Fermented Hot Sauce

Every year I name my hot sauce something different. Last year, my older son Felix got to choose. But this year, in honor of my dad, I named this batch Caiman Bite which will remind me of a trip we took together to the Peruvian Amazon back in 2005. One evening, as the sun was about to set over the jungle, our guide paddled our small boat along one of the small tributaries near Iquitos. The next thing we knew, the guide casually reached into the water and pulled up a medium sized caiman which he then passed off to another member of our group. In a moment of panic, the woman next to my dad let go of the caiman’s mouth and it dropped to the bottom of the boat. As it thrashed around in anger it ended up sinking it’s teeth into my dad’s knee, giving him a proper souvenir of our trip and a memory that I’ll never forget. This year’s batch of fermented hot sauce was made with homegrown arapahos, hot paper lanterns, and sweet cornito rosso peppers - along with a little garlic, salt, and about 3 months of slow fermentation. Video about the process below.

Recipe

Mix of hot & sweet peppers

2 teaspoons of sea salt

2 - 3 cloves of garlic

Water

White Vinegar

24 oz mason jar

Fermenting lid (Nourished Essentials)

This recipe is designed around having your own home garden. It comes together gradually throughout the summer as the peppers ripen vs doing it all in one big batch. It begins in the early part of the season (for me it was early July) when the first peppers start to ripen. I roughly chop the peppers and garlic in a food processor to make the mash. Depending on the type of peppers, I’ll add water very gradually so that the surface of the mash is covered with a thin layer of liquid (water + pepper juice). The mash is thick so there is not a lot of excess water. Eventually it all gets thinned out in later steps. For each 24 oz mason jar I’ll add approximately 2 - 3 teaspoons of salt. Mix very well to incorporate all of the salt. I like to use 24 oz mason jars with an airlocked fermenting lid to ferment my mash. Once I exceed 24 oz, I’ll just start another jar mostly because of the space available in my refrigerator but if you have the room this can all be done in one large fermenting vessel. 

Set out at room temperature for about a week. You’ll start to see the natural fermentation after a few days as bubbles begin to form in the mash. Stir once a day. After a week move the fermenting jar into the fridge where it will stay for the next three months. 

As more peppers ripen throughout the season, you’ll continue to make your mash and mix it together with the pre-fermented mash already in the refrigerator. Mix together very well. If you are exceeding the 24 oz jar and need to begin a new jar, it is important to first mix together the pre-fermented mash and the new mash in a large bowl before dividing into the fermenting jars. This ensures there is a healthy pre-ferment in each separate batch. It is also important to try to adhere to the same salt to mash ratio as you begin to increase the volume of your mash throughout the season. Some marker and tape on the outside of the jar will make remembering your ratios easy.

At the end of the season which for me is early October I’ll take all the slow fermented mash and pass it through a hand cranked food mill. This process removes all of the pulp and extracts just the pure liquid from the mash. At this point the mixture is quite thin, which will be further cut down with about 30 - 40 % of white vinegar (at room temperature). The blend will be bottled up in small hot sauce glass jars and stored in the refrigerator. The denser parts of the hot sauce will sink so the bottle just needs to be shaken before use. 

For a thicker hotsauce you could simply pass the entire mash through a Vitamix or food processor but this recipe is built around a lighter and more liquidy hot sauce.