Batch 24 Hot Sauce Pepper Addition Number 3

Weather made the Cayenne peppers slow to ripen so this week’s pepper addition will be heavy on other hot peppers

The third pepper addition is heavy on Hinkelhatz and Fish peppers

This year’s run of my fermented hot sauce (Batch 24) is off to a strange start.

When I started the batch in late August, the weather was hot, but not unbearably so. Most of the daytime highs were in the high 80s with the night time lows dipping into the low 60’s. Pretty good late summer weather for peppers. The Hidden Lake Hot (HLH) cayenne/Thai cross that is the main pepper in this hot sauce was producing plenty of peppers, and the plants were still flowering vigorously. I figured we’d have those peppers well into October at this rate.

Additionally, the other peppers I’m using in this year’s batch (Hinkelhatz, Aleppo, Long Cayenne, and Fish) were rocking along quite nicely as well.

A Change in the Weather

Then we got a week-long bout of extreme heat (108° – 113°) and very low humidity. Even though the nights were still relatively cool and I was making sure everyone had plenty of water, the HLH peppers suddenly dropped their flowers and the pepper fruits stopped growing, going straight from green to red in a matter of days. Figuring they were getting sunburned, I gave them some shade, crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

The heat passed a few days ago, and we’re now experiencing much cooler weather than usual — like 15° to 20° cooler. The HLH peppers have resumed growing and flowering, but there isn’t much to harvest at this point.

Also, the extreme heat kicked the fermenting peppers into overdrive, so the first couple of pepper additions are about spent meaning that I need to add a fresh round of peppers to keep things going or the hot sauce will finish long before it usually does.

Pepper Change-up

Fortunately, the other peppers aren’t in the all-day sun like the HLH ones are, so I have plenty of them to make up for the lack of my normal ones.

As a result, this week’s addition, the 3rd fresh pepper addition since we started, will be heavy on Hinkelhatz and Fish, with a smattering of the HLH peppers and a single Aleppo. (I’m drying the rest of the Aleppos, which is how they’re usually used in their native Turkey/Syria).

I sampled the Hinkelhatz and Fish peppers a few days ago to get an idea of what kind of flavors they might impart to the hot sauce. Hinkelhatz is very sweet-fruity up front with a pleasant, but not overwhelming, heat that lingers for a few minutes.

The Fish peppers are hotter up front with a slightly “green” or “grassy” flavor. The heat doesn’t linger as long as the Hinkelhatz or the HLH peppers. THe HLH are also hotter than the others.

If things in the garden continue this way through the rest of the growing season (which usually ends in late October), Batch 24 will likely be more mild than previous year’s batches, but hopefully with a little more sweet, tropical fruit notes. Of course, that also depends on the fermentation. Sometimes the yeast in the fermenter goes wild and I end up with a funky, tangy flavor rather than sweet.

Ultimately, who knows? It’s still early in the process, so the HLH peppers could recover and we go back to a flavor profile that’s more in line with previous years. Or, maybe not.

That’s the fun of doing this fermented hot sauce every year. You never know quite how it’s going to turn out.

Author’s Note: Every year since 2001, I’ve made a slow fermented hot sauce from a unique Cayenne hot pepper we’ve grown here since the early 1990’s. The hot sauce takes around six months to finish and, like wine and other fermented foods, each vintage is a little different from the other. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad. I write these notes to track the progress and hope I learn how to produce more good than bad.

Batch 24 Timeline