I made this sauce last night when I got home from work. It came out great! Prep time was about 15 minutes (mincing all the fresh ingredients, get all of the other items out of the pantry, etc.). Take the time to mince the pepper and onion fairly small and you won't have to worry about the chunkiness some of the others mentioned in above posts. I am going to hit one of my finished containers with a stick blender to smooth it out and see if it winds up tasting any different then the ones that I leave as is. Keep an eye on the garlic, don't let it go much past a minute or it will start to brown too much and get bitter. That may be the reason for the problem danelmore had (there is not too much else in this recipe that would cause a bad taste-maybe the lemon juice if it was rancid, other then that nothing else really has a spoilage issue). I had the two cans of tomato sauce open and ready to go so I could get them in there as soon as the garlic was done to stop the cooking process in the pan. And make sure you a big enough pan. I used a large non-stick dutch oven and it barely fit in there. I went with that because of the larger surface area, which would lead to more evaporation and better thickening of the sauce. Jblamb asked about covered or uncovered- I would have to say uncovered in order to get the moisture out of there so the sauce will reduce and thicken and to condense all of the flavors. I let mine sit on the stove for four hours, taking about two hours to bring it to a low simmer. The kitchen smelled great! Every time I went in there to stir it the aroma just hit you right in the nose! It wound up reducing down by about 1/3. The next time I try this I want to make it earlier in the day so I can let it reduce down to about 1/2 and thicken it even more. Right now it is still a little thin, but not that bad. Definitely thicker then when it started out. Hopefully when I get home tonight it will thicken up a bit from being in the fridge. The finished yield was just about 2 1/2 quarts of sauce. As for the taste...WOW! It is just the right amount of sweetness with some bite on the back end. I used one jalapeno in it and it is perfect. My wife, who doesn't like hot & spicy, thought it was very tasty. Just enough she said. I am going to use this as a side sauce served with a butt I am making this weekend. I will also use it on a rack of ribs I am going to throw in the smoker while the butt is cooking because honestly I can't wait to see how this glazes up and finishes on a rack of ribs. I think it is going to be excellent. I give it a big thumbs up, would absolutely make again!
