Amarillo Hot Sauce: Making-of

We pride ourselves on our in-house production here at Sauce Shop. Every bottle of sauce is made by us in Nottingham, from recipe development to cooking, right down to bottling and labelling.

Here's a bit of a behind-the-scenes run through of one of our favourite products, Amarillo Hot Sauce...

Making Amarillo

To make this sauce we use a juicy orange-yellow chilli called Aji Amarillo. Widely used in Peruvian cooking, this chilli has been described as 'tasting like sunshine'. It certainly does taste bright, berry-like and its fruity medium heat gives an incredible overall flavour.

First up we receive boxes and boxes of this dazzling yellow chilli and get it straight into barrels to be made into our signature chilli mash. The process takes around 3 months, at which point fermentation has given these chillies an entirely new flavour profile. Taking the lid off the barrels releases the most amazing aroma, a deep aged fruitiness that you just can't replicate.

Once ready, the mash is given a good blend and added to our pans. We combine the chilli mash with white grape vinegar, selected for its crisp acidity and subtle sweetness. It gives our hot sauces that sharp, tangy flavour, the perfect complement to chilli heat.

The beauty of this sauce is in its simplicity, it's a stripped back recipe that allows the true flavour of the chilli to shine through, just three ingredients with no artificial nonsense getting in the way. After plenty of blending and a gentle cook this mixture of vinegar and chilli transforms into a punchy, tangy hot sauce with a glowing yellow appearance.

It's got a fairly thin consistency, like a Louisiana-style hot sauce. We don't use any thickeners or stabilisers so it's not the gel-like hot sauce you often come across. It makes it perfect for dropping onto food rather than dipping!

That's it, it's ready to bottle! Each bottle is filled and sent down the line through our labelling machine, shrink banded and packed off ready to hit the shelves. We made it sound easy, but try screwing all those caps on...

This sauce is an office lunch staple for us. It lifts absolutely anything with its almost tropical flavour, our current recommendation is adding it to a pot of cottage cheese for a tasty snack!

Check out Amarillo Hot Sauce in our web shop.