Does anyone have a recipe for a Tabasco like sauce made from Habaneros?

My dad brought these purple kandari chillies from our village in Kerala, India, and I decided to turn them into a hot sauce.

I believe these are also known as purple bird's-eye chillies.

Recipe (This makes roughly 250–300 ml)

200 g Purple Kandari chillies, stems removed

50 g onion

15 g garlic (about 4 cloves)

100 ml white vinegar

30 ml lime juice

5 g salt

10 g sugar

50 ml water

Method:

I sautéed the chillies, onion and garlic in a little oil over medium heat for about 5 minutes until softened. Then I added the vinegar, lime juice, salt, sugar and water and simmered everything for about 10 minutes. Blended it until smooth, then simmered it for another 5 minutes. Adjusted the salt and vinegar to taste. It turned out pretty spicy, tangy and slightly sweet...

Has anyone else here made hot sauce with these chillies?

I have all these hot peppers from the garden and want to make hot sauce. I’m not sure what kind they are even though I grew them from seed I also didn’t purchase any hot pepper seeds on purpose 🤷‍♀️ 😂
Any recipe suggestions?

My personal (and very amateur) best so far, named so as it's very orange and pretty bitey! After making a lot of pasta alla vodka I wondered if cooking in some alcohol would make the fruity notes on the chillies pop, since they're both nightshades, and I'm pleased with the results. No fancy jars or methods, and this was using small and fairly ugly habs I grew last summer that have sat in the freezer since April. Still made my nail beds burns after prepping, and yes I wore gloves....

250g ripe apricots, pitted and chopped

250g orange/yellow habaneros, stemmed and seeded

2 tablespoons minced ginger

1 teaspoon minced garlic

1 c white sugar

1 c water

1.5 c white vinegar

1 teaspoon salt

1 eyeballed slosh of Fireball (I had homebrew on hand, did not go blind)

Chuck the apricots, chillies, ginger and garlic in a a blender/nutribullet with about half a cup of water and blitz the living daylights out of it.

Bring the water, vinegar, sugar and salt to a simmer until the sugar has dissolved.

Dump in the chilli mix and give it a rinse so no goodness is left behind. Great time for the extraction fan to be on here.

Stir and simmer gently for 5 minutes, then add the Fireball- I guess you could use any spirit, just though the cinnamon notes would go well with the apricots.

Simmer another 10 minutes, stirring every now and then, and make a slurry with 2 good teaspoons cornflour and 1/4 c water.

Stir in to thicken a little then off the heat, pour into sterilised jars - I just throw my jars and metal lids in the oven at 100° Celsius for 5 minutes.

Fruity as, sweet at the start, very sharp heat that sticks to the tongue but doesn't linger too much, and hits the ears pretty quickly. Go hard on it, up the Wahs.

Made a very small batch of hot sauce for my fantasy football league draft this coming weekend. All my other death spirals are still not even close to ripe but I picked this one off and made about 4oz of hot sauce. Used some shishitos for a somewhat neutral heat level to let the spiral heat come thru. Sauce is very tasty, not killer level heat. It’ll sit in the fridge for 4 days til I leave. Excited to let the rest of my plant get fully ripe for a larger batch

Death spiral ~4g
Shishito -35g
Pineapple -50g
Onion - 20g
Garlic - 2 cloves
Honey ~ 2-3 tbsp
Salt ~ 2g
Lime juice ~ one wedge
Vinegar 5% - 70g plus a few splashes during blend

Quick roast on the griddle top til charred, 8 min simmer in pot with vinegar, blend, add honey + lime juice, blend more. Strain and enjoy 🤙🏻

Also have the leftover pulp dehydrating outside to make a spice rub. Gonna go for at least 8hrs at 145°F. Probably will stir it up halfway or so.

Apparently, having a child means giving up all your hobbies and free time. Who knew. 😂

Luckily, the little one is becoming slightly more independent, so I’m slowly picking things up again.

Back to making hot sauce. 🌶️

Just need to remember that habanero fingers and babies are not a great combination.

Fermenting

- Mango

- habanero

- Bell pepper

- onion (roasted)

- garlic

After fermenting i'm going to add some nice bourbon, honey, lime and liquid smoke!

This is my first time fermenting peppers. One jar is straight cayenne. The other is 80% jalapeños and 20% Anaheim. There is nothing else besides the peppers in the jars.

My question is, what should I do next? I want to add some flavors like garlic and vinegar. Should I cook the sauces? Go straight up? I’m new to this so just looking for whatever advice I can get.

Usually, after I make my hot sauce (non-fermented), I wait 2-3 days before using it. I don't know if my taste buds detect something, but my homemade hot sauce tastes better after waiting for a few days.

