| What actually is Hot Sauce made out of?
Hot Sauce is a combination usually of chunks of simmered peppers till they are soft in vinegar and a little salt. You can use any type of peppers that you want, your sauce will be colored by they color of your pepper. Recipe to make your own Hot Sauce from scratch.
Examples
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The Habanero Pepper is very hot and would give an orange color |
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The Tobasco pepper
is what the Tobasco company uses in their sauce.
This will give a reddish color sauce. |
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A green pepper will give you a green colored sauce. It will be a milder hot sauce. |
When did man start using Hot Sauce?
Hot sauce is about as old as we can find traces of civilization. clues of Hot Sauce containers and the use of it , have been dug up in archeological digs, and when dredging up sunken ships.
The Aztecs living where Southern Mexico is now used chili's as far back as 7000 BC. They began cultivating them probably before 3500 B.C. They were used for flavor but also for medicinal purposes.
Drawing from the Codex Mendoza depicting aspects of Aztec life.
A child is being punished by being held over the smoke of burning chili peppers.
Columbus most likely brought the peppers to Europe and India where they became popular in any culture that enjoyed spicy cuisine. Evidence of hot sauces have been found in all kinds of ancient ruins, and ships, showing that it has been important in making food more palatable as well as being medicinal , aiding in digestion and is great for the liver. It is also believed that it releases endorphins with that surge of HOT when you eat chilies.
More Recent Finds
This is an old hot sauce bottle that was found in an old mining town near Virginia City , Nevada.
It was an old cologne bottle that Mcilhenny used when they first started bottling hot sauce.
To read more of this find go here. |
Here are some of the recycled cologne bottles used by Mcilhennys for bottling their hot sauce. |
Hot sauce is such a huge subject that I will take just one story,
that brings out a lot of facts.
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One of the oldest hot sauces in the country is Tobasco Most everyone has heard of this famous brand.
Edmund Mcilhenney the founder of the Tobasco sauce was an avid gardener and got some pepper seeds that were from Mexico or Central America and planted them on Avery Island that is near New Orleans.
picture courtesy of the Tobasco web page |
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He loved these pepper plants and the flavor of them so he decided to make a pepper sauce, and market it. Tobasco is a region in Mexico and also the name of a pepper. Edmund trademarked the name.
The peppers are to this day grown on Avery Island, where Edmund started his farm.
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Avery Island is located 140 miles west of New Orleans.
it is surrounded by marshes and swamps that make it unique for growing peppers.
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Tobasco Peppers growing on Avery Island.
The notorious pirate Jean Lafitte and his crew would have liked Avery Island. They would have thought of it as a real paradise for men on the run in the early 1800s.
After pirating the treasure-laden vessels that plied the otherwise friendly waters of the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast, they could have slipped ashore to this semi-tropical wilderness of dense woodland and grassy marshes. And nobody, but nobody, would have ever found them. From Diane M Moore |
The peppers are mashed and put into oak barrels, then topped with salt to sit in a
cold warehouse for 3 years before it is sold |
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