If you hurry, you should still find a few bushels of local chiles here and there. Grab what you can — at least a couple quarts — and don’t worry about how glamorous they look; some are bound to be shriveled and beginning to dry. For this sauce recipe (which comes from my husband’s uncle, a painter from New Orleans who has lived in rural Mexico for the better part of 40 years) it doesn’t even matter what kind they are — though obviously the hotter the chiles the hotter the brew.

Once home with your stash, don’t refrigerate them. Green fruit will eventually turn red, orange, or yellow; you can make sauce at any stage, but I don’t like to mix ripe with unripe in the same batch. We grow ring-of-fire cayenne, poblano, and jalapeño, and the bottle you see here includes a mixture of the three, all fully ripened. I also make an all-green jalapeño that’s herbaceous, with slightly bitter notes.

When you’ve got 15 spare minutes and the color is where you want it, put on a pair of rubber gloves and get out the blender. After you rinse the chiles, chop the stem off each (I use scissors), get rid of any bad spots, and drop them into the container of the machine. You can core them and clean out the seeds, but why bother? This stuff is going to be hot no matter what you do.

Pour in enough white vinegar to submerge the chiles, along with a handful of salt. Puree until quite smooth. Transfer the sauce to a pot and bring to a boil, stirring once or twice. Seriously: at no time during either of these steps do you want your nose or eyes anywhere near the fumes that waft from these vessels. Funnel the sauce into a clean jar or bottle and cool. Then cover with a cloth napkin and let the mixture sit at room temperature for three days, undisturbed. Carefully pour off all but a thin layer of the vinegar (which true enthusiasts save for another use) and refrigerate. The sauce keeps for months; you’ll know if it goes off when it starts to ferment and get sort of effervescent. But you’ll use it all before then.