Back in August I mentioned the First Habanero I got from my garden this year. Well, it wasn’t the last. Since then I have been harvesting some now and then as they became ripe, passing them on to friends and family, drying some to grind up to use in the place of black pepper (this is commonly what I do for most things I eat – yeah, I am that crazy.)
Well, this past weekend we had our first frost. So Sunday I went out and harvested all the remaining peppers, whether they were fully ripe, still dark green, or anything in between. This is what I got:
There are over a thousand peppers there. No, seriously. I know this because I have been keeping a rough count as I have used them this week to make various and sundry hot sauces.
The first one was intended to be a jelly, actually. Using this recipe. But something somewhere went wrong, and it just turned out to be a delicious thick Raspberry-Habanero sauce, suitable for glazing meats, adding to other recipes, drizzling on a cream cheese or a salad. I made 6x the batch, and about doubled the amount of habaneros, using about 36 – one for each of the half-pints of finished sauce. It’s hot – these are damned hot peppers, as I noted before – but it is within the range of what I would characterize as “normal human food”.
Then there was the batch of stuff I made today . . .
No recipe, specifically, though somewhat similar to many such recipes you will find online. I’ve made hot sauces enough to have a ‘feel’ for what works, what doesn’t, what I can get away with, what is going too far.
And boy, did I go too far.
Usually, this kind of recipe would call for anywhere up to 10 or 15 habaneros per batch. I made what would be considered 4x a usual batch. I used 300 habaneros. No, that’s not a typo – three hundred. No, they weren’t all fully ripe, so they weren’t all at peak heat on the Scoville Heat Unit scale. But roughly one in five were. In other words, I used as many fully ripe, super-hot Red Savinas (rated about 580,000 SHU) as the normal upper limit for regular habaneros (rated between 100,000 and 200,000 SHU) per batch. And then four times that number of unripe habs ranging in heat from probably 50,000 SHU to almost full ripe heat. There are about 14 habaneros in each half-pint jar of sauce. Or something like almost one hab per tablespoon of the stuff.
This stuff is so intense that I put a drop of it on my tongue to test it and it took my breath away and sent me running for the milk (dairy products are the most effective way to cut the burn from capsaicin). This stuff is so intense that it gave me chemical burns on my hands. No, of course I wore gloves. For all the prep and cooking. The burns were from washing the dishes, for which my normal gloves are too short. After rinsing the gross residue from them, the leftover bits of sauce added to the sink full of soapy water was still so powerful that the more sensitive parts of my hands got burned. When all that was done I went out and bought longer medium-weight chemical gloves.
Because I still have at least twice as many remaining habs to use. Tomorrow I make up a different sauce, using a different set of spices and tomato sauce in lieu of water . . .
Hehehehehehehehe!
Jim Downey
I like to garden. Always have. Since my senior year in college, I’ve almost always had at least a small vegetable garden. This year I kept my garden intentionally small, due to the increasing time constraints of being a full-time care giver. I didn’t want to have to be dealing with 40 or 50 pounds of ripe tomatoes a day for weeks on end, like I did a couple of years ago when I planted about three dozen different tomato plants, and they all bore very heavily. This year it was only 10 plants, and as a result I’ve only canned and sauced a couple of afternoons. Surprisingly, the deer this year have decided that they too like my tomato plants, and have been ‘helping’ me by keeping them trimmed back so that less fruit grows.
Six or seven years ago, I got bit by the “chilehead” bug – I started liking hotter and hotter spices, moving up the Scoville scale from Jalapenos to Serranos to eventually commercially available Habanero peppers. Over time I started reading about hot peppers, trying sauces, eventually even growing my own peppers. For the last several years I’ve been growing Habaneros, getting seedlings from local nurseries without much choice in terms of the varietal. I’ve been making my own sauces, but also simply dry the peppers and grind them up, use the powder like most people use black pepper. That’s fairly hard core.
But this year . . . this year, I wanted to up the ante a bit. So I ordered some of these:
All photos Copyright © Cross Country Nurseries DEVIL’S TONGUE – extremely hot; Habanero Type; 2 to 3 inches long by 1 to 1.5 inches wide; matures from green to golden yellow; pendant pods; green leaves; 30 to 36 inches tall; Late Season; this pepper is outrageously hot!;C.chinense.
and some of these:
All photos Copyright © Cross Country Nurseries HABANERO-RED SAVINA ™ – extremely hot; Habanero Type; 1.5 to 2.5 inches long by 1 to 1.5 inches wide; medium thick flesh; matures from green to red; pendant pods; green leaves; 24 to 30 inches tall; Late Season; in the Guinness Book as the hottestchile known. **Cross Country Nurseries is a licensed grower of the Red Savina ™ Habanero (PVP 9200255). Transplants are provided for the home gardener. Seeds from these peppers can not be legally saved to sell to others. You must plan to use these peppers for your own use.;C.chinense.
Now, last night the damned deer munched over the Devil’s Tongue (WTF? I thought deer would stay away from hot peppers??), so I may or may not get any peppers off of those. But a couple of weeks ago I put up some additional fencing around the RedSavinas, when one of the plants showed some early signs of someone feeding on them (I’d figured some kind of groundhog or something). And this morning when I was picking tomatoes I noted a nice little orange ball in the midst of one of the plants. Investigating, I saw that this one pepper had started to ripen, but had also been sampled by a bird (birds don’t react to the capsaicin in the peppers). So I nabbed it, brought it in.
This pepper wasn’t fully matured – they become deep red as noted in the description above – and so hadn’t fully developed the heat it will have. Still, I cut it open, removed the nibbled bits and the seeds, and set it aside to dry. Then, in what is something of a normal test for me, I touched the edge of the knife with the pepper juice to the tip of my tongue. There was the briefest flash of heat, and then my tongue simply went numb. And it stayed numb for about 20 minutes, the rest of my mouth echoing that wonderful Habanero burn.
Yeah, baby, this is gonna be good!
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 