Fermented Hot Sauces! — Positively Probiotic (2024)

Here’s what you’ll need

Hardware

Jars for your chiles, possibly also weights

Spoon or whisk

Measuring cup for brine

Muddler, rolling pin, wine/similar bottle, or spurtle (optional) - I use whichever of these is closest to my hand to smash my chiles in tight

Knife

Cutting board

Blender or food processor (manual or electric; can also use a mortar and pestle if preferred)

Software

Chiles - any kind, any amount; this is 100% up to you and how much you’d like to make! I know a lot of y’all really do prefer to have specific measurements, but I can’t give them because I don’t know how much you want to make, nor how big your jars or (or how many of them!). Just go with it, because it really will make sense as you’re destemming chiles, lightly chopping them, and packing them into your jars.

Salt - any kind of salt that doesn’t have iodine added; this can be as inexpensive as grocery store free-flowing salt or as expensive as you fancy sea salts. You are not measuring your salt with respect to how many chiles are involved; you’re measuring with respect to the water. It’s 100g per litre or quart of water. Scale up or down as needed.

Here’s what I did for software

Hatch chiles; mostly red, but some green so I could make some for my neighbors, who prefer green hot sauces.

Salt - I used Colima salt, because I have a lot of it and it’s not my favorite. It’s not my favorite because the large size of the salt makes it impractical for a lot of things I want salt for. It’s lovely for fermenting, though, and many other applications!

Water - I’m just gonna say it: I use tap water for this. And I live in the Houston metroplex, where the water isn’t nearly as good as it should be in a metroplex of this size.

Spices - I used whole garlic cloves in each (1-2 per jar). My mold jar also had coriander, black peppercorns, and cumin seed in it. You really can put whatever you want in there; a little ginger or cinnamon might be nice, but you really can use any spices you feel like. If you’re not sure how that will go, do those in smaller jars so you don’t have more than 1-2 cups you’ve got to figure out what to do with if you don’t like how it came out. Most of my hot sauces don’t contain spices other than garlic, so really just do what you want with this.

Vinegar - I use apple cider vinegar here, but any vinegar is fine. I add a splash at the end to slow fermentation. My splashes are 1-2 tablespoons. if you want less, please use less. All it’s doing is adding flavor and slowing fermentation, so it doesn’t matter if you decide not to use any at all.

Critical Safety Note!

When this is all done, you really do need to keep your hot sauces in the fridge. I’ve had a room temperature hot sauce explode and get into my eye (the sauce, not the jar), and I can say with certainty that it wasn’t fun. I guess I should just tell the story, so y’all have the full scope of how completely no this would be for you:

While preparing holiday gifts during the winter of 2019 (the Before Times! Remember those?), I set out two bottles of hot sauce to pour into my gift jars. I didn’t get around to doing this part of the gifts that day, and I also forgot to put them back in the fridge.

Next day, Ross is at work, I’m panicking that my gift bags aren’t done yet, and I shake and open one of the jars. Everything is fine. I don’t understand why I shook these before burping, but it is what happened. Actually, I do know why. I don’t strain out my solids from my hot sauces, so when I grab a jar out of the fridge to put on whatever food I’m eating, I shake the jar so it’s not just liquid sauce on top and solid sauce on the bottom. Straight from the fridge you can shake. Room temperature is a bad idea.

Second jar was a swing top. Shook that one too, didn’t put a cloth over the opening in case something went wrong as I fully know I should always do, and flipped the baling wire for the lid up. Mistake.

At least a quarter of the hotsauce blew out of the bottle, and some of it got on both of my eyeballs. I dabbed as much as I could off my eyes with the cloth I had near me, then closed my eyes (not tight; just regular closed like you’re blinking or sleeping), walked over to the spice racks, grabbed my baking soda, then walked back to the kitchen and set it down on the counter near the sink so I could feel where it was more easily once I got a bowl out. Groped around in the cabinet for a bowl, got it, dumped in some baking soda, added water, and stirred until the water felt like the right texture. Then I got the bowl on the counter part of the sink, opened my eyes, and washed them with the solution until I couldn’t feel them burning anymore. Then I rinsed with fresh water from the tap until I couldn’t feel grit on my eyeballs anymore.

