Canning your own hot sauce

It's now quite common to see those jars with-the-green-lid, Chili-Garlic "sauce" for sale in most supermarkets...and they're usually found in the aisle where Asian Food products/sauces/condiments are displayed. This Viet Nam style chili-garlic puree has a rooster imprinted on the bottle and it's made by Huy Fong Foods, Inc. It's always near the Sriracha Sauce that made by the same company. Personally, I like the chili-garlic sauce, better, but use both, way too much.

Good stuff...... but a little too hot for me when I overuse it. I no longer have the cast-iron stomach that I had when I was a kid, so, I dilute the heat by adding flame-roasted red bell peppers. Here's how: I flame roast 2-3 red bell-peppers, then peel off the charred skins and coarse grind up the peppers in a food processor. I add the ground peppers to a frying pan that has some coarsely chopped garlic -that's been fried to a light golden-brown in some olive oil. Add the red peppers to the pan, and cook until the ground up red peppers loose most of their liquid. Cool off, and then add the sweet red pepper paste to the jar of the chili-garlic sauce and mix well. You'll probably have to use a bigger jar because the volume of "chili sauce" will be about doubled.

I find that adding the red bell peppers spreads/dilutes the heat of the original sauce, and I could then eat more without suffering the predictable incendiary aftermath. The addition of the red bell peppers and some olive oil changes the intensity of the heat more that the flavor of the original. The added preservatives in the commercially prepared sauce keep everything nice and fresh when the total concoction is stored in a cold refrig.

When I was a young teen, I worked in an Italian Deli. For lunch, I'd split open a loaf of crispy-crusty Italian bread and dump a whole jar of cherry peppers on it -along with some sliced cheese, ham and salami. That sandwich would be gone within my allotted ten-minute "lunch break". I suffered no subsequent problems. If I did that today...I'd be in traction for 6 months!