Original Bajan Pepper Sauce

Pirate's Lantern

https://pirateslantern.com/

Pirate’s Lantern Pepper Sauce is uniquely a Barbados-style hot sauce. What makes this style distinctive is the use of two key ingredients: Scotch Bonnet peppers and mustard.

Seductively sweet, yet sinfully hot, Scotch Bonnet peppers are scarlet in color and range from 100,000 to 350,000 Scoville units. In their native Barbados, these peppers contribute a level of heat that helps the locals keep cool in the tropical climate by causing a mild perspiration.

Mustard adds the vibrant color and bold flavor that are essential to a great Barbados-style pepper sauce. Mustard also plays an important role in texture, as it helps to thicken the sauce naturally without the use of additives. However, this sauce should not be confused with spicy mustard. While the aroma of the mustard is quite noticeable, the taste of this Barbados-style pepper sauce signals that a more complex flavor palette is at play, thanks to the cast of other ingredients.

While on the topic of key ingredients, its worth mentioning the use of one other ingredient that makes our pepper sauce that more unique and that is rum. Why rum, or pirate’s gold, as we prefer to call it? It might not seem an obvious choice, but in our family, it’s tradition—four generations worth, to be exact. Our great grandmother, a religious woman seeking to temper her husband’s drinking, used to sneak a bit of rum into her pepper sauce just so there’d be less going into his glass. When she discovered how it enhanced the flavors of her sauce, that rum earned a permanent place in the family recipe.

Each bottle contains a savory blend of Caribbean hot peppers (Scotch Bonnet peppers), mustard, vinegar, onions, salt, horseradish, and rum— a pirate’s gold. These simple and fresh ingredients are carefully controlled, starting with ideal proportions, added at just the right time, in just the right sequence. As the sauce slowly simmers, it thickens and evolves into the desired balance of heat, aroma, texture, and taste. When ready, the pepper sauce is promptly bottled, sealed, and sits for a period of time, letting the flavors develop further before it begins the journey to your dinner table.