As you might expect, this was a bit traumatic for me. It was also traumatic for Child Tester, because as I was groping my way to the spice rack, she called out for help with something. I yelled that I couldn’t help her right then because in the middle of an emergency, and said she should stay in her room.

She did not stay in her room, so when I could see again, I saw her standing quietly in the dining room, mouth agape, and having seen nearly everything I did to save my eyes. She was really scared, and scared enough that she kept quiet because she understood it might be harder or impossible for me to fix this if I knew she was there and was distracted by her presence. I’m really sad she saw all that, despite it having been an exceptionally good lesson on why safety protocols matter.

There was hot sauce all over my kitchen, in the pantry, on the ceiling, everywhere. Just everywhere. It took ages to clean it all up, and some of the wall and baseboard surfaces were stained. I always made it a point to look at them whenever I was considering doing something else that was dangerous and dumb, and it stopped me every single time from carrying out my idiotic plans.

My eyes are totally fine, but this could’ve gone a lot differently for me. If this happens to you, you should not use the method of fixing it that I used. I did this because I didn’t want to use dish soap (that seemed somehow more horrible than what I chose), and because I knew that part of our home well enough to be 100% confident I could do it both quickly and blind. I also knew I would be able to feel when I had diluted the baking soda enough; there was a pile of baking soda in the bottom of the bowl that didn’t dissolve, and that’s because I really could feel the right dilution. I would call this success to be a result of a solid knowledge base coupled with an extraordinary amount of luck. Luck was the main factor in me getting every step of that treatment right, and had luck not been with me on the baking soda, I probably would have irreparable damage from the incident.

Baking soda comes with risk, though, and that risk is that it can scratch your eyes and cause permanent damage. Use the dish soap if this happens to you, because it’s safer. My friend Cassie has needed to dish soap her eyes one one occasion (I guess everyone learns after the first round of horror), and her description sounded worse than what I endured, but it is the safer choice for that kind of situation.

The tl;dr (too long; didn’t read) here is that if chiles get in your eyes, wash them out with dish soap and then go to the doctor once the most critical part of the emergency has passed. Also, do not store these at room temperature or they will explode. That’s really the important takeaway here.

Here’s what you’ll do

Boil water, then add 100g of salt for every litre. I’m going to be honest here and say that when I’m using a measuring cup that uses quarts instead of litres, I still do 100g for the quart. I never do this more than a pint at a time unless I’m really making a lot of hot sauce, because I’ll feel compelled to save any leftover brine otherwise so as to not be wasteful. Y’all know I’m obsessed with preventing waste, so I do 50g/pint of water at a time.

Let the water cool. Or don’t, if you don’t mind your hot sauces taking around double the time to get going that they’d need with room temp brine. This doesn’t double the total ferment time, but rather just that initial period winds up taking a week or so before you really start seeing the bubbles.

While all that jazz is going on, go on ahead and destem and chop your chiles. Put any flavorings/spices you’re adding in the bottom of the jar, and then pack your chiles in as tightly as you can. I generally fill the jar about a third of the way with chiles and then tamp them (if you smoke a pile, it’s identical to the process you use with your tobacco filling and tamping), then continue along until it’s full. Smaller amounts tamped frequently will always get you a tighter pack than larger amounts tamped infrequently.

Now, you add the brine! Please leave at least an inch of headspace at the top of the jar. You may need a plate under your jars during the early days where it’s fermenting anyway, but you definitely will need one to catch leaks if you don’t leave adequate headspace. Brine all of your jars, let them sit for 5-10 minutes, then top off the jars that need it with more brine. Put your weights in if you’re using those, then seal the jar in whatever manner is appropriate for the type of jar you’re using. Write the date on the top of the jar, and I also like to write what it is and what went in it. I also write what kind of salt I used, in case I particularly like how a given salt interacts with the flavor profile. But them in a closet, pantry, cabinet, or somewhere else that is dark and cool.

