I love hot sauces like the next chili head, but sometimes I just want the heat without any pronounced flavoring. Most sauces have intense flavoring that often takes away from the flavor of the food it is applied to. No better example here than the venerable Tabasco sauce, which has a real take it or leave it flavor.
Anyway, it's easy to make a good hot seasoning and the good thing is you can control the heat, the flavor and the amount of sodium.
Remember that whenever you reduce a sauce, or dry a food product, you are evaporating water and therefore intensifying the flavor. Most people don't think of intense flavor when they think about a plain old tomato, but you dehydrate that puppy and it's a veritable taste sensation.
So here's what we'll do -
Take a couple large beef toms, or 4/5 smaller Roma's or whatever, slice them paper thin and lay them on a dry non-stick baking tray. Take a dozen of your favorite peppers, de-stalk them and cut them in half. Leave the seeds intact. Remember what I said about the dehydration process intensifying the flavor, it's also going to intensify the heat level, so if you're not at the Habanero level, go with something like serrano's. You can mix and match too, to get your favorite flavor.
So lay the halved peppers around the tray and bake the whole thing on low heat (275) for 5-6 hours until the peppers and tomatoes are all dried out.
Scrape them off the baking tray into a bowl and crumble them into small pieces. (protect your hands - or don't handle your wiener for at least 12 hours).
Once crumbled, put the mix in a spice grinder and grind to a powder. Use in a salt shaker on all your favorite dishes.
You can experiment with additional veggies like onion, garlic etc, to steer the flavor in your particular direction.
Enjoy.
