I’ve been a big fan of hot sauce for many years, although it has always been an on-and-off battle with my stomach.
Usually, I get carried away. Every meal becomes a little spicier until, eventually, my stomach demands a break.
Around ten years ago, I started making hot sauces myself. What I could find in supermarkets or small boutique shops just wasn’t doing it for me. The supermarket sauces were often highly processed and added a strange taste to the food. Then there were the homemade craft sauces with the funny, colourful labels—the ones everybody knows.
Those sauces often seemed to have just one purpose: to be extremely hot and burn your mouth.
That makes them a little useless in my eyes. I can handle plenty of heat, but I don’t need to test my strength with every bite I take. Everybody knows those bottles: you buy one, use it a couple of times, and then it stays in the fridge forever. Eventually, it only comes out again as a party gag.
So I started making my own hot sauces.
At the time, I had a Turkish supermarket around the corner with a huge variety of chillies. My first sauces were very simple. I cooked green chillies with a few spices and blended everything into a thick paste. It tasted incredibly fresh, and I was inhaling the stuff. Suddenly, every meal got a spicy upgrade.
I started cooking a new batch every week. Luckily for me, my stomach didn’t complain anymore.
I had found a way to make hot sauce that wasn’t only about heat. It tasted fresh, worked with food and was something I actually wanted to eat every day.
I’ve continued making my own sauces ever since.
And after that, I never bought another bottle of hot sauce.