Batch 23 Hot Sauce Update #3
Made one last addition of fresh cayenne peppers for a full gallon to slow ferment. Now we'll cellar it and let the lacto yeast do its magic for a couple months
Made one last addition of fresh cayenne peppers for a full gallon to slow ferment. Now we'll cellar it and let the lacto yeast do its magic for a couple months
Summer might have ended, but that doesn’t mean your peppers have to. Here's how to easily overwinter pepper plants and have fresh peppers again next spring!
After 191 days of fermentation, I'm pulling Batch 22 hot sauce out of the fermenter and bottling it. Cayenne-Thai peppers with fresh garlic aged on toasted oak.
I am continuously fermenting the hot peppers, adding fresh peppers every week, and pulling half after 4 week's time to turn into hot sauce. This is round 1.
Batch 21 of my fermented hot sauce begins! This year it's a 100% cayenne/Thai pepper hybrid. We start the ferment today with 12 ounces of fresh peppers in brine
The 20th edition of my slow ferment hot sauce. It's funky, fruity with a medium heat on the back. BBQ worthy for sure! See how to make your own in the video.
It's been a little more than six weeks since we began the fermentation on Batch 20 of my hot sauce. Today I'm popping open the fermenter to see how it's going and give the peppers a stir to keep thing moving.
Batch 20 of the fermented hot sauce hit 5 gallons of fresh peppers 8 weeks early, so I'm bumping up to 10 gallons by splitting peppers between 2 fermenters. As for what I'm going to do with 10 gallons of finished hot sauce next spring, I have no idea.
2nd addition of peppers was a full pound split between Hidden Lake Hot and Culebra Negra (see photo). This should be more than enough to get a good ferment going before I pitch it to the barrel and add 10 - 15 pounds of fresh peppers over the next 10 weeks.
Rain and persistent cold weather have slowed the peppers to a crawl. There's still a few left on the plants, but not enough to hold off on moving the hot sauce to its resting stage. To enhance the flavor I add a couple of oak staves to the pepper brew and let it sit for another 8 - 12 weeks. American oak happens to be high in a compound called vanillin, which is why things that age in American oak [keep reading...]