Hot Sauce - Fermentation of a Different Sort

While we're a beer club and largely focused on running ethanol fermentations (beer, mead, wine, cider), we know that the world of fermentation lives all around us and fuelled the rise of humanity. 

In that spirit, I gave a talk to the club about how easy it is to make a "lacto fermented" hot sauce using the abundance of our gardens and farmers' markets. It turns out it's astonishingly easy in comparison to making beer and really a practice you should incorporate into your life!

September's meeting will feature the first ever Maltose Falcons Hot Sauce Competition!

• clean your peppers and other vegetation. (Drew likes to destem many of the peppers)
• Coarsely chop the mash (Drew gives everything a quick pulse in a food processor to a rough chop like a pico de gallo - not a puree)
• Weigh the resulting mash (IN GRAMS!)
• Weigh out enough kosher or non-iodized salt to be 2-3.5% of the weight of the mash (IN GRAMS) - e.g. if you have 1000g of mash - weigh out 20-35 grams of salt. (More salt, the slower the ferment)
• Mix the salt into the pepper mash and let it sit for 20-30 minutes. 
  • if you want "insurance" add a dose of live brine from sauerkraut or a previous pickle to the mash as a kickstarter
• Put the now very wet mash into a clean and sanitized fermenting space (e.g. a mason jar with a lid or a vacuum sealed bag!). Use a weight (or water filled ziploc bag) to keep the mash under the brine.
• Let ferment for 1-3 weeks
• Blend, adjust acid, sugar and seasoning levels to your taste and bottle and store in the fridge!

The Super Rooster Recipe (pictured above)

520g Red Jalapeños/Fresnos
275g Red Italian Frying peppers
221g Cayennes
86g Thai Bird's Eye
55g Habaneros
65g Garlic

27g Kosher Salt (2.5%)* 

1 oz Sauerkraut Brine

• - cleaned peppers and garlic yielded 1078g
  

After a 3 week fermentation, puree the peppers and press through a sieve to remove seeds and skins. Take the remaining mash , mix in a bit of the clean puree and re-blend to extract as much product as possible. Sieve and you should have a perfect smooth sauce. For this batch, I added about 50ml of apple cider vinegar, 8g of honey, 0.5g Ascorbic acid and then after pureeing and sieving, about 0.5g of Xanthan gum as a stabilizer.