Thanks, Ken, Zabby, and jt! I have dried alot of peppers in the past, at those low temps.....but haven't made Hab Sauces before. Since i would use less of these peppers than other sauces we like - i am glad to hear that flavor would still be in place! We are moderate corp types, and don't especially seek out pain in our eatings :) I make alot of sauces of dried peppers that are steeped with garlic and various vinegars and salt to taste, make blended chili powders, dehydrated hot sauce powder, and varietals dried for cooking. Love those plants! I hope to use the hotties along with things such as peach, mango, carrot/onion/garlic blends, etc. Just want to taste the pepper thru all the mixers! Have any of you ever made fermented mash for sauces? I had best start a new post for a new topic on that. I appreciate your inspirations here. The tiny freezer is almost full.. and i still need to freeze the bundles of seed harvest each for a few days. How i miss my beloved BIG freezer now. Good growing, Glad

"But actually it isn't all that difficult to know the approved ones as there are so few of them for spaghetti sauce since it is a low acid product. NCHFP/USDA publications, which includes the ones in So Easy to Preserve, and those in the Ball/Bernardin books. That's it. There aren't any in Small Batch Preserving." Well, it may not call itself spaghetti sauce, but there is "Chunky Basil Pasta Sauce" with fresh herbs and veges in Small Batch Preserving, and also "Roasted Vegetable Pasta Sauce" with both veges and fresh herbs in Small Batch Preserving, and also "Seasoned Tomato Sauce" with veges and fresh herbs that Small Batch Preserving suggests using in "pasta sauces, soups, stews, pizza, or casseroles." So, although the OP did leave the door open to reasonable questions about recipe safety, it is also good to take care in making broad statements about recipes which include such phrases as "there are no recipes which. . .", or "all approved recipes for (pasta sauce, salsa, whatever) MUST be. . ." since there may well be a safe recipe which allows such processing. For example: you CAN use fresh herbs in the approved NCHFP spaghetti sauce recipe, as this email from Elizabeth Andress states: Thank you for visiting the National Center for Home Food Preservation. > question -> Spaghetti Sauce without Meat: > 1. Can I eliminate the celery/peppers completely? > 2. Can I use fresh herbs or only dried? > 3. Can I add basil (fresh or dried)? > 4. Can I eliminate the sugar? For our particular procedures: http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/how/can_03/spaghetti_sauce.html You can leave out the celery and peppers completely, leaving everything else the same. (The mushrooms are already optional, also.) If you use fresh herbs, make sure they are very clean. I can only recommend using the equivalent volume measures, though, and that may not give you the flavor you desire. Eg., instead of 2 TBSP dried oregano, use 2 TBSP minced fresh oregano. I do not have enough information to know the upper limit on how much fresh to add, so that's all I can suggest without testing. (which we cannot do). You can use basil as a substitute for one of the other herbs (eg, you may not want the parsley with basil). Or, if you are leaving out the celery and peppers completely, you could add 2 to 4 TBSP of basil. Yes, you can eliminate the sugar in this recipe. The chopped celery and/or peppers and the sugar add a little moisture/liquid in many recipes. In this particular sauce, however, it is cooked down to thickened consistency anyway, so the amount of liquid that would be added by these ingredients would not be important as it might be in other types of food products/mixtures. Best wishes, Elizabeth Andress -------------------------------------- Elizabeth L. Andress, Ph.D. Project Director, National Center for HFP Professor and Extension Food Safety Specialist Department of Foods and Nutrition The University of Georgia 208 Hoke Smith Annex Athens, GA 30602-4356 Phone: (706) 542-3773 FAX: (706) 542-1979 -----------------------------------------------

There is a Carolina Cayenne listed above(developed in the U.S.A. 100,000-125,000)that gets in the range the add says. When I grew it ,it was hotter than regular Cayenne but I only grew it once. There are probably tons of hybrids/developed cayenne types out there that are in all different heat ranges. I was refering to Cayenne in general. Maybe it was my growing conditions but in general , I don't think Cayenne peppers pack that much heat. I haven't grown them in a while. I use mostly C.Chinense,Baccatums and Pubescens for my powders and rubs heat. Annuums I use mostly for flavor.Especially Chile Negro , Poblano and Cascabel. For short intense bursts of heat a lot of the Frutescens do the trick. I grow a lot of Pubescens too. They'll fool you though. They have all 3 kinds of Caspaicin in them so they feel hotter than they are. They hit up all the receptors in your mouth. I'm more into using several types of peppers to blend together to get the taste and heat i want. I'm growing several strains of 7 Pot,Trinidad Scorpion ,Nagas and Bhuts this year with a couple seasoning type peppers to mellow them out. I guess if the growers are using a similar strain to the Carolina Cayenne type for their powder it could reach up to 125,000 units. I've just never had a Cayenne that I thaught was anything to write home about as far as heat goes. I did like yellow Cayenne better than the other ones for taste when I grew them a few years back. I've grown several different ones.Regular assorted Cayennes,Long Slim,Long red,Yellow,Carolina,Thomas Jefferson,African,Purple,Super,Orange,Golden,Turkish,Picante,Portugal,Processing and sweet.

I agree, as long as you are longing for the salt flavor, you won't notice the other flavors. My favorite way to dress pasta is to sautee some garlic, add chopped fresh tomatoes just until warmed, toss in the pasta, add copious amounts of chopped fresh basil, some pepper and freshly grated parmesan, yummy. Those fresh homegrown SunGold cherry tomatoes are lovely for this purpose. Of course I don't like the cooked tomato sauces very much, so.... And, as has been mentioned, if the tomatoes weren't wonderful, the sauce won't be. Sometimes canned tomatoes really are better than fresh. My doctor told me yesterday that average humans have 10,000 taste buds. Those regenerate approximately every 10 days to 2 weeks, so we get a whole new set of taste buds. If you don't get the new taste buds accustomed to salt, you won't miss it after a few weeks, and will even notice the salty flavor more, so there's hope. As for the tomato powder, I haven't tried it. I sliced tomatoes, put them in the dehydrator. 40 HOURS LATER, they were still flesible but certainly couldn't be powdered. And yes, they were homegrown tomatoes and yes, I have a very nice Excaliber dehydrator, so that's not it. It just didn't work and was a waste of time and perfectly good tomatoes. Well, it wasn't, because I re-hydrated the tomatoes by throwing them in soup, but they couldn't be powdered. so, I'd suggest you buy some of the commercially prepared stuff first and see if it helps, then you could try to make your own, hopefully with better success than I had. Also, if you get tomatoes that are wonderful in season, you can just wash them and toss them in the freezer in a bag. When they thaw, the skins slip right off and you have really good tomatoes. If you have any freezer room, LOL. I can mine and that way I can add no salt at all and still have wonderful home grown tomatoes in the middle of winter. Annie