"dave weil" wrote

PS, instead of doing the alcohol thing, you could probably buy some
Dave's Insanity Sauce (based on habanero peppers), or any other firey
hot habanero/scotch bonnet sauce and just add that to the eggs. After
all, the capsaicin is already extracted and suspended in a liquid and
would probably mix well with the eggs. It's a bit more expensive, but
you don't have to spend the time in extraction.

I've gotten good results in under an hour with cayenne-pepper powder
and denatured alcohol; for all I know a long soak isn't essential even
with whole dried peppers. Might work just fine if one just put the dried
peppers in a blender, added enough alcohol to allow pureeing, and let
them whirl for a few minutes.

I'd worry about capsaicin staying with the seeds and pulp and such
that would get filtered out of sauce (sprayers kept clogging 'til I learned
to strain the mix really well), and probably add alcohol anyway.
(Remember: capsaicin is freely soluble in ethanol but only slightly
soluble in water; presumably, once one dilutes the mix to two gallons
or so, even if the capsaicin comes out of solution it should come out
as really tiny particles.) But I could just be being foolish he Dave's
Insanity and the hottest of the Mexican-made habanero sauces by El
Yucateco, such as "Salsa Kutbil-ik" (try a local Mexican grocery;
sometimes those have it at a reasonable price; the specialty hot-sauce
retailers mark it up to double the price or more), probably have enough
kick even without bringing in alcohol to get every bit of heat into
solution. In Florida near the sugar-cane fields (any town northeast, east,
or southeast of Lake Okeechobee, from maybe Ft. Pierce south), many
big grocery stores have a Jamaican section, where one can buy five-ounce
bottles full of mangled orange lumps labeled "Crushed Scotch Bonnet
Peppers Sauce." Not too expensive, and quite strong.

Just make sure that the sauce *is* hot. That's why I recommended
Dave's, because I know for sure how hot it is. Some other habanero
sauces might not be as concentrated...

They do vary. Many list "carrots" ahead of "habanero peppers" in the
ingredients, even those labeled "Habanero Sauce" boldly. "Salsa
Kutbil-ik" lists habaneros as the first ingredient, and the "Crushed
Scotch Bonnet Peppers Sauce" by JCS lists, sure enough, Scotch
Bonnet peppers. If the hot peppers don't come first, don't even consider
it. If a major ingredient is pepper oleoresin, it means they've added
extra heat extracted from other peppers: the oleoresin usually has a
fair amount of capsaicin.

I'm still gonna build a fence. If the rains stop long enough, I mean.

Mark., Henri fizzled out, thank Heaven