How To Make Red Rocoto Hot Sauce

If you have ever grown rocoto chiles you know one plant can produce a LOT of really hot peppers. Here is a great way to use some of that heat and store it in bottles. Hot Sauce makes a great gift for your friends and this stuff will last for up to a year in the refrigerator. By then you will have more rocoto peppers to make more sauce.

You can play with the flavor profile of your hot sauce by adding various other ingredients. This recipe is simple with just serranos, carrots for sweetness and garlic. You’ll use distilled water and vinegar no matter what other flavors you add but there are different kinds of vinegar to experiment with.

You can use this recipe with most any chiles, not just rocoto.

This recipe is naturally gluten free.

Watch a Video

Here is a video of 2 Cooks in the kitchen making Red Rocoto Hot Sauce:

Red Rocoto Chiles

Rocoto is an interesting pepper. It is a different species than the other peppers we know and love. Here is what Wikipedia has to say:

Capsicum pubescens is a plant of the genus Capsicum (pepper). The species name, pubescens, refers to the hairy leaves of this pepper. The hairiness of the leaves, along with the black seeds, make Capsicum pubescens distinguishable from other Capsicum species. Capsicum pubescens has pungent yellow, orange, red, green or brown fruits.

This species is found primarily in Central and South America, and is known only in cultivation. It is consumed fresh, as a paste, dried, or ground. It is called rocoto (Quechua, rukutu, ruqutu’) in Peru and Ecuador, locoto in Bolivia and Argentina (Aymara, luqutu), and in Mexico manzano (Spanish for “appletree”) pepper for its apple-shaped fruit.

Remove the Seeds

We’re going to start by cutting the rocoto peppers and removing the seeds. We strongly advise wearing latex gloves to protect your hands for this step. These peppers are hot! You also might consider eye protection. The rocoto peppers are juicy and we’ve splashed a little in our eyes before when prying out stubborn seeds.

Boil the Carrots

We also peel and slice the carrots and boil them for about 5 minutes to get them to soften a little. We’re using carrots to add a bit of sweet flavor to the sauce. You can use your imagination and add any number of ingredients that you think will taste good in your hot sauce, there are no wrong answers here. Mike at Chili Pepper Madness has lots of good hot sauce flavor ideas.

Roast the Rocoto and garlic

For our sauce we are going to roast the rocoto and serrano peppers, along with the peeled garlic cloves, on the grill. We want to get that grilled flavor in our sauce.

Blend the Ingredients With Distilled Water

Next we will put everything in the blender. We recommend doing as much of this as possible outside. these peppers put off a powerful amount of capsaicin, which can be quite irritating. If you have to be inside do it in a place with good ventilation.

Then we need to add water to cover the ingredients. If you have too much for one blender it is fine to do this in batches. You will need a lot of water if you want this to be thin enough to shake out of a hot sauce bottle.

Cook the Sauce With Vinegar and Salt

We want to blend this thoroughly. The opening on the hot sauce bottles is rather small and any chunks you leave will just clog it up so give this a good while to get chopped up. Next we are going to put the sauce in a saucepan and cook it with 2 cups of vinegar. You will get different flavor from different types of vinegar and they all work fine. Distilled White Vinegar is what we are using but Apple Cider Vinegar would give a different flavor.

We also want to add 1/4 cup of salt to this while it is coming to a boil. We’ll boil the sauce for 15 minutes. This will ensure that we have a good sterile product when it goes into the bottles, which will help with shelf life.

Bottle Your Rocoto Sauce

This made a little less than 3 quarts of hot sauce. To let it cool down and store it temporarily we just put it in quart jars. The next part of this for us is to put it into 5 oz hot sauce bottles. We use the Nicebottles Hot Sauce Bottles that come with cap and shaker insert from Amazon. You’ll want to sterilize the bottles before filling them. You can put them in boiling water for 10 miinutes to do that. Then, using a small funnel, you can fill them, cap them and store them in the refrigerator. You can also design your own hot sauce labels using one of the online print services such as Vista Print. It is fun!

Hot Sauce Variations

This is a fairly basic recipe for a roasted rocoto sauce. There are endless variations you can experiment with by adding other flavors to your hot sauce. A really good variation is to smoke the ingredients in a smoker rather than roasting them. This gives a very distinct smoky flavor. We have also fermented the ingredients after grinding them up in the food processor. This was really good and fun to do as well.

There are so many other variations to try starting with this basic recipe. Use habañeros or ghost peppers. You can add mango or pineapple for a caribbean vibe. Maybe add mustard, tomato and brown sugar for a barbecue flavor. use your imagination and, most importantly, have fun with it because that is what this is all about.

If you enjoyed this recipe share it on social media, subscribe to our Youtube channel and try some of our other spicy recipes.

• Morita Salsa
• Arbol Salsa
• Chile Oil

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