This one is all about CHILLIES.
I'm a big fan of spicy food; not that raw heat that brings tears and pain, but a wonderful warm heat that courses through your mouth and makes the tips of your fingers tingle (and may bring a few beads of sweat to your forehead). Whether it's spicy sauce, chilli seasoning, jerk chicken, scotch bonnets sliced and diced into dishes, I love it! Making hot sauce is definitely something I would like to perfect; to create a small range of really delicious hot sauces that can complement any sort of food, ranging from a sweet, sticky chilli sauce to a super hot condiment.
Big surprise... I bought a book on hot sauce! FYI: I probably love books just as much as I love food and gardening. So, this book, aptly entitled Hot Sauce! by Jennifer Trainer, and it contains information about types of chillies, types of chilli sauces, recipes for chilli sauces and also recipes in which to use the chilli sauces you have made. Brilliantly compact with lots of great pictures, it's a great book to set me on my way of Chilli Sauce Experimentation.
Last year I grew chillies for the first time. Some I grew from seeds and some I bought as young plants from the local gardening centre. I grew Serrano, Cayenne and Jalapeno from seed, which were very successful on growth but not so much the flowering, and then I bought some Apache chilli plants which were covered in peppers.
Chillies demand a little bit more effort than I had presumed, and unfortunately, mine weren't half as productive as they could have been had I done a little bit of reading around the matter and really put some effort in. So, with the aid of my countless gardening books, I have read up on what it is that I need to do to ensure that my 2014 chilli babies are more fruitful than last year's.
I will be growing:
Bulgarian Carrot
Cayenne
Jalapeno
Padron
Paper Lantern
Serrano
They range from hot to super hot (not in the order I've listed them, that's alphabetical - I don't like lists that aren't alphabetical). Cayenne, serrano and jalapeno are the hot ones, and bulgarian carrot, padron and paper lantern are the super hot ones. Well, they say super hot on the seed packet and I can only trust what the label says. I bought them from my local family run gardening centre in Pontarddulais and they have one of the best vegetable seed ranges there. Always a happy customer!
With regards to chilli sauces, I think I will use a lot of this year's crop of chillies (providing it all doesn't go horribly wrong!) experimenting on sauces, and what I'd like my signature sauces to taste like. I want them to be unique, to have something different to the supermarket mass-produced stuff. Once I have developed my recipes and worked on my techniques, then I will spend next year making several dozen bottles of Oscar's chilli sauce range.
I have so many ideas that I want to bring to reality, so many products that I have written down and recipes to develop to bring into the Oscar's Kitchen range. But I believe it is of utmost importance to spend the time developing any individual product or range to ensure that it is perfect for the customers. These things take time, and I must be patient. There are just so many delicious things to make for you all to enjoy!
As per usual, I will let you know how it goes, with pictures of my plants.
Wishing you are all well,
Ruth and Oscar
p.s. if anyone who is reading this lives local to Hendy/Pontardulais and would like to be a chilli sauce tester in the summer, please get in touch and come and help me create some magic in the kitchen. I will not accept liability to any face melting though. Obviously.
