Real Texas Hot Sauce

How To Be Texan #2

This is #2 in a series of How To Be Texan-Wherever You Are.  Yes, it’s the Wherever You Are that is important in this post.  There are so many Texans who live outside of the Great State due to circumstances beyond their control, that many of them look for ways to observe and display their Texan ways-wherever they are.

Hot sauce, picante, pico de gallo, jalapenos

We’re hot sauce and jalapeno connoisseurs in Texas.

We put it on everything from eggs to toast and probably consume prodigious amounts per capita.  I put hot sauce in my beans, hot dogs and hamburgers, on my broccoli to make it edible, potatoes, tortillas, on baked chicken, and nearly everything else.  I eat hot sauce and chips as snacks instead of supper sometimes.  Of course, hot sauce and tortilla chips come standard at any Tex-Mex restaurant.  If I don’t order nachos, which is rare, I always order a side dish of sliced jalapenos.  I always judge the restaurant by the hot sauce it serves.

Coonies over to the east of Texas eat Tabasco like it’s going out of style and we eat hot sauce and jalapenos.  If it has to come out of a bottle like Tabasco, I recommend Cholula Hot Sauce. It’s a product of Mexico, but high quality stuff.  You can get it at H.E.B. Tastes great sprinkled liberally on a Jimmy Dean sausage patty.   It’s standard table fare at IHop’s down here.  Good stuff.

Here’s a tip!

You can always be a good Texan Wherever You Are if you follow my friend Rosie Martinez’ example.  She’s a bank executive.  She carries a homemade bottle of hot sauce with her in her purse. Rosie is very discreet, but at any function if you watch closely she takes out her little bottle of homemade hot sauce and pours/sprinkles it over her food.   She’s never without it that way and she refills the bottle when she gets back home.  She still makes Mario homemade tortillas…muy bueno!

Here in Texas we even have festivals dedicated to salsa and hot sauce and give out some pretty big prizes for the recipe judged to be the best.

Texans like their hot sauce hot.  Here’s another good way to be Texan wherever you are.  If you are a gardener, you can have your own pepper patch and grow your own jalapeno peppers and other ingredients for making your homemade salsa.  Ramona regularly makes fresh salsa from her own recipe.  She adds more heat by adding a ‘ghost chile’.  Yep, that’s a secret ingredient and that is what it is called.  Also, be sure to read the comments section.  Several readers have contributed their own great salsa recipes.  We’re very opinionated about our salsa here in Real Texas.

I have had a spot in the garden dedicated solely to peppers for several years now and Ramona’s salsa is getting near legendary status.  It’s pretty good stuff.  We plant 25 or more jalapeno plants along with assorted bell pepper and banana pepper plants.

This year those pepper plants are getting an enclosed fence so the chickens don’t also enjoy them and a drip watering system so we don’t have to drag hoses all over the place.  I have eight larger jalapeno and banana pepper plants in my office by the big double windows that made it through the winter.  Some have peppers on them.   Being a good Texan Wherever You Are can be as simple as having your own pepper garden and making fresh salsa.

If gardening is not your thing, then it’s easy to get a good jar of hot sauce.  Either go to H.E.B. and get some Pace or Hill Country brand hot sauce or go to any craft show or walk down the streets in Fredericksburg and shop the stores.  There will be someone there who makes their own delicious private label hot sauce you can buy and probably order on an ongoing basis.  We’ve done that in the past also.  Click on the blue Pace link and watch the videos and read the story of David Pace and his hot sauce.  It’s a good story all Texans Wherever They Are should know.  Be sure and watch the Pace TV ads in the bottom left hand corner of the page you go to.  They rival any super bowl ad I ever saw.    If you watch ‘em, bet you’ll agree!

When do I eat hot sauce?  Sitting in my favorite spot down by Spring Creek with a cool beverage and seeing lovely wife Ramona come out with a sack of her homemade tortilla chips and a tub of hot sauce is almost like having an angel appear out of the mist.

Or me and the dogs end the evening sitting out on the front porch with those same beverages, chips and hot sauce.  We watch deer in the pasture, dodge hummingbirds, and bark at the emerging moon.  One for me, one for Bowie and one for Starbucks.  Good stuff and when you have a good bowl of hot sauce and chips, it’s easy to be Texan Wherever You Are.

Texas Hot sauce:  Be like Rosie and don’t leave home without it.

Tagged as: david werst, Real Texas Recipe, texas cooking, Texas hot sauce