From a garden full of hot peppers to hot sauce at the Manchester Diner!
Leslie Kirkland (left) and Laura Billetdeaux (right) recreate Laura’s face on the labels while holding their freshly bottled hot sauce at the Manchester Diner. Photo courtesy of Laura Billetdeaux.
by Sara Swanson
Manchester resident Laura Billetdeaux and her husband Neil are avid gardeners but a quirk of their garden conditions has lead Laura to start making hot sauce, and her very abundant harvest of hot peppers this year means you have the opportunity to try it yourself at Manchester Diner!
She explained, “For some reason, the soil grows really spicy/hot vegetables. We first noticed it with radishes. Then arugula. Both so spicy they were challenging in salads. So a few years ago, we planted different kinds of peppers – just curious about how they’d turn out. Holy moly, so very hot. We played with different varieties for a couple of years, and also played with a recipe for hot sauce. I started bottling it and giving it to friends.”
She gave Leslie Kirkland, proprietor of the Manchester Diner a couple of bottles to try and Leslie loved it.
Laura stated, “She wanted to have it on hand all the time at the Diner, but it needed to be made in-house in the Diner’s kitchen for her to be able to offer it. So – we made that happen!”
This first batch in the Diner kitchen took about two hours, with Laura naming the most labor intensive parts as trimming the stem end and peeling the garlic, and made enough to have on hand for customers. Laura says that Leslie plans to make more batches and eventually there may be enough to offer bottles of it for sale at the diner.
Each batch of hot sauce makes enough for about a dozen bottles and uses 40 oz of peppers and 25 cloves of garlic, and about three cups of white wine vinegar, two cups water and a little salt. But what varieties of hot peppers, you ask? It is a mix and match of whatever peppers are ripe at the time but Laura did have hot sauce in mind when deciding what to plant this year.
She stated, “Last year, I planted 90 peppers of different hot varieties. I made over 100 bottles of hot sauce … and I froze enough peppers to make another 100 bottles. This year, I planted 50 pepper plants, but was pickier about the types: giant cayennes, regular cayennes, and Thai chili peppers are the main varieties. This year, I also have just a few habaneros and ghost peppers. For fun.”
The mix of peppers results in a very flavorful sauce, but it also has a kick! Leslie ranks it a little spicier than Frank’s RedHot when compared to commercially available sauces. Stop by the Manchester Diner at 112 Adrian St and order some breakfast or lunch, ask for the hot sauce, and try it for yourself!
If you are thinking about growing your own peppers, Laura says hot peppers seem to do well with Manchester summers as long as they don’t go in too early. She added, “They don’t like chilly air and they don’t like wet soil… I just put them in the ground on June 1 and let them be.”
Regular cayenne pepper. Photo courtesy of Laura Billetdeaux.
Still ripening giant cayenne pepper. Photo courtesy of Laura Billetdeaux.
Laura’s first ripe habanero. Photo courtesy of Laura Billetdeaux.
Peppers destined for hot sauce. You can see the difference between the regular cayenne peppers in the bowl and the giant cayenne pepper on the very top. Photo courtesy of Laura Billetdeaux.
A batch of green hot sauce from last year made from unripe, but still very hot, hot peppers. Photo courtesy of Laura Billetdeaux.
Hot sauce on the shelf at the Manchester Diner. Photo courtesy of Laura Billetdeaux.
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