Fermented Hot Sauce Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How long should you ferment hot sauce? ›

Culture at room temperature until the color of the peppers changes and dulls, usually 5-7 days. If you like, this ferment continue to ferment at room temperature for many months. We like it best after at least 3 months; the flavors become more complex and rich, the longer it ferments.

Add the fermented peppers to a food processor or blender, along with 1/2 cup of the brine and 1/2 cup vinegar. You can add more or less of each as desired to your preference. More brine will have more salty flavor, more vinegar will be more acidic.

Fermented hot sauce is a spicy, slightly acidic sauce made by fermenting hot chilis and other ingredients together in a jar or crock. Over time, the flavor will deepen, growing more complex and acidic as beneficial bacteria go to work.

In practice, most commercial hot sauce producers aim for a pH level of 4.2 or lower, just to be safe. For truly shelf-stable homemade sauces, the popular standard for pH is even lower—3.4 or below. You can also taste your ferment to gauge acidity.

Some people prefer a longer ferment for a more *funky* flavor, while others like a milder ferment. You can ferment your sauce as long as you like, so long as it doesn't grow mold or spoil.

Vinegar - this gets used at the end, and is to slow down the fermentation. It also gives a nice flavor. Use whatever vinegar matches the flavor profile you're looking for from your hot sauces.

White Vinegar

All hail the king of vinegars! White vinegar in hot sauce is by far the common vinegar. Really, the most common in all of cooking. It's made from a grain alcohol similar to vodka, so it has the most neutral taste out of any vinegar.

Several store-bought brands of hot sauce are fermented, including Tabasco, Huy Fong's Sriracha, and Frank's RedHot. However, you can make your own at home (easily!) with just three ingredients: chile peppers, salt, and garlic.

A fermented hot sauce must be stored in the fridge, or else have vinegar or citric acid cooked into it in order to make it shelf stable. Karla keeps some of her blends fresh in the fridge, with no additives, and to others adds vinegar at a rate of 1/4 cup per quart for longer-term storage.

Fermentation tends to mellow out the heat from chili peppers, so fermented hot sauces tend to be milder and have more flavor. Unfermented hot sauces tend to be hotter since these sauces have not undergone a fermentation process to mellow out the chili peppers.

Is fermented hot sauce healthy? ›

Along with the beneficial probiotics, the fermentation process is also known to increase bioavailable nutrients in food while producing B vitamins, lactic acid, and omega-3s. So when you consume fermented hot sauce, feeling awesome may result as a side effect!

Sriracha, in Thai “ศรีราชา”, is a sauce made with fermented chiles from Southeast Asia and very popular in Thailand. Its name comes from the city located on the beach Si Racha, where it emerged as a local product.

“Oxygen will feed mold.” “Oxygen will feed mold,” says Letourneau, which is why he prefers a vessel with an airlock lid to keep oxygen away. It's important to keep the ferment moving by stirring or shaking daily, remembering to re-secure the lid.

Optimal temperatures for fermenting range between 18-22°C/65-72°F, so if a ferment is too cold, it will still ferment, but just take longer. It if gets too warm it will speed up the rate at which the bacteria work, meaning your ferment will ferment quicker, which sounds good but isn't necessarily the case.

It is critical that you pasteurize the sauce by boiling before bottling if you want your sauce to last for a length of time. Boil blended sauce (120°C/248 °F) for 2 minutes while stirring (to prevent scorching on the bottom), and let rest for 20 min before bottling.

Don't worry, it's safe! Microorganisms can form a delicate and almost odourless white biofilm. This film covers all or part of the surface of the liquid in your fermentation jar. This biofilm is harmless to health.

The Tabasco chiles are chopped up, mixed with salt mined right from the island itself, then poured into old oak barrels to ferment in a barn for up to five years, although most of the mash is fermented only (!) three years.

You can also skip the sugar completely—peppers contain enough natural sugar—but adding sugar makes fermentation more visible the first few days (i.e. it bubbles a lot more!). With the brine prepared, fill your chosen fermentation jar with a small amount of your brine and roughly half of the spice mix.

Both overcooking and using an excessive amount of vinegar, which can result in a sour taste, can contribute to the unpleasant flavor of the finished product. To prevent this from happening, you should steer clear of hot sauces that contain ingredients with names like oleoresin, extract, or capsicum oil.

Since 1868, TABASCO^® brand Original Red Sauce has been handcrafted with just three ingredients: aged red peppers, salt and distilled vinegar.

What is the hot sauce trick? ›

She claimed that Drizzy poured hot sauce into a used condom in order to kill his sperm after they had sex. After the rapper allegedly disposed the condom, the model took it out of the bin and attempted to impregnate herself inside of the bathrooom.

