Craft Your Own Hot Sauce with Cultivate the City's Class Tomorrow (9/22)

A small harvest from my own garden earlier this year

Cultivate the City will hold a class tomorrow (9/22, 12–1pm) on making your own hot sauce. If you've never tried this before, I highly recommend giving it a shot. Creating your own hot sauces can be kind of addictive, and this class sounds like a great introduction. Tickets for the event, to be held at H Street Farms (roof of W. S. Jenks & Son Hardware at 910 Bladensburg Road NE), are $30 (+ $2.64 fee). The class will start with a quick tour of H Street Farms, an overview of the peppers in their harvest, and a look at some of the other ingredients in the sauces, before jumping right into making some blends.


Cultivate the City grows a wide selection of peppers. The list includes: Bhut Jolokia (ghost peppers), Scorpion, Carolina Reapers, Thai Chili, Jalapeño, Habanero, Aji Charapita, Aji Amarillo, Aji Chombo and several other varieties.  Understanding the flavor profiles of different peppers is key, as is figuring out the perfect heat level. They'll teach you how to create a shelf-stable sauce with minimal processing. To wrap up the class participants will taste the different sauces everyone made.

Here are some of the sauces Cultivate has been making this year:

• Strawberry Peach Killer Sauce (Ghost Peppers)
• Wild Berry Hot Sauce (Jalapenos and Chilis)
• Friendship the Sauce (Ground Cherries, Habaneros and Lemon Drop Peppers)
• Friendship Killer Hot Sauce (Ghost Peppers)
• District of Fire (Pawpaw, Ground Cherries, Fish Peppers, Lemon Drop Peppers)