This is the first in a series on my hot sauce experiment. Today, I show you how I started to make my own homemade hot sauce. Click on the other links (when they are written) to read the other articles.
I love hot sauce. The other day I made Red Hot Spicy Brussel Sprouts, which is basically frying the brussel sprouts and loading them full of store bought hot sauce. Here’s the article if you are interested. But the store bought sauces can be loaded with salt. Anyway, to make a long story short, I decided to try an experiment on how to make homemade hot sauce to avoid the salt and to try something new.
I read about 20 blogs that all had different recipes for how to make hot sauce. All of them looked good, but there seemed to be two primary thoughts. The first was to simmer the ingredients in a pan and then basically juice it. The second was to ferment the peppers. I chose to experiment with the fermenting. It seems more authentic to me. But, I really have no idea because I have never even tried this.
When it comes to fermenting peppers, there were several different techniques on how to do this. I tried two which are a hybrid of what I read. One blended the ingredients into a soup and added a pinch of salt. The other chopped the ingredients and put them in a white wine to ferment. I used the same blend of peppers and added a little garlic as well to each batch. I added different kinds of peppers and the garlic because I thought it might give the hot sauce more of a rounded flavor. I guess we will have to wait and find out!
While Tabasco sauce is fermented for three years, most bloggers said a month or so would be sufficient. Here’s what I did:
Ingredients on hand: 1/3 went to the wine test, 2/3 went to the soup test.
- 10 Serrano Peppers
- 10 Habanero Pepper
- 1 Jalepeno Pepper
- 1.5 Cloves Garlic
- Pinch of Salt
Directions for the first batch using the wine technique:
- Chopped all of the ingredients.
- Place in a mason jar.
- cover the ingredients with white wine 1/2 inch over the ingredients.
- Wait for one month. Stir and check for mold every other day. If there is mold, spoon it out.
The second batch used blended the peppers together.
- Place the ingredients in a blender and liquefy
- Place in a mason jar.
- Wait for one month. Stir and check for mold every other day. If there is mold, spoon it out.
What will happen? I don’t know~ But I will write some posts along the way.
