Firstly If you would like to read a beginner’s guide to fermentation click here. And without going in to all the science behind fermentation, here is fermented pepper sauce recipe. it’s very simple:
- Pick your favourite pepper, I use red chilly, on a scale of sweet-spicy-hot-very hot, it is between spicy and hot. Stem the peppers and chop each pepper to a few pieces.
- Prepare a few garlic cloves (optional). I’ll use about three cloves for 450 grams of pepper.
- Just for the scent and complex taste add very small part of a lemon along with the peel (twice the pee size)
- Weigh the peppers+garlic+lemon. Write it down.
- Put all ingredients in the food processor. Chop with pulses, open the lid to scrape all the peppers from the sides. Chop to a spreadable consistency, not watery.
- Put it in a closable glass jar.
- Add course/sea salt/table salt, any salt will do.
Weigh peppers+garlic+lemon. Devide this by 100 and multiply by 2.75%. This is the weight of salt. So if your peppers (with garlic and lemon) weigh 500 grams, you’ll add 14 grams of salt. - Stir in the jar and close lid but not tight. Let it rest on your kitchen’s countertop (not in the fridge!). After stirring, scrape the sauce from the side of the jar back in.
- Now the fermentation stage starts, continue stirring twice a day. You’ll begine to see fermentation after about 48 hours, the sauce will sometimes rise, and bubbles will apear in it. Sometime you’ll see fluid on the bottom, it’s ok, just stir it and close the lid. The same with white film or layer that sometimes forms on the surface during fermentation, which is kahm yeast, a harmless surface yeast.
- After about a week in a room temperature, the peppers are fermented, developing tangy flavors and a different aroma — a pleasant, lively scent of fermented vegetables.
- When to put it in the fridge? After about 7-10 days is a nice time that insures flavours have developed but there’s still an active fermentation.
What I like about fermented sauce is that it’s a live product, unlike posturized sauce you’ll buy on the store, which is a “dead” material, most likely packed with artificial preservatives, the friendly bacteria that developed during the fermentation process, