Fermenting Hot Sauce

[Syzygies]

That looks like hot sauce, Syzy.

What was your recipe/technique?

Yup. I've been making around 3 gallons a year for friends, for the past five years. I don't make beer, wine, anchovies, you name it because I can buy better. The uniform position of my friends is to remind me that we can't buy better hot sauce, and the new season is upon us, have I started yet?

I read up on classic hot sauce fermentation (pack pepper mash and salt into an oak barrel for three years, trim off the black, add vinegar), and tried to figure out how to modernize in small batches. My goal is no artifice, the straightest line from A to B, a recipe anyone would discover coming at the same problem. (As in, if you feel the temptation to add your special mark, just don't! One is aiming for a classic.)

We live near a national beer-making supply outlet (http://morebeer.com/), so it's easy to buy carboys, fermentation locks, cleaners and pH equipment. I have a commercial blender (the Vita-Prep) which undoubtedly makes working with the pepper mash easier, but isn't essential. The key is to recognize that a quick ferment (a month or two) is the same kind of process as making sauerkraut or kimchi. If one can find either that hasn't been preserved or sterilized, the juice makes a perfect starter. Fermenting is key; I've tried both ways, and skipping the fermentation just isn't in the same league.

One risk in home fermentation of vegetables is botulism, which doesn't survive below a pH of 4.6, while the fermentation drives the pH well below this point. pH meters cost $80 and need maintenance more than once a year (replace saline storage solution around probe) to survive several seasons, but provide assurance one isn't about to bump off one's friends. Other than this, we don't sterilize the finished product, preferring the uncooked taste, and haven't had a problem.

Use disposable vinyl or latex gloves at all stages of handling the chiles. One could elaborate; just trust me on this one. Later, when adjusting the salt, taste in moderation.

One also has to go with the best local chiles, which can be an adventure to track down. (It is also possible to order pepper mash from afar, but I'd rather be the one picking over the peppers with a few beers and a baseball game on the radio.) We lately go with a Thai-style pepper sold on or off the bush in Asian farmers markets (Alemany is best) in the SF Bay area, which looks a lot like the original tabasco pepper. The riper the color, the less vegetable left to ferment; we've seen significant variant year-to-year in how active the bubbling and expansion of the mash gets, with this year's very ripe (and yes, very hot) mash a minimum. The three gallon carboy shown has headroom for the most expansion we've ever seen, yet we're only up an inch, which means that at night air is actually getting back into the jug through the fermentation lock. This could spell disaster; it hasn't yet. The oak barrels used to breathe; a friend of mine did lose a batch in New York to mold. If I had a fridge in the garage with room, I'd certainly experiment with a longer cold ferment, which would need less worst-case headroom, and might be dramatically better in flavor.

Our recipe: Buy 12 pounds of chiles to make a couple gallons of mash, stem and pick over. Grind with 8% sea salt by weight and distilled water; strain the mash to recycle the water, so one has enough liquid for the blender action, without making the mash too soupy. Include kimchi juice now and/or pour it on top later. Adjust the pH to 3.2 by adding several TB of white vinegar per gallon. Funnel the mash carefully into a sterilized 3 gallon carboy (splatter can encourage mold) and stopper with a fermentation lock, using vinegar again as the lock liquid. Let ferment a month or two until activity subsides, then fill with champagne vinegar (white vinegar will do, but champagne vinegar is neutral yet more refined). After an arbitrary delay (a month? When you get around to this...) grind the mash again as finely as possible, add more sea salt to taste, sieve and bottle in 5 oz "woozy" bottles easily found on the web. Sterilize the bottles before filling in a boiling water bath.

We apply labels with packing tape, and seal the caps with good vinyl electrical tape, for a nice home/pro balance. One can seal with heat shrink tubing; it's more work.