So I attempted making 4 different mini batches of hot sauce the other day with varying ingredients. One thing that was common to all of them was habaneros, and for simplicity/laziness sake, I didnt de-seed or de-vein them. I just pulled off the stems and tossed them all in the food processor. I tried my first one yesterday, and yea it was hot as hell, but that wasnt the problem, its what it did to my stomach after. I have enjoyed eating insanely hot sauces from restaurants for years, and even though I can handle the heat, Ive never had issues with it hurting my stomach afterwards. I can only assume it was the seeds sitting in my stomach/GI burning away. Can anyone else confirm this about the seeds....or have had a similar issue? Im seriously thinking that taking the extra time to de-seed may be well worth it.
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Hot sauce with seeds
- Thread starter Heisenberg
- Start date
I'm not sure about your stomach problems, but you may consider getting a food mill if you like making sauce. These remove all the seeds, skins and excess pulp quickly, so you get a "smooth" sauce. With some practice, you can vary the pulp/thickness by running the sauce through the mill more/less times. These start at about $20 for the simple hand crank models, to $$$ for the big electric models. I use a super simple one (like the pic below), and still manage to crank out quite a few bottles worth of salsa. De-seeding by hand is way too time consuming.
hottoddy said:
Don't remove pulp, pulp = pepper flesh! Cook it or blend it until smooth but don't remove it. That's the stuff that makes the sauce the sauce.
Agreed. I should have said just skins and seeds - the tough bits. The food mill still let's the good pulp through. I blend and cook first, so it's all soft. I use the mill as a last step on my smoothe sauces. I also make "purée" type sauces with no food mill.The Hot Pepper said:
+1 for a food mill. I bought mine a couple years ago similar to the one above (the hand crank model). I definitely like the consistency of my sauces after going thorugh the food mill. Also don't have to worry about de-seeding the peppers or even tomatoes (I make alot of BBQ sauce too).
Pulp isn't seeds, it's easy to remove seeds without pulp, pulp is the pepper flesh, which breaks down as you cook, straining a sauce with a fine strainer, and too early, you remove pepper. This isn't like making orange juice where you want to separate pulp from liquid, this is sauce, like tomato sauce, which when made from fresh tomatoes the "pulp" cooks down into a silky sauce.Greenguru said:
The mill has larger screens which will catch seeds and let sauce pass though but only after cooked properly. Seeds and any hard bits like stem that made it in.
salsalady
Business Member
hiesenberg- most commercial sauces have the seed in them, they're just blended or macerated to the point that the seeds are not detectable. When tasting your homemade sauces, were you eating it straight or with chips or food? Maybe the difference is when eating sauces in restaurants you have food in your stomach. Had you eaten anything before tasting your sauces? An empty stomach is much more prone to capsaicin cramps than eating hot things with food in the stomach.
Salsalady:
you said it,Scorpion that ripened in my garden was pretty red and i guess it was 8:30 am i was watering and i picked the red pepper i saw and oh me all i can say is my mouth only burned for about twenty minutes give or take and my GF said i cried about my gut burning for hours and after eating the ice from my ice maker bucket it eased up but I lieyounot, i felt like throwing up and many other things but i did not hurl but it has taught me to never never eat a Scorpion for breakfast all alone
you said it,Scorpion that ripened in my garden was pretty red and i guess it was 8:30 am i was watering and i picked the red pepper i saw and oh me all i can say is my mouth only burned for about twenty minutes give or take and my GF said i cried about my gut burning for hours and after eating the ice from my ice maker bucket it eased up but I lieyounot, i felt like throwing up and many other things but i did not hurl but it has taught me to never never eat a Scorpion for breakfast all alone
Salsa lady, sorry for the late reply. I ate it on chicken, not alone. I've never had stomach issues before when eating extremely hot food, so that was the only thing I figure I could attribute it to. I experimented again and made a small batch of habanero/cayenne sauce. I deseeded them all and it was much less hot, and no stomach issues. I am going to do some more, deseeded again, but ramping up the heat with more habs to see if I'm still good. I'm also not going to be using lime juice in any more recipes. At first it seemed like a good idea, but now I'm finding that even a little bit is over powering and distracts from the other flavors.salsalady said:
It really seems like 5 minute sauce when I see seeds in the bottled products
some of my first hot sauce creations have visible seed but my latest creations do not have visible seed and I never remove them or own a food mill and I do like my sauce very hot I use food processor a smoothy machine and blender and heat. Puzzled in Georgia
some of my first hot sauce creations have visible seed but my latest creations do not have visible seed and I never remove them or own a food mill and I do like my sauce very hot I use food processor a smoothy machine and blender and heat. Puzzled in Georgia