Wait Time!

If you like a really young hot sauce, you can pull these at 2 weeks. I never leave mine for less than 3 months, because I like to get as much nuance in the flavor as possible. Hot sauce is more about flavor than heat for me, so the time it takes for the flavor profile to really develop is important for the ones I make. I am the only person in the house that eats my hot sauces, because I eat about 5 times as much chile as Ross or Child Tester do, so they find them too spicy. I eat a lot of hot sauce, though. I’ve left these to ferment for up to 8 months, and I find that after the 6 month mark, they develop a much stronger sour note that I am not a huge fan of. Those sauces I tend to cook with rather than use as a condiment.

Whenever it is you’re ready to pull them, once you do, you’ll dump your jar’s contents (one jar at a time) into the blender, and add that vinegar if you’re using it, and then blend it up like it’s a smoothie.

NOTE: if you did use spices other than garlic and/or some kind of onion, I advise you put those spices in a tea bag or similar so you can simply pluck the bag out instead of having to pick the spices out before blending. You also could, I suppose, leave them and let them get blended too. I have never done this, so I can’t tell you if it causes an off-putting texture in the final product. If y’all try blending with the spices still in there, please let me know in the comments how it went for you.

Some of you may want a really thin sauce, and if that’s you, put it all in a strainer bag or fine mesh strainer with a bowl under it to catch the good stuff. This could take a while, so consider this to be a part you can walk away from and come back whenever you feel like it. 2 hours should be good, though.

If you prefer a thicker sauce but not as thick as it’d be if you kept all the solids in there, do what the thin sauce people do. Just do it for less time. You can always add solids back in if you strained it completely, too.

If you prefer a thick sauce (me!), bottle it as soon as it’s fully blended. Whatever thickness or thinness you prefer, bottle it when you’re done straining, or not, the solids out. Those strained solids can be composted or thrown away, or you can freeze them in ice cube trays and use those solids in your cooking. It would also be pretty tasty if you added olive oil or similar to the ice cube trays, as many people like to do with freshly chopped herbs.

So, it's clear that the writer knows their way around making hot sauce, and the evidence is right there in the details. Let me break down the key concepts and components mentioned:

Hardware:

Jars for fermenting chiles
Weights (optional) to keep chiles submerged
Spoon or whisk for stirring
Measuring cup for brine
Muddler, rolling pin, wine/similar bottle, or spurtle (optional) for smashing chiles
Knife and cutting board for chopping
Blender or food processor for processing the sauce

Software:

Chiles of any kind and any amount
Salt without iodine, measured at 100g per liter or quart of water
Optional add-ins: spices, garlic cloves, slivers of onion or shallot
Vinegar for flavor and to slow down fermentation

The writer shares their personal process using Hatch chiles, Colima salt, tap water, garlic cloves, and additional spices. They emphasize the flexibility in the recipe, allowing for personal preferences in chile types, salt, and optional ingredients.

Critical Safety Note: The writer recounts a personal experience of a hot sauce explosion and cautions about the importance of storing fermented hot sauces in the fridge. They share a dramatic incident involving hot sauce getting into their eyes, emphasizing the need for safety protocols and cautioning against room temperature storage.

Procedure:

Boil water, add salt (100g per liter/quart), and let it cool. Optionally, use room temperature brine for faster fermentation.
Destem and chop chiles, add optional spices at the jar's bottom, and pack chiles tightly.
Pour the brine, leaving an inch of headspace. Use weights if necessary, seal the jar, and label it with the date and ingredients.
Store jars in a dark, cool place for fermentation. Fermentation time can vary (2 weeks to 8 months).
When ready, blend the contents with vinegar if desired. Strain if a thinner sauce is preferred.
Bottle the sauce based on thickness preference. Strained solids can be composted, frozen, or used in cooking.

The writer emphasizes their preference for a well-developed flavor profile, advocating for a longer fermentation time. They also share tips on blending and straining for different sauce consistencies.