Skip to content

How to Make Hot Sauce for Just $65 per Bottle

2023-10-31 · letter vlog · John · 3:28 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Personal life · mode: Personal update · tags: heavy topic

In a mock how-to, John walks through the eight-month process of growing heirloom peppers and fermenting them into homemade hot sauce with his mom, and says the hobby eases his anxiety; the description and a channel comment point viewers to a Crash Course video and his Reddit post on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Anxiety; growing weird pepper varietals from seed in the bathtub, planting, weeding and harvesting thousands

  • ★★ John tells Hank he is a little overwhelmed with anxiety at the moment. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ John starts pepper seeds in a portable planter in the guest bathtub, choosing weird early-20th-century varietals (habaneros, lipstick peppers, paper lanterns) rather than common ghost peppers. (playful) — 00:00:08
  • ★ Around April the seedlings go into the garden, followed by four months of weeding and watering. (playful) — 00:00:29
  • ★★ John says he grows the peppers not to be happy but to keep himself sane: it is good for him to touch plants and take care of something. — 00:00:39
  • ★★ John went a little over the top this year (2023) and harvested peppers by the thousands. (playful) — 00:00:51

00:00:58 — Making fermented pepper-mash hot sauce: blending, salting, fermenting, the mold check, blending with garlic and vinegar, bottling

  • ★★ John makes a pepper-mash sauce: stems cut, peppers blended until nearly liquid, then salted at about a tablespoon per three pounds of peppers. (playful) — 00:01:06
  • ★★ The mash ferments in labelled jars (one called Mostly Scotch Bonnet), burped daily while getting the kids ready for school, for about three weeks. (playful) — 00:01:30 · Sharpie
  • ★★ Opening the jars is the risky moment: mold would mean all the work was for nothing; this year (2023) there was no mold. (playful) — 00:01:50
  • ★★ John says homemade hot sauce is miles better than store-bought, though he does not even like hot sauce that much. — 00:02:05
  • ★ The mash is blended with garlic and white wine vinegar, here a pepper vinegar his mom made from excess peppers, then taste-tested and bottled. — 00:02:20 · Sydney Green
  • ★★ John cannot sell the sauce, since it was not made in a commercial kitchen and would need about $80 a bottle to profit, so he gives it to family and friends for the holidays. — 00:02:50

00:02:55 — Giving it to family and friends; hobbies shared with his mom ease anxiety; sign-off

  • ★★★ Finishing the sauce leaves John a little less anxious: it is good to have hobbies, especially one shared with his mom. — 00:03:00 · Sydney Green

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description says John and his mom make homemade hot sauce that costs $65 per bottle, takes about eight months and has a fairly high chance of catastrophic failure. (playful) — video description · Sydney Green
  • ★ In a channel comment John says the bottles last a year if refrigerated. — creator comment
  • ★★ Noting that many viewers asked for their comments on the Israel-Palestine conflict, the description points to a Crash Course video on the conflict's history for context. — video description · Crash Course
  • ★★ John says he has written grief-stricken and worried thoughts on the current conflict in a Reddit post. — video description · Reddit
  • ★★ Asked why his conflict statement is not a video, John says a Reddit post in their community usually reaches more readers over time than an average vlogbrothers video. — creator comment · Reddit
  • ★★ John says he wanted to be intentional with each word, while in videos, even scripted ones, he always veers off the script. — creator comment
  • ★★ John says he did not want a clippable audio or video statement that could be edited into misinformation on TikTok, which he has often seen in recent weeks. — creator comment · TikTok
  • ★★ In a channel comment John says he has a bit of dread pressing in from every direction, so this video is a kind of sequel to an earlier 'How to Cook' video a viewer named. — creator comment

Humor (significant)

  • John offers a how-to for making hot sauce at an absurd cost per bottle. — 00:00:00

    “Here's a video about how to make hot sauce if you want your hot sauce to cost about $65 per bottle.”

  • John grows his pepper seedlings in the guest bathtub. — 00:00:29

    “you grow these seeds in a bathtub, which is a totally normal thing to do”

  • Reassuring viewers that getting the salt ratio wrong will not ruin the whole process. — 00:01:27

    “just kidding it will”

  • Burping the fermentation jars lets gas out. — 00:01:40

    “i don't know what kind of gas i don't know how fermentation works”

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Sharpie · Sydney Green

Only in the description or credits: Crash Course · Israeli–Palestinian conflict · misinformation · Reddit · TikTok

← Previous: I Keep Thinking About Taylor Swift · Next → We Need to talk about Sarapocial Relationships