Habanero harvest 2025 sauce

Life was busy in late September/early October when the habaneros in our garden ripened, and I didn’t have the gumption to make a batch of hot sauce out of them. Charlie and I bagged them up and froze them instead.

We ended up with ~60 orange and red habanero peppers, about twice as many as last year.

Fast forward to January, when I was making the chili on Saturday, I decided to cook down the peppers into sauce while I had to keep an eye on the simmering beans and chili.

This recipe from Rick Bayliss is my go-to. I change the proportions a bit, and this time around I made roughly a 5x batch.

Habanero Hot Sauce

I cooked the ingredients down, pureed it, then set the bowl out in the snow for a bit to cool.

I ended up with almost 2 quarts, which is roughly 12 5oz bottles.

After I bottled it, Amanda had a great idea. We’ve been saving the wax from the Babybel cheese that Charlie likes to eat for almost a year. The glass jar we store the wax in is now full, and she’s been interested in melting it down to use in some projects. She thought it would be cool to seal the bottles with wax, too. Great idea!

I melted it down and gave it a test dip.

It worked, and Charlie wanted to help, too. He dipped about half of the bottles.

I poured the rest of the wax into silicone cube trays to save for future projects.

Now, back to the hot sauce. It has a nice kick, a bit of fruitiness from the habaneros, and a noticeable but not overwhelming amount of garlic. It will be a good everyday house sauce, just like last year’s batch.

Compared to last year’s batch, this year’s is a bit deeper reddish orange and thicker. Favor-wise they are very similar. I used the same recipe.

The snow is still piled up on our deck railing, so I thought it would be fun to pull out the SLR and take a photo: