It’s that time of year when hot peppers start showing up at the farmers market – actually at this point, it might be a week or two past the prime time. Every year I round up as many hot peppers as I can get, and turn them into hot sauce. But my method of making hot sauce is a little more labor intensive than just whipping them up in a food processor and boiling them down with some vinegar and other ingredients (why shouldn’t it be, right?)
I turn my peppers into pepper mash before turning them into hot sauce. What is ‘pepper mash’? It’s fermented peppers. Fermenting your peppers breaks down the cellular fibers of the vegetable, reducing the vegetable quality of the pepper, while enhancing the essence of the style of pepper you use. Most of the hot sauces on the market are made with this technique. If you’ve ever tried to make your own hot sauce and were kind of disappointed with the result, especially after all the work – the burning of your hands, face, lungs, and other parts of your anatomy you’d rather not talk about – mashing might be the answer for your next batch, let’s get into it!
First, find yourself a bunch of peppers – for my first batch, I did only Fatalii peppers, an equally hot cousin of the habanero – slightly sweeter and not as long lived (burn wise) as the habanero, I was interested to see what kind of punch they packed.
Next step is to wash them well in a colander, and dry them off.
Always use protection – I remember one year cutting down 5 pounds of habaneros with bare hands – huge mistake. The capsaicin got under the skin and I couldn’t handle it! Forget what you hear on the internet – soaking them in olive oil, soaking them in milk, bleach, alcohol – once you get enough of that chemical on your hands, your best bet is to just drink the alcohol until you pass out and your hands explode in your sleep and callus over.
Even if you don’t have rubber gloves, you owe it to yourself to protect your hands: I used a plastic bag this time around.
I started by cutting the stems off:
For habaneros, I just pop the stem off and throw the peppers into a food processor whole, but the benefit of cutting them open is that you can see if the inside of the pepper has gone bad — Like this: I don’t know what it is, but I don’t want it getting in with my fermentation!
I threw those right in the trash. And kept going until I had all of them processed.
I needed two vessels!
Look at all the dead soliders!
After they were all broken down, I put them into a food processor, then into a bowl to weigh. And you bet your life that when you crack the lid on your food processor, you will end up inhaling hot pepper laced air. You will choke. You will choke even harder when you go to clean your food processor – it is just the cost of doing business.
So why weigh the peppers?
Mashing the peppers requires the addition of a specific amount of salt – to create a proper and effective fermentation. 3.3% of the weight of the peppers to be precise. Doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s enough to do the job. A little more is ok, but a little less and the fermentation will take longer than it should.
So you take the weight of your peppers and multiply it by .033 to get the amount of salt you need to add. In my case, I ended up with 859 grams of peppers.
Multiplying 859 by .033 gave me a total of 28.347 grams of salt I needed to add.
I dumped it right on top, then used a funnel to put all the salted pepper into the vessel I chose to mash my peppers in.
I dropped an airlock on the top and stashed it in my closet. A couple days later, it had started to break down and I wish I had a couple extra inches at the top, because it ended up blowing over. I cleaned up the mess, but here’s a picture. You can see the liquid at the bottom – that’s a good sign for a couple days in – and it’s recommended to shake it every few days.
That wasn’t it though: I had more peppers! Habaneros, Hot Hugarian Wax, and Jalapenos!
Can’t wait to see what this looks like in a few weeks!
You can go for 2 weeks if you’re impatient, but I like to go for 2 months – I feel it sound
