Hot Chilli Sauce Home Made

Hello, chefs! 😋

I think it's high time, now, before Christmas, to publish what I cooked about a month ago.
I usually do this once a year, in late autumn, when I pick the chilies and make my homemade hot sauce. I use most of it myself 😁, but some I give away as gifts.
Well, below is a draft of the label I'm going to put on the bottles.

By the way, last year I also made a hot sauce with my chilies and described it here, if anyone is interested.

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So, first of all, I weighed the bag of picked chilies to see roughly how many there would be. And, as you can see from the picture below, I harvested almost one and a half kilograms of chilies, 1.422 kg to be precise.

I had three sorts of chilli, two similar, Scorpion Rosso and Scorpion Giallo. Both are originated Trinidad Moruga scorpion, due to Wikipedia exceptionally hot, with 1,200,000 average SHU (Scoville Scale).

And I had another from my own seed from last year, Rocoto (Capsicum pubescens), which is significantly less hot, max 250,000 SHU.

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First, the seeds had to be cleaned, cut into smaller pieces, and rinsed under water. I did this with gloves because everything was already burning.
I was working in the kitchen, and my wife went completely mad because there was a strong smell of these chilies in the kitchen and living room and her throat started to scratch. She is more sensitive than I am.

I just had a little burning around my mouth... I will know another time.

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I decided to bake them in the oven first and I added more vegetables, as in the picture below.
Of course, this is all by feel, I didn't weigh anything, and for a change from last year, I added sundried tomatoes in oil, because, for me at least, they have such a distinct, Mediterranean flavor, like a mix of Western and Eastern spices.

two tomatoes
200 grams of dried tomatoes
a clove of garlic,
one white onion,
one lemon
one carrot
a bunch of parsley

All cut and ready, oven preheated to 200 degrees.

I covered it with aluminum foil for the first half hour and took it off for the next half hour.

Maybe I could have baked it more, but I didn't want it to be too burnt, because then the burnt taste in the sauce is very pronounced. (Well, when I tried it later, it was so hot that if it had been more burnt, I wouldn't have even felt it).😅

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And now the next phase :)
Cooking. I added two decilitres of homemade apple cider vinegar and one and a half liters of water. This was boiled on low heat for another half an hour to evaporate some of the water.

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In the meantime I prepared the bottles, two decilitres each, two were a bit bigger, washed them in hot water,

and disinfected the stoppers with alcohol.
I could also heat them in the oven to 100 degrees, but since I'll be pouring hot liquid it's not necessary.

The liquid is ready for mixing. I'm going to use a hand blender to blend everything into a sort of sauce.

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Now I have to strain it all out.

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And poured into bottles.

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Now heat to 100 degrees for about 10 minutes.

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I got somewhere around 3 litres of sauce. I think I have enough for the next year or more. I will also give some as presents now for the holidays.

I didn't add any flavourings or flavour enhancers or thickeners like they usually add to chilli sauces. So it needs to be shaken before use.

I have to admit that it's much stronger than the one last year. Fruity aroma.
If I had added more sundried tomatoes it would have had a dried fruit aroma. But it's so strong that this aroma is in the background. Very, very hot. Just a drop or two in the dish is noticeable. You have to be careful about adding it to dishes. :)
Some friends of mine also make chilli sauces, so we'll compare :) 🌶️

Finally, a sticker, just a draft for now, but it will go on each one as a gift.