How to Avoid Killing Your Friends with DIY Hot Sauce
In almost every hot sauce class I teach, someone raises their hand and timidly asks, “but what about botulism?” or, “how do I make my hot sauce safe?” or, “do I have to refrigerate it?”
And almost every time I reassure them that it’s pretty hard to kill people with hot sauce if you follow our recipes, unless you put arsenic in it. That said, basic food safety is a must when cooking.
Here are some tips to help you safely make hot sauce at home. Best of all, you only need a few tools. These are tips for making hot sauce at home for personal consumption, not producing it commercially. If you want to start a hot sauce company, that’s a much bigger feat and I will happily share all the nitty-gritty.
But for anyone making it at home, here’s the skinny:
Use High Temperatures & low pH
Foodborne illness is the biggest concern whenever you’re preparing food, and the risk increases when the intention is to keep it in your fridge for an extended period of time, like hot sauce. While the only surefire way to assess the safety of hot sauce is to test the pH and and control the temperature during the cooking process, it’s important to know why. Bad bacteria like E. coli and botulism can’t withstand an acidic (aka, low pH) and hot environment.
The FDA guidelines suggest a pH of 4.0 or below and a hard simmer of at least 180F (83C). You also need to hold the hot sauce at that temperature for 10 minutes to kill all the bad guys. Last step is to fill the bottles while the temperature is still over 180F, and then invert (aka, flip upside down) them onto their lids to fully heat the bottle. I like to prop them in a box or rack to avoid them falling over and breaking—yes, it sucks to clean hot sauce off your cabinets and floor.
Ideally, you should use a digital pH reader (like this here) and a digital thermometer to test your sauce during the cooking process. All the recipes on this site have been tested and fall well below the recommended 4.0 pH level, but if you tweak the ingredients at all, you’ll definitely want to test your batches. Most the recipes on this site don’t add the pasteurization step (simmering at 180F for 10-minutes), but the ones that poach the ingredients are inherently safer due to the included 10-minute poach. If you do not pH test and pasteurize as described above, then it’s essential that you refrigerate your hot sauce after bottling.
Keep it Clean, dude
Not rocket science, but it’s essential that you keep your kitchen clean while making your sauce. Move all the stuff, wipe it down and sanitize surfaces before you begin and anytime you dirty it up during the process. This doesn’t mean go nutso with bleach. Use common sense and safe cleaners like appropriately diluted bleach.
Don’t make hot sauce when you’re sick. Sneezing and coughing into the sauce is a general no-no for very obvious reasons.
And wash your hands. Post-pandemic we all know how to wash our hands. But as a reminder, sing the A, B, Cs as you scrub your hands using soap and hot water. And wash them often throughout the cooking process.
Finally, keep your pets away from the kitchen. No one, I mean NO ONE, wants dog or cat hair in their hot sauce. Yes, dry-heaving as I write this.
Use Good Ingredients & the right Tools
If your peppers are not covered in E. coli, the risk of illness greatly decreases. Large scale farms and big grocery store chains have less reliable safety measures and statistically more outbreaks of contamination. Getting peppers from a reliable source like a farmer’s market or good produce shop lowers this risk. Same goes for the other ingredients like vinegar, salt and garlic. And wash them when you get home, duh.
Use clean and efficient tools like rinsed food-safe bottles, a stainless steal pot, un-chipped knives, and a solid blender or Vitamix. According to the FDA, both plastic and wooden cutting boards are hygienic as long as they’re cleaned frequently and replaced when they get too scratched.
And keep a nice stack of clean kitchen towels on hand to help wipe up messes and keep your hands dry.