Hot Sauce

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Ingredients:  Peppers, water, salt, garlic and whole peppercorns (optional).

 

I love hot sauce, and really anything spicy, not to the point where I hurt myself but I like to be just a little afraid of the heat.  Learned my lesson there when I ate a whole tabasco pepper, which is so small you wouldn’t think it’s that hot, yea that ruined my entire day.

 

Hot sauce is made from peppers and a few other ingredients depending on where you are.  Peppers were first domesticated in the Americas, probably in modern day Mexico, around 8,000 years ago.  Through selective breeding (picking out the preferred peppers and replanting their seeds) over thousands of years people created tons of different varieties and this was a really important part of the diets for peoples all over the Americas. 

 

As soon as the Europeans arrived, they immediately incorporated peppers into their diets; mainly I think because European food at the time would have been terribly bland with very few spices used at all.  Through the trading networks set up by the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, peppers were soon all over the world and being selectively bred in other areas to reflect the preferences of whoever was growing the peppers.