Hot Sauce Recipe

Your hot sauce recipe will get it’s heat from capsaicin, which will come from your choice of chili pepper used in the recipe. Hot sauces recipes are generally a variation of 4 or 5 main ingredients, peppers, vinegar, onions, garlic and tomato sauce. Peppers and hot sauces are rated using the Scoville scale in Scoville Heat Units, or SHU. The way the measurement is by measuring how much water is needed to dilute the heat from the capsaicin found in the pepper or hot sauce.

Hot sauces will generally have a comparitively low rating compared to the peppers themselves due to the dilution and mixture of ingredients in the hot sauce recipe. Consider this when you choose the peppers for your hot sauce recipe.

Here is a heat rating for commonly used peppers:

• Bell peppers – 0 SHU
• Jalapeno peppers – 5,000 SHU
• Serrano peppers – 15,000 SHU
• Tabasco peppers – 30,000 SHU
• Pequin peppers – 75,000 SHU
• Scotch bonnet habanero – 200,000 SHU
• Red Seville habanero – 450,000 SHU
• Bhut jolokia – 1,000,000 SHU
• Pepper Spray – 400,000 SHU