hot sauce

We have been looking for more condiments to add flavour to our meals. A special offer at the local market presented an opportunity to try fermenting a hot sauce.

The process is straight forward.

Chop chillies or capsicum, some onion and garlic, cover with a brine solution and leave to ferment for 10-14 days. Once done, blitz the whole lot into a sauce and transfer to a sterilized, lidded container and store in the fridge. Since it will keep fermenting, slowly, a loose-lidded container is recommended.

One day, I’ll be able to make a hot sauce like this using produce from the garden.

First attempt: 2 November 2024

Details

We do like some heat, but since this is a first attempt, this one is very much on the mild side.

Ingredients

  • 15g Bird’s eye chillies (red)

  • 15g long red chillies

  • 200g bull horn peppers (yellow, orange and red)

  • 200g red onion

  • 12g garlic (3 cloves), peeled

  • 450ml 3% brine (approx. 13.5g salt dissolved)

Notes

2024-11-02: Started fermentation. Stored in a cupboard with the door closed, sitting in a small plastic container slightly larger than the jar. Just in case.

2024-11-06: Definite signs of fermentation (brine going cloudy, bubbles). Scooped a few pieces of vegetables floating on the surface, because the glass fermentation weight slipped down into the jar and let them float up. Next time, I wouldn’t chop the vegetables so finely. I would also make sure to really fill the jar with ingredients in the expectation that they will compress down a bit as they ferment.

2024-11-09: Done. As a first hot sauce ferment, decided to call time after a week. Decanted solids and liquid into a glass bowl, blitzed with a stick blender and returned to the rinsed jar. It’s quite spicy and very tasty, but it’s very runny and not really combined as a sauce. Next time, I would leave it to ferment for longer, to help the onion flavour mellow. I also wouldn’t blend in as much of the brine and I would use a food processor better suited to emulsifiying food into liquids. Nevertheless, it’s now in the fridge (with the lid of the jar slightly loosened in case of further energetic fermentation), to slow fermentation but allow it to continue to mature. I will likely decant the large jar into two or three smaller ones and give some away.

2024-11-14: On reflection, this was a bit of a risky ferment. The brine was 3% salt by weight, but by the time the vegetables were added, the actual ratio would have been closer to 1.5% salt for the total weight (water and vegetables), which is a bit low. While this seems to have worked out ok, I’ll keep a close eye on the hot sauce in the fridge, in case of mould. In future, I’ll weigh the water and vegetables to determine the total amount of salt to add to achieve the desired salt percentage (closer to 3-4%).