sauce of all time is called “Miss Anna’s.” It comes from St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands, and the story goes is that it’s been the same recipe for more than a century, with Anna‘s grandfather making it in giant batches.

At some point, a hurricane raged across the Virgin Islands, and knocked the little island of St. Croix out pretty good. Not want to be kicked off her feet, the titular miss Anna decided to double down. She took her family’s famous hot sauce, and decided to go big time, manufacturing it in bulk, selling it all over the island, and ultimately, overseas.

To the best of my knowledge, her sauce has gone on to gather a bit of a cult status. It’s the kind of stuff that tastes great on top of that crabcake, on top of jerk chicken, as part of a chicken wing mix, throw it on a burrito, pizza, in a pot of soup… You can pretty much put the stuff on everything.

So, going off of nothing more than my recollections of the flavor, and a little bit of gut instinct, I read the ingredients online, and figured out how I could get as close as possible. And I got to say, in this case? I got about 90 to 95% of the way there, so I’m pretty happy!

When I got my shipment of habaneros, I decided to ferment half right off the bat. More on that to come. The other half? I didn’t. I was debating whether or not to use fermented peppers in the sauce, but then I realized something… Fermentation was invented by a bunch of people who couldn’t grow food eight months out of the year. Go down to the Caribbean? Food is growing out of the ground all the time. There’s no reason to ferment peppers to make this hot sauce. You know that Miss Anna didn’t have time for that shit! She just hacked up the peppers, threw them into a blender, put it on the stove, and called it a day.

If you’re familiar with habanero peppers, you know that they have a natural smoky-yet-floral kind of flavor that, even for some people who don’t like spicy, is worth enduring the pain. Turns out, this profile goes really well with mustard and curry, which are two of the big ingredients that make this sauce what it is.

Here’s the recipe:

• 125 g habanero peppers, after you’ve cut out the caps and pulled out the seed pods (save those for later).
• 125 g yellow onion
• 50 g fresh garlic
• 200 mL vinegar (i prefer white wine, but distilled white is ok too)
• 125 mL water
• 12 g salt
• 3 g curry powder
• 10 g Dijon mustard

Throw everything into a blender, and let it go till it’s as liquidy as it’s going to get. Put it in a sauce pan, and bring it to a low boil for 20 minutes.

Then you’re good! I’m no scientist (insert “preserve and eat at your own risk disclaimer” here), but 20 minutes should kill all the nasty stuff, and the pH balance should be low enough (<4.0 for home-made) so botulism can’t occur, so make sure you follow proper bottling techniques, and it should be able to stay on the shelf for a year!