Hot Pepper Sauce

Hot Pepper sauce is produced from the Chile pepper which was introduced to Europe by Christopher Columbus and subsequently to Africa and to Asia. On his first voyage, he discovered a plant which rivaled the traditional black pepper from India. Furthermore, the pods of this fruit were colorful and different varieties produced different flavors.
Chile spread like a virus from Europe to India to Asia. It was an instant hit and was quickly incorporated into the recipes of those continents and eventually, the whole world.  Unlike many of the products that were available from the ‘New World’, peppers were easy to produce and were available in large enough quantities to make them affordable to the rich and poor alike.
The ancient ancestors of Central and South America used chile in their diets from the beginning of civilizationin the Western Hemisphere making them one of the oldest cultivated crops in the Americas.
It was they who took the wild plants and cultivated them and by using ‘modern techniques’ of selection produce domesticated varieties of chile.
Today we can find several varieties of peppers in the marketplace, ranging of course from the Pimento Pepper which smells like a normal pepper but is not hot at all, to the habanero  which has a Scoville  heat level of over 350,000. That’s really hot.
Hot Pepper Sauce comes in different flavors and can be as simple as a chile pepper soaked in salt and vinegar to a product with several ingredients designed to  prolong its shelf life, make it look attractive, to enhance the heat level or to accentuate the flavor of the chile peppers. It is made in homes and in factories and has totally different effects on different people. test edit
Many people get distressed at what we consider to be a very mild pepper sauce as in the Native Treasures  ‘Old Fashion’ and ‘Blazing Inferno products’.

Pepper sauce is easily the product with the highest variety of names in the world as manufacturers do their utmost to make their products stand out or appeal to various niches in the very competitive markets of the world.

How do you Spell Pepper?
“Chile” is a variation of “chil” derived from the Aztec dialect and refers to plants now known as Capsicum. Plants of this type are called by several names, depending on the location – Pepper, chili, chile, chilli, aji, paprika all refer to the same thing.

Peppers – Just how hot are they?
Everyone knows that Peppers are hot and depending on where you lived, you may have thought that the smaller the pepper the hotter or quite the opposite. What was needed was a scientific way to determine how hot a pepper actually was.

In 1912 a man by the name of Wilbur Scoville developed a test to measure the heat level of peppers .  A group of testers were engaged to test a mixture of sugar water and pure ground chillies. The solution was diluted by the addition of more of the sugar mixture until the “hotness” was no longer detected.
In practice this meant that if your chile was rated at 3000 Scoville units you would have to combine it with 3000 tablespoons of sugar water to dilute the concoction to where you no longer feel the heat!
As time progressed more scientific and less judgmental methods of testing the heat level of peppers have been developed and High-Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) is now used to determine the hotness of peppers and hot pepper sauces.

As the table below shows, some varieties of peppers have no heat at all.

Growing your own pepper plants

Growing your own pepper plants is relatively easy to do. When you are done, you will have the satisfaction of enjoying your beautiful peppers either in your food or on display in a pickle jar.

Temperature
Pepper seeds germinate at soil temperatures between 75 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
Daytime temperature of 80 degrees is preferred by most varieties.
Too high a temperature during blossoming will result in less peppers as the blossoms
will fall off.

Water
Not too much or too little. Soggy soil or too little water can cause the plants to die or to produce reduced yields.

Best location
A place that gets full sunlight and is well drained.

Picking time
The riper the hotter

In summary, you should plant your peppers in a well drained area that gets full sunlight. Depending on where you live, you may have to hatch the plants indoors and gradually introduce them to the outdoor environment.

Peppers cross pollinate very easily, so don’t plant hot and mild varieties too closely together or you will be disappointed.

Watch out for insect pests and treat accordingly.

When it’s time to pick, you can chose to pick the peppers green and let them ripen indoors to get the mild, tasteful flavor or you may choose to wait until they ripen on the plant when they are at their hottest.

Other uses for Peppers

I suppose that the first use that comes to mind is Pepper Spray. This uses the Capsaicin, which is the heat producing equipment in peppers to produce a vicious spray that will stop the meanest attacker.
It is very potent and can even cause death under certain circumstances.
Peppers are also associated with many treatments for various ailments, insect and rodent repellants and has even been credited with weight loss.
In one country it is used as a snake repellent by tossing a few peppers in the campfires. Apparently the snakes’ sensitive tongues which they use to smell, are irritated by the pepper fumes and they steer clear of the area.

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