A Batch of Jungle Sauce, Start to Finish

There's no factory here — just steel bowls, a lot of habaneros, and a kitchen that smells like it for days afterward. Every batch of Jungle Sauce starts the same way: chillies washed and sorted by hand, checked one by one for the ones ripe enough to use.

From there it's garlic, coriander — leaf and seed — black pepper, brown sugar and cane vinegar, blended down until the texture is right rather than to a fixed clock. Some batches come out finer, some a little chunkier. We'd rather it taste consistent than look identical from bottle to bottle.

The last stretch is the slowest part: filling bottles one at a time, capping each by hand, checking for drips and air pockets before it goes anywhere near a box. It's not the fastest way to do it, but it's the only way we've done it so far, and we're in no hurry to change that while it's still just us doing it.

This is the part of the process nobody sees when a bottle shows up on a shelf. We wanted somewhere to show it.