A red-hot, green thumb: East County resident perfects hot sauce recipe

Hot sauce in an unmarked, corked, glass bottle is a gamble.

There’s no familiar Tabasco label, no hot wing sauce recipe on the back — no indication of how flammable it could be.

East County resident Margie Hernandez, creator of this unlabeled red jalapeño sriracha sauce, loves spicy things, but even she admits, it’s hot.

“On a scale of one to 10, it’s a 10,” she said.

The sauce’s layered, herbal flavor highlights each of the items she grows in her garden. It’s not an instant-flame kind of hot, it’s a slow, smoldering development of flavor on your tongue.

“All it is, is peppers and garlic, basically,” she said, adding that she puts in some spices and sugars, too.

Hernandez has spent years perfecting her two signature hot sauce recipes.

She started making her own sauces years ago, when all she could grow were peppers while she was living in the suburbs in Sarasota. She researched recipes online, then experimented with a trial-and-error process. She eventually found the right mix.

The red jalapeño peppers she uses are only a few inches long, and it takes about a pound of them to make one bottle of

sriracha. She cooks the peppers with a blend of spices and other items from her garden, lets the mixture sit in jars for 10 days and then cooks it again to finish the flavor.

“We put hot sauce on every-thing,” Hernandez said. She serves her sauce as a salsa with chips, adds it into other dishes, slathers it on chicken — anything that needs a kick.

Her other signature sauce is what she calls carrot sriracha sauce. It was inspired by a dish she tasted in Belize, which was flavored with a carrot-based hot sauce. After she tried it, she decided she would start making that, too.

“I bought a bottle, and the ingredients were basic, so I had to play with it a little to make my own sauce,” she said.

Everything she puts in her sauce is something she has grown herself — onions, garlic, herbs, carrots, peppers.

When Hernandez and her husband, David, moved from Sarasota to a home on Upper Manatee River Road six years ago, there wasn’t one fruit tree or produce-bearing plant on the five-acre property. Now they are growing not only ingredients for hot sauces but also pomelos, bananas, apples, oranges, lemons, limes, star fruit and cherries. They also have a few rows of grapes to make their own wine, and 14 free-range hens, all with their own names, of course.

She’s still letting her grove mature before she tries to start selling her sauce regularly. The Hernandezes  hope to turn their land into an income-generating retirement pastime. For now, she makes her wine and hot sauce for her family, friends and occasionally sells them at the Myakka Market.

“I take care of my girls (hens), my trees, my garden, that’s what I do,” she said. “It’s a full-time job.”

Hernandez hasn’t been completely without help, however. In the last year, Heike Caspary, a neighbor, has become her close friend and an apprentice to hot sauce making.            

The two women connected over their love of food and have become integral parts of each other’s kitchens. They both love to cook, love to try new recipes and experiment with different fruits they find at the farmers market. Now, when they visit each other’s houses, they stay up late into the night — in the kitchen.

 “The sauce blew me away,” Caspary said. “I try to make my own, too, but I’m still learning.”