Jananas

Over the weekend we made our first trip out to the T&T Supermarket on Cherry St. We had a blast looking at packaging and new foods. I ended up picking up a box of mangoes (something like 14 of them!) and some scotch bonnet peppers. I’d decided to make hot sauce.

I sort of winged the ingredient list/recipe, after having read a bunch of hot sauce recipes online. They were all pretty similar. So I just adjusted based on what I had.

Ingredient list:

• 14 mangos
• 3 bell peppers (red, orange, yellow)
• 14 scotch bonnet peppers
• 5 habaneros
• 2 onions
• lots of garlic (i went with pre-peeled because cutting the hot peppers and mangoes already took a whole whack of time)
• about 1-1.5cups of apple cider vinegar

First up I cut all the hot peppers. I wore nitrile gloves so that I didn’t get super spicy stuff in my eyes or on my skin. I also wore these when doing the washing up, transferring the hot sauce to jars, etc. Better safe than sorry. The fun part of cutting was the eye watering and coughing that accompanied it.

The peppers, onions, garlic, and vinegar all went on the stove to start cooking up while I chopped mangoes.

I know how to cut mangoes up properly. However, there’s a difference between cutting for eating and cutting 14 of them to cook with. I ended up peeling them as you see above, then cutting the meat off of either side of the seed. I put the seeds in the blue bowl. Once I was finished with the main part of the prep, I squished the last of the flesh off of the seeds. Probably not the best solution, but it worked for me and got the job done.

After this, I added the mango to the hot pepper mixture on the stove and let it simmer away until everything was soft and the flavors had had time to mingle. Then we blended it to get a nice smooth hot sauce. We had so much that we had to blend in three separate batches! Then it was time to transfer it to jars. We keep all our glass jars and reuse them, so it was a motley batch. But it works!

Normally, I would have heat sealed canned goods in a hot water bath. But hot sauce is normally kept in the fridge, plus most of the jars are already spoken for/will be gifted to friends.

I took a jar into work. It received rave reviews on taste and an omg that’s hot. I consider that a job well done.