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How Caribbean Pepper Sauce Gets Its Fire
Across the region and the diaspora, the Scotch bonnet lends its distinctive, tart, numbing heat to this hot sauce, offering a taste of the islands and a punch of flavor.
As a child, the cookbook author Lesley Enston learned maybe the most important lesson about pepper sauce from her uncle Richard in Trinidad and Tobago: Be very careful when handling Scotch bonnet chiles.
“I will always remember coming back to the house in Princes Town and finding him on the couch with his hands up in the air covered in Vaseline,” she writes in her book, “Belly Full: Exploring Caribbean Cuisine Through 11 Fundamental Ingredients and Over 100 Recipes” (Ten Speed Press) released this month.
Recipe: Pepper Sauce
Asked what had happened, he shrugged. He said he’d just finished making a batch of his famous sauce, and the Scotch bonnets’ intense heat had burned his hands.
Uncle Richard’s recipe inspired Ms. Enston’s own, run through with earthy culantro (a fresh herb not to be confused with cilantro), garlic, whole-grain mustard and fresh ginger bolstering the fiery flavor of the essential Scotch bonnets.