Add Lemon Juice To Homemade Hot Sauce For A Citrusy Kick

Unusual-hot-sauce-flavor-loving foodies, this one's for you. Making homemade hot sauce is an impressive, flavorful way to take your barbecues, meats, veggies, pasta, and dips to the next level. Plus, when you whip up a batch of hot sauce yourself, that mouth-watering, tear-inspiring, nose-running condiment becomes customizable. You can emphasize particular flavors, incorporate whatever ingredients you want, and manipulate the taste to exactly suit your preference — and on that note, for complex citrusy hot sauce, lemon juice can be used in place of vinegar or in addition to it.

Hot sauce needs an acid component, which typically comes from vinegar. Although, white vinegar, malt vinegar, apple cider vinegar, and all other varieties each come with their own unique taste, which influences the overall flavor of the sauce. To instantly impart a sweet-spicy-citrusy note into your homemade hot sauce, look no further than a dash of lemon juice. Fresh-squeezed is ideal but store-bought works, too.

Take this homemade sriracha recipe for example. The already-dimensional profile of red jalapeño peppers, garlic, and brown sugar would be even further complexified with a citrusy kick, by swapping the called-for ⅓ cup of white vinegar with ⅙ cup of white vinegar and ⅙ cup of lemon juice. Look to your go-to hot sauce recipe to determine how much lemon juice to add to your unique batch. You could even try using different types of peppers for spicier, sweeter, or more vegetal nuanced flavors, like Scotch bonnets, habaneros, fermented chilis, green chiles, jalapeños, serranos, or smoky roasted red peppers.

Some types of hot sauce, particularly sweeter ones, might fare totally fine by skipping the vinegar altogether and replacing it with lemon juice entirely. Lemon sans vinegar would bring a sweet-acidic kick to this mango habanero hot sauce (we're all about "swicy" homemade condiments here at Tasting Table). Other, more savory hot sauces, however, might perform better with equal parts vinegar and lemon juice. Vinegar's piquant dryness is essential for building a successful buffalo wing sauce, for instance, but a little lemon juice would round out the profile with a welcome acidic balance.

Now for the fun part: Putting that sauce to good use. You could drizzle your lemony hot sauce over a basket of fried fish and chips. Or, use it as a consommé for raw oysters on the half shell. Drizzle your citrusy hot sauce over shrimp and grits, or use it to dress some fresh mango slices to beat the heat during the dog days of summer. This citrusy spicy beauty doesn't have to just be a dressing, either. You could use it to amp up a batch of vegetarian paneer tikka masala to spicy vindaloo territory. Or, stir it into a casserole dish of baked mac and cheese with crunchy topping for a little maturity and color. Use it in meat marinades, stir it into dips, or use it to dress your chicken wings or loaded nachos.