Brad Chadwick
Registered User
- Jan 16, 2017
- 114
- 1
Good morning,
It's a pleasure to roll out another BFFoF and this week's is dear 2 my heart. Like many other gardenbros I've been growing a lot of chilies in my yard and many a pepper is ready and ripe for picking! SO EXCITING!
I love various peppers and have more than enough to give away and still be saddled with buckets of these spicy fruits. So what do you do when you have chili megawealth???
I make hot sauce. Now a lot of hipster food nerds are getting into "craft hot sauce" probably because sriracha is so popular like over 10 years ago due to 4chan memes and what not, and the hot sauce making is supposedly a manly thing too.
IDK, i just use a lot of hotsauce as a condiment and in cooking so might as well make it especially if i grow the main ingredient right?
So ppl are like reverse engineering it by flavor - and I guess some idiots just think you put peppers in a blender with some vinegar and puree that and it's hot sauce. Well, i guess. But we can do better.
It takes some time, but there's this thing called lacto-fermentation and its basically the foundation for any legit good tasting hot sauce out there. Sriracha, fermented. Tobasco, Fermented.
How do you do it, Brad? I get asked literally all the time. For the last 2 weeks probably at least 3 or 4 times. So here's what I tell em:
Take peppers from ur yard. don't wash them. leave them out on a counter in a bowl for a day (make sure u don't have fruit flies) this allows natural yeasts to collect (there's already good yeasty bacteria on the peppers though)
Then take maybe a Tablespoon of sea salt, dissolve it into a mason jar of FILTERED WATER. Pack peppers into another mason jar, and then dump the saltwater brine into the jar with the packed peppers until everything is submerged (can't have any veg exposed to air) Screw a cap on that and put it in the basement away from sunlight for at least a month.
You can go check on it after a week and it should be fizzy when u shake it up, if it's really fizzy, gently unscrew the cap a little just to let some of the yeasty fart gas out. The peppers will get tangy, because the **** from teh yeast eating the sugars of the peppers is literally lactic acid.
After you got that tang go ahead and dump that all in a blender and swazz it up. strain for thin sauce, maybe add a little vinegar at this point but that will kill of any beneficial bacteria, but whatevs, it's whatever taste you want.
You can add in garlic or other stuff into the fermentation stage as well. You can puree peppers before fermenting too, which can give you a speedier ferment.
It's not the only way to make hot sauce but it's the right way. U can also make sauerkraut and pickles doing this but that's for another BFFoF i guess.
Anyone do this b4? any thing i'm missing? Any other best practices?
Do you put hot sauce on ur steak?
Looking forward to your fave hot sauce stories ITT.
It's a pleasure to roll out another BFFoF and this week's is dear 2 my heart. Like many other gardenbros I've been growing a lot of chilies in my yard and many a pepper is ready and ripe for picking! SO EXCITING!
I love various peppers and have more than enough to give away and still be saddled with buckets of these spicy fruits. So what do you do when you have chili megawealth???
I make hot sauce. Now a lot of hipster food nerds are getting into "craft hot sauce" probably because sriracha is so popular like over 10 years ago due to 4chan memes and what not, and the hot sauce making is supposedly a manly thing too.
IDK, i just use a lot of hotsauce as a condiment and in cooking so might as well make it especially if i grow the main ingredient right?
So ppl are like reverse engineering it by flavor - and I guess some idiots just think you put peppers in a blender with some vinegar and puree that and it's hot sauce. Well, i guess. But we can do better.
It takes some time, but there's this thing called lacto-fermentation and its basically the foundation for any legit good tasting hot sauce out there. Sriracha, fermented. Tobasco, Fermented.
How do you do it, Brad? I get asked literally all the time. For the last 2 weeks probably at least 3 or 4 times. So here's what I tell em:
Take peppers from ur yard. don't wash them. leave them out on a counter in a bowl for a day (make sure u don't have fruit flies) this allows natural yeasts to collect (there's already good yeasty bacteria on the peppers though)
Then take maybe a Tablespoon of sea salt, dissolve it into a mason jar of FILTERED WATER. Pack peppers into another mason jar, and then dump the saltwater brine into the jar with the packed peppers until everything is submerged (can't have any veg exposed to air) Screw a cap on that and put it in the basement away from sunlight for at least a month.
You can go check on it after a week and it should be fizzy when u shake it up, if it's really fizzy, gently unscrew the cap a little just to let some of the yeasty fart gas out. The peppers will get tangy, because the **** from teh yeast eating the sugars of the peppers is literally lactic acid.
After you got that tang go ahead and dump that all in a blender and swazz it up. strain for thin sauce, maybe add a little vinegar at this point but that will kill of any beneficial bacteria, but whatevs, it's whatever taste you want.
You can add in garlic or other stuff into the fermentation stage as well. You can puree peppers before fermenting too, which can give you a speedier ferment.
It's not the only way to make hot sauce but it's the right way. U can also make sauerkraut and pickles doing this but that's for another BFFoF i guess.
Anyone do this b4? any thing i'm missing? Any other best practices?
Do you put hot sauce on ur steak?
Looking forward to your fave hot sauce stories ITT.
