Red Pepper

Since I made the salsa and pasta / pizza sauce really mild this year, I wanted to make a nuclear hot chili sauce to compensate. Something that I could use just like that, or mix into one of my other tomato sauces to spice it up a bit. I did some googling and asking around, and finally found a recipe that really appealed to me. I did not follow that recipe to the T - left out the salt and pepper, and the vinegar. The latter I believe was only added to make it suitable for boiling water canning, which I do not have to do since I pressure can.

I wanted a sweet tomato-based sauce that was spicey as heck, and that's what I got! It's got apples, peaches, pears and honey to sweeten it up. It calls for 10 lbs of tomatoes - I used 7 lbs of romas, 2 lbs of various heirlooms from my CSA, and about 1300 ml of canned diced tomatoes from my 2006 batch.

Roasting red peppers is pretty easy to do if a bit finicky at first. In this video I'm fumbling around with it quite a bit in part because I only do this once a year during harvest time, and this was the first time this year, and in part because silly me chose peppers which were largely inappropriate for roasting. You want to select peppers that are larger, and fairly regularly shaped. This video was taken a few weeks ago when peppers were just in season, and I got so excited that I just picked up a bushel without thinking about it first. Today I picked up about a half bushel of large, nicely formed peppers for my pasta sauce today, and I had them all roasted and peeled in no time at all - less than 2 hours.

There we go, the sauce is finally in the canner! This is definitely not a sauce for someone who does not like a lot of work since it takes a good 2 or 3 days to make. First of all, it contains a lot of roasted red pepper, which itself takes a good day of work. Though I roasted about twice what I needed for this recipe and canned the rest. Hmmm, note to self : I still have not written the article on roasting peppers, so please stay tuned for that. Last year was the first year I used roasted red peppers in my Pasta / Pizza sauce, and I liked it so much that I'm doing largely the same thing with a few tweaks.

The biggest difference between this year and last year is that this time around I wanted to use up some zucchini from our CSA, so I decided to toss a good sized one in there. I also have a 2 or 3 pounds of heirlooms tomatoes in there this year as well - just to use up ones from the CSA. I did not measure either, but I did measure another zucchini that was about the same size, and it was 650g. Heirloom tomatoes about 2 or 3 lbs - together after cooking it down for about an hour they made up exactly 2 litres of puree that went into the main sauce.