Why? Because fermented hot sauce has a more complex tangy flavor that you can only get by fermenting. It's like a recipe of time, the fermentation "cooks" up more flavor than you could ever get without it. Plus, it has probiotics (like yogurt or kombucha), so it is really good for you as well.

When you ferment a hot sauce, you're basically converting the sugars of the chiles into alcohol, which then converts into acetic acid—vinegar. Like Gene Wilder in the movie Young Frankenstein, you'll scream, “It's alive! It's alive! It's alive!” when you witness the first sign of bubbles in your blazing brew.

Vinegar does stop fermentation, but only if in concentrations that are high enough to prevent bacterial growth. This is the case with traditionally canned pickles, salsas, and chutneys. However, just adding a little bit of vinegar to fermented vegetables won't be sufficient to stop fermentation.

You must always sterilize hot sauce bottles, otherwise your hot sauce will only keep for a week or two in the fridge. Sterilization of the bottle is part of what makes it stable at room temperature for a longer period of time. You also need to sterilize jars for canning, pickling, and my personal favorite jams.

Hot sauce is full of probiotics, bacteria that are beneficial to our bodies. Studies show that hot peppers kill up to 75 percent of bacteria in our bodies. The most common bacteria in hot sauce, is lactobacillus. Lactobacillus help break down food and absorb nutrients in our bodies.

Fermented hot sauce is rich in probiotic bacteria and has awesome enzymes for improved digestion. No cooking required. The spicier the pepper you use, the harder it is to cook in a kitchen.

Spicy foods may worsen acid reflux, IBS, peptic ulcers, and gastritis. They may also cause digestive issues, including heartburn, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, and stomach cramps, if consumed in large amounts.

Why? Huy Fong Foods, the maker of Sriracha sauce, said in an April letter to its customers that it's experiencing a chili pepper shortage. As a result, it's now suspending production of the spicy sauce until after Labor Day.

Why did they stop selling Sriracha? ›

Last week, Huy Fong Foods announced that it was halting production of its popular hot sauce. Why? Not enough chili peppers, said the company's executive operations officer, citing weather conditions in one Mexican region.

In a letter to customers, Huy Fong explains that "due to weather conditions affecting the quality of chili peppers," the California-based company is facing a severe shortage of chilies and is unable to produce its products: Sriracha Hot Chili sauce, Chili Garlic or Sambal Oelek.

We do not recommend opening jars during fermentation. It exposes the content to air, and therefore to environmental microorganisms that could contaminate it. It is therefore advisable to place the jar in the refrigerator after opening it.

One rule of thumb is to use 1-3 tablespoons salt per litre (4 cups) of water.

Beer, we always recommend that you bottle your beer no later than 24 days in the fermenter. You can go longer but the longer your beer sits the more chance you have to get an infection and get off-flavors in your beer.

The yeast cells used in fermentation can tolerate a pH of 4.0 to 8.5 but work best when the pH is between 4.0 and 6.0. This means that yeast cells require a slightly acidic environment to do their best fermenting.

Several factors can affect how long fermentation lasts, including the type of yeast used and the fermentation temperature. However, the risk lies with leaving beer in the fermenter after the process has finished. This can lead to yeast autolysis, where enzymes in the yeast affect the beer's quality.

They found that hot sauce was the most potent. When dashed straight into a test tube of bacteria, it killed them all within a minute. Even diluted 16 to 1, it wiped them out within five minutes. Horseradish and lemon juice worked moderately well; ketchup had little effect.

In fact, not only will yeast not ferment when refrigerated, if your temperature is too cold, you might find your fermenting process stops. Too cold of a temperature will put most yeast to sleep. Which is why, when brewers or vintners complain of stuck fermentation, temperature is the first question that gets asked.

After the fermentation process is finished, the pH of the sauce is typically low enough that you can heat the finished sauce, funnel it into jars, and process it in a boiling water bath canner for 15 minutes if you want it to be shelf stable.

How do I know when my ferment is done? ›

If there are still bubbles in the airlock after 14 days let it sit for another few days, or at least until there is no bubbling for at least a minute or two. Once there is no activity in the airlock, fermentation is complete.

Fermented hot sauce has a deeper and more complex tangy flavor that you won't find in vinegar-based hot sauces. And since it's a “living” product, the flavor continues to develop in the fridge and become even more delicious as it ages.

Beer, we always recommend that you bottle your beer no later than 24 days in the fermenter. You can go longer but the longer your beer sits the more chance you have to get an infection and get off-flavors in your beer.