Tabasco Peppers in Vinegar
Back in the late spring, Laurie and I made our trip to the local Lowe’s to find some vegetables for our back porch raised planters. She likes to grow greens like kale, etc. and I have this thing about peppers. Last year I tried banana peppers and I got a grand total of one to grow. And it tasted awful.
So for some reason I figured I’d try peppers again. As we were browsing the plants, I saw a couple of little plants labeled as Tabasco peppers. The picture looked cool – lots of little red, orange and green peppers. And I like Tabasco sauce, so I thought “hey, let’s give it a try”. So we planted the pepper plants in a couple of pots on the patio table to see what would happen.
One of the plants took off. The other kinda dawdled and didn’t do much. But eventually BOTH of them started producing peppers. A LOT of peppers. By the end of summer, we probably had a couple hundred cute little red peppers on the plants. The plants probably wound up being 2-3′ tall. But then – what do we do with the peppers?
I thought “hey, let’s see how they taste.” So I picked on and cut it into VERY small pieces – probably 2mm long. It smelled good, so I gave one of the VERY small pieces to Laurie to taste.
Mistake #1
She got this terrified look on her face and spit the thing out immediately…and started looking for some way to put out the fire in her mouth. Turns out that just as she was spitting it out, I had put a piece in MY mouth.
And that was Mistake #2.
I spit mine out a tiny bit faster than hers, so my pain was slightly less than hers. It probably took us a couple of hours to shake off the effects. Laurie said “It felt like my teeth were melting”.
But we DID wind up finding a use for them. Turns out folks that grow collard greens like using Tabasco peppers in vinegar as a sauce for greens. Sounded like an easy way to get rid of a few peppers and create something that looked “cool”. Thus, I made a couple of bottles of Tabasco Pepper in Vinegar “sauce”
- Fill a small (preferably decorative) bottle with the Tabasco peppers. It helps to pierce the peppers so the vinegar can infuse with the pepper flavor. Be sure not to burn yourself with the pepper oil (smart move: use gloves). Once the pierced peppers are in the bottle, fill it the rest of the way with the vinegar. Seal the bottle and let it sit and age.
It'll probably take a while for the pepper flavor to infuse into the vinegar.