About once a month, you can find Van Horvath chopping up 12 cups of onions in this St. Johnsville commercial kitchen. It’s one of several ingredients the 15-year-old will use to make Van’s Hot Sauce.

“It’s more like a versatile condiment versus a typical hot sauce,” Horvath said.

It takes him about three hours to make seven cases of his hot sauce, each carrying 12 five-ounce bottles. And Horvath is careful to get the right amounts of habanero peppers, mustard, vinegar, and garlic in order to make it perfect.

“I switched over to do, like, actual weighting it, because it is gets much more precise versus measuring it in cups,” Horvath said.

It’s a flavor he wanted to replicate after enjoying a similar sauce in the Caribbean on a family vacation a few years ago. It took 30 attempts, but Horvath finally got it right.

With his hot sauce growing in popularity, he decided to start making and selling it in bulk at a commercial kitchen. Last year, Van’s Hot Sauce debuted in some local stores in his hometown of Galway.

“It’s such, like, satisfaction, like a surreal sight,” Horvath said. “You wouldn’t expect to see something that you made just for fun back in the days on an actual shelf, in a store.”

As the finished sauce cools and its flavor fills the room, the next step is the most time consuming part - the bottling.

Horvath has ideas in mind on more sauce recipes for the future. But for now, he’s opened to sharing his latest flavorful creation with even more stores and restaurants.