Jalapeno Hot Sauce – v2 – August 2010

This year I went with a theme for making jalapeno hot sauce of “go big, or go home”, which I think that I more than accomplished.
When I was in Michigan two weekends ago, I had a little bit of free time on Saturday morning before I needed to go to a wedding in Northern Michigan. So I thought that I was swing by the Pontiac Farmers Market with my sister to see if they had any deals on peppers (jalapeno specifically) like they did last year. And once again I wasn’t disappointed. After a quick walk around to gauge the prices for a pint container of jalapenos (they ranged from $0.25 each to $2.00 a pint.) I finally found a vendor at the edge of the open air section of the market that was selling jalapeno’s for $1 per pint. I also noticed that the vendor had about 1/2 a peck’s worth of jalapeno’s in the back, which was in addition to the 3 pints on display. So I inquired how much they wanted for all the jalapeno’s they had, they quoted me $5.00, and I told them “sold”. So for $5.00 I ended up getting about 3.5 lbs of jalapeno’s, which is about $1.43lb, so not too bad price wise. Combine that with the 2.5lbs of El Jefe jalapenos that I picked from my garden, and we are talking about a lot of jalapeno’s.

With all the jalapenos on hand, it was now time to scale up the recipe by about nine times compared to v1 that I made last year.

Ingredients:

  • Jalapenos, stems trimmed and cut into rings (pre-trim weight 6 lbs 0.4 oz, final trim weight 5 lbs 6.1 oz)
  • 1/2 cups + 1 TB Lemon Juice
  • 5 yellow onions, diced (pre-trim weight 2 lbs 3.8 oz, final trim weight 1 lb 13.8 oz)
  • 15 cups White Vinegar
  • 3 cups Water
  • 1/4 cup Pickling Salt
  • 6 TB White Sugar
  • 10 cloves of garlic (trimmed weight 1.4 oz or 38 grams)

Final yield:
5 quarts – filtered hot sauce
1 quart – un-filtered hot sauce
1 pint – all the pulp from the filtered sauce and a little bit of un-filtered hot sauce to top off the jar

Side Notes:
1) I cooked this batch for about 45 mins, instead of the 30 mins listed in the V1 recipe. When I was mixing the hot sauce while it was cooking, it just looked like it need the extra cooking time.
2) Once again I really won’t know how this stuff tastes for at least a month, just so that the vinegar has the necessary time to mellow out. But just giving it a quick taste in the cooking pot, it seemed pretty good.
3) I kind of made a mistake in calculating the scale up factor, since I scaled up the recipe using the pre-trim weight on the jalapenos (9 times the base recipe, when it should have been scaled up 8 times for the jalapeno trimmed weight.) So in essence, there is an extra unit of brine/liquid compared to the amount of jalapenos in the recipe. I didn’t realize this error until after everything was completed, so it was too late to make a correction. So if the aged product comes out runny, or it comes out awesome, this is the reason why.

Links:
Jalapeno Hot Sauce V1
Jalapeno Pickling recipe

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