While learning to sail in Antigua I fell in love with Caribbean style hot sauce!

I have had a life-long obsession with hot sauce. I love, love, love hot sauce. In college I would make batches of homemade hotsauce and give bottles to my professors as Christmas presents.

When Scott and I went to Antiqua to learn how to sail last year, we stumbled upon “Suzie’s Hotsauce”. This stuff is as good as it gets. It’s light your A** on fire hot, but the flavor is so great you beg for more. After our 5 bottles of sauce ran out from our trip back home, I became obsessed with finding Suzie’s recipe.

Suzie's original hot sauce from Antigua.

This was no easy feat. I played around with many combinations until I finally stumbled on a book called “Hot Licks – Great Recipes for making and cooking with hotsauces” by Jennifer Trainer Thompson. It seems the author had stumbled upon Caribbean hot sauces when she was on a sailboat delivery to the Brittish Virgin islands and her boat had motor trouble and she was stuck in the outlying parts of the Bahamas chain. She then, too, became obsessed with this style sauce.

Jennifer, all I can say is “THANK YOU!” for getting stuck in the Bahamas so you could stay long enough to learn this basic hotsauce recipe to enlighten the rest of the world.

My "Sweet with Heat" version of the recipe above.

This recipe is slightly modified fromt the original, Jennifer Thompson “West Indian Pepper Sauce”.

Ingredients:

1. 1 ripe medium mango or papaya (the smaller version, use only 1/2 if you use the large kind)
2. 1/2  medium yellow onion chopped
3. 2 medium garlic cloves
4. 1 inch piece of ginger root, coarsely chopped
5. 5 scotch bonnet of habanero peppers, de-stemmed
6. 1/2 tsp. turmeric
7. 1 tblsp dry mustard
8. pinch of cumin, pinch of coriander
9. 1/2 tblsp honey
10. 1/2 cup water
11. 1/2 cup cider vinegar
12. 1 tsp sea salt

Puree ingredients # 1-9 in a blender. Transfer this mixture into a bowl.

Next bring the vinger, water and salt to boil in a non reactive saucepan. Pour this mixture over the mango mixture and mix well. Allow to cool before putting in bottles.

Keep the sauce in the refrigerator up to 6 weeks.

Cheers to some “sweet with heat”!