Boboe
Full Member
Posts: 32
Joined: Sat Mar 25, 2017 2:25 pm
Location: Destin, FL ; Zone 8b

Aji Limon (Lemon Drop Chile) Hot Sauce

I have several lemon drop pepper plants, and they were very prolific this year. I'd never made a hot sauce before, so I looked up some recipes for inspiration. I don't measure when I cook (except baking, because that's chemistry), so this is all estimates.

Lemon drops have a Scoville score of around 30,000. Interestingly, I've found the green (unripe) peppers to be hotter than the ripe yellow ones. Unripe peppers, however, don't have the delicious lemon flavor that the ripe peppers have. Also, once cooked I found the heat diminished more, but the lemon flavor become even more pronounced.

On to the recipe

Ingredients:
About 75 lemon drop chiles
1/4 - 1/2 onion
6 garlic cloves
fresh ginger
coriander seeds
2 cups apple cider vinegar
sugar
water
one lime

I used a deep frying pan/sauce pan to cook this.

Toast the coriander for 5 minutes or so
Cut all the peppers lengthwise and toss them in, including seeds and pith. Cook for a few minutes to soften a bit.
Add garlic, ginger, onions, and vinegar.
Simmer for about 10 minutes. Get it all cooked. I added sugar here, but in retrospect it didn't need it at all.

Toss it all in the blender. Blend it up nice. I added some water to thin it a little, and added juice of a lime. The lime wasn't necessary in retrospect.

Strained it through a wire strainer and bottled it. It made about 16 oz.

This sauce was VERY citrusy, but not super hot. It's more like a lemon pepper sauce. It is a beautiful yellow color, which you don't see often in hot sauces.

I made another sauce a month later using lemon drop peppers and tabasco peppers my sister brought me. This one was about 25 lemon drops and 15 tabascos. Tabascos are hotter, and that's what I wanted for the sauce. This time the sauce had NO SUGAR, NO LIME, AND NO GINGER. I liked the ginger in the first batch, but I didn't have any on hand. Oh well.

This Tabasco and Lemon Drop sauce was noticeably hotter than the first, and slightly orange (rather than yellow) due to the tabasco peppers. It still had a lot of nice citrus flavor from the lemon drops.

Now I've got a yellow Bhut growing, and I plan to make a lemon drop and Bhut sauce that'll knock your socks off with color, flavor, and heat. Then I'll just make a yellow Bhut sauce to destroy my mouth.

Boboe
Full Member
Posts: 32
Joined: Sat Mar 25, 2017 2:25 pm
Location: Destin, FL ; Zone 8b

Here you can see the lemon drop sauce on the left and the lemon drop with tabasco on the right.
Attachments
IMG_20171231_142733929.jpg



Return to “Canning - Preserving - Recipes”