About 5 lbs of peppers, 12 plums, 15 figs, 2 heads of garlic, apple cider vinegar

Stumbled across some Jamaican hot peppers, a variety/strain I had never seen or heard of. So I decided to give them a try. Heat is on par with a habanero sauce. This was modified from Chili Pepper Madness (see the last image for what I actually used).

I know there are a ton of historical posts like this. But please, indulge me with what you have. I like it spicy and don't mind hurting myself.

Habanero, garlic, salt, and vinegar. Simmered, blended, then put through a mesh strainer to get the pulp out. I've been craving a good habanero hot sauce for a while, and I was shocked at how good this tasted. I can't wait to experiment and make more in the future.

My newest sauce i made with 4 Jay's Peach Scorpion peppers, 6 sweet bell peppers, 8 peaches, 1 garlic, 1/2 teaspoon turmeric, 3/4 cup brown sugar with some honey.

My fridge is basically becoming a collection of half-used sauce bottles. One for wings, one for fries, another for burgers… and somehow I keep buying more.

I just want one bottle I can grab without thinking too much about which sauce goes with what.

Lately I’ve been wondering if that’s even possible, or if every food really does need its own sauce.

I recently tried SOSS Bros, and it honestly made me wonder if having one go-to sauce for different foods is actually possible.

What’s your go-to sauce that you actually use on different foods?

I have some vibrant hot lemon peppers that are starting to ripen. I plan to ferment them into a yellow hot sauce. To play up the yellow color, I’m considering adding a pinch of saffron, but I don’t want the flavor of the saffron to be lost. Has anyone tried adding saffron to a hot sauce? What other flavors would you recommend with a hot lemon hot sauce?

A big thank you for people who helped me brainstorm this morning. My first batch is started. I did two jars, one with more tomatoes, habanero and onion. I do very small batches so that I can make tons of variations. Recipe from my notes below.

Italian style: red lid (8/23/26)
1/2 carrot
1/4 small onion
1/4 red pepper
3 orange habaneros
1 clove garlic
1 plumb tomato
6-7 basil leaves

Italian style: teal lid (8/23/26)
1/2 carrot
1/2 small onion
1/4 red bell
4 habanero
2 smaller plumb tomatoes (these were riper than the above batch)
7 basil leaves
Smaller clove of garlic

I use small 16oz jars so that I can experiment with around 5 variants per year. (Cherries, peaches, varying pepper and garlic etc…) I’m looking for a fresh perspective or to change my flavor profile completely.

Standard recipe per sub rules:
3-5 habaneros
6 baby carrots
1/4 sweet onion
1 clove garlic
1/2 mango
1/4 red bell
2 week brine ferment, boil, blend solids. Add 2 tbl white vinegar and 6 tbl brine

This is a sauce that is mild enough to be slathered. If I go up to 5 habaneros it has enough kick to make you think about how much you use.

This year I want to play with adding mango at the end of the fermentation because the ferment kills the sweetness. I’m very worried that it won’t keep for a year if there is unfermented sugar.

I am asking for anyone who makes sauce to either advise on what I can tweak or give me a completely different approach. I’m in a rut where I do the same thing every year so I’d love to shake things up. Must be habanero based because that’s what I grew.

Hey [r/hotsauce](r/hotsauce)! 🌶️
I got this free app for sauce enthusiasts and thought it’d be worth sharing here for anyone interested in joining the beta test!
It’s built to help you save, tweak, and organize your custom hot sauce recipes all in one place. Track batches, share recipes, and much more. One of the coolest parts is an AI tool where you just type in whatever random peppers or ingredients you happen to have lying around, and it instantly drafts up a full recipe for you.
It’s completely free to use with zero data tracking, and the developer is looking for honest feedback from passionate sauce makers to help make it better.
I’ve attached a few screenshots. If you make your own sauce and want to give it a try, drop a comment or send me a DM! What features would you love to see in a hot sauce recipe app?

(excuse the leftover olive and caper jars!)

Knocked this up today. Lots of random chillies, scotch bonnets, Thai red chillies and bullet chillies, a whole pineapple, the juice of one lime, a cup of apple cider vinegar, a good squeeze of honey, salt, a shallot and 4 garlic cloves. I also used a tablespoon of turmeric and ginger powders. Again these got a bit lost, maybe more was needed or it was a case of too many flavours fighting for competition.

This week I'm thinking of doing a non fruity hot sauce, one that really is all purpose, any suggestions for a 'secret' ingredient to make it fun?

I had an idea to use chopped dates which I thought once stewed and softened and the sauce is blended would give it a caramel undertone but after a quick taste they haven't really added anything.

Still, it tastes very lovely and would be a super addition to bbq'd chicken, burgers, a dip for pizza and in a halloumi wrap!