This is a bit of a weird post.

I’ve developed a little addiction to making my own hot sauce in the last couple of weeks.

Cue the obvious music reference…

I do love hot sauce. And have been partial to splashing Frank’s hot sauce on mash potatoes or even bread crumb covered fish.

Plus I’d made my own chilli oil that I use to spice up a korma or add a warmth to scramble eggs.

So when I found out how easy it is to make my own hot sauce I had to try.

On one of my rare forays into the outside world I found that my local Asda had a better selection of chillies than Morrison’s. So four packs of scotch bonnets ended up in my shopping basket.

After making my first hot sauce with them (link to recipe used below) I was sold.

I currently have four different hot sauces made up.

The recipe I’ve been using as my base recipe to play with is this one.

It’s a slight variant from what I can tell is a Louisiana style hot sauce. Take away the garlic and it is one!

But each hot sauce I’ve made so far has seen me playing with the recipe. Either using a different vinegar, adding garlic and onion, just using garlic and different chillies.

I decided (and this is the loose link to tie this post in with this blog) to be inspired by D&D to name my hot sauces.

So I came up with a naming convention.

If I use a chilli that falls in the top third of the scoville chart then the hot sauce will be named after a dragon in D&D.

If the chilli used falls in the middle third of the scoville chart then the hot sauce will be named after a spell in D&D.

That leaves the bottom third of the scoville chart and the influences for those names will be monsters that have a challenge rating of one or less.

The annotated chart above shows the chilli used, where it is on the scoville chart and the name I gave the hot sauce.

My Magic Missile hot sauce (not shown) only used four scotch bonnet chillies (I had a spare pack left to use up). Made with a cider vinegar, and an apple,maple and spiced fruit juice along with garlic and onion, and salt. I liked the end result.

My next hot sauce will be using Carolina Reapers. Which at one point was the hottest chilli in the world. It still clocks in at around the 2 million scovilles mark. So it’s going to be pretty spicy! I have a name already for this new hot sauce Tiamat.

That will keep me going for a while in hot sauce. But I have plans!

I’ve got seeds for the reaper, scotch bonnet, Trinidad scorpion and one called the Armageddon chilli. So during January I’ll be planting the seeds, and hoping to have a good crop of each to use next year.

Here’s another handy site to look at as well.