Living off Homegrown Food (Making Hot Sauce)

It's getting close to our average first frost date and while I'm more than ready to slow down and settle into the kind of cozy projects that winter brings, I am starting to feel that little twinge of panic that I always feel this time of year. Did we can enough tomatoes? Will I regret not making more pickles? Do we have enough to comfortably get us through the winter? We only have a few more weeks of these summer vegetables surviving and so I'm always wondering, did we do enough to really prepare ourselves for when the gardens and the woods are frozen over and cold? Of course, we're lucky enough to be able to go to the grocery store if we're really in need of anything, but we try not to and it's a fun challenge to see if we can not only grow the number of calories that we need but also really enjoy ourselves over the winter when we're eating what we've grown, foraged, and hunted. And for me, that's where hot peppers come in. I've been a hothead for as long as I can remember eating raw habaneros to show off for friends and putting hot sauce on just about everything that I eat. I also just love growing hot peppers. I love the way the plants look and I love the stunning variety of different shapes, sizes, colors, and flavors that they come in. We grow most of our peppers in pots in our driveway so one of the added benefits of growing hot peppers is that they pack so much heat and flavor in a small package. We preserve our chilies in a number of ways and one of my favorites is chili paste. These long skinny beauties are a variety of Calabrian chili that we grow in my work and the seeds of which have been passed down from generation to generation in a family that immigrated from Italy in the 1950s. They are so rich in flavor and make an amazing paste when roasted and blended up with oil, salt, and garlic. Oh yeah. Another classic preservation technique we use for peppers is hot sauce. We make lots of different hot sauces, sometimes smoking them beforehand or fermenting them to add some probiotic funk. But today I wanted to keep it simple and make one using primarily one pepper, ajilimo. This is a Peruvian pepper that we grew for the first time this year. They are extremely prolific and they have a nice heat level and a fruity almost citrusy flavor that I think is going to pair well with fish or really anything. A quick note from today's video sponsor which is us. If you want to learn more about how to grow and forage your own food we actually have two comprehensive online courses that teach you just that. One is all about how to forage and preserve wild foods and the other is how to grow a great garden to eat from year round. We've worked on them over the past two years and they're full of all kinds of detailed information for how to live off the land even if like us you don't own a big farm. You can buy them both as a package deal so once you're done with this video check out the link in the description and we also have a discount code. capsaicin, is naturally antimicrobial and has preservative properties on its own. But we add to that in our hot sauce as well as adding to the flavor by putting in some of our homemade apple cider vinegar. Capsaicin is also being studied for its numerous health benefits like being anti-inflammatory and being full of antioxidants. I'm very happy to get these perks from hot peppers but we mostly enjoy them because they're simply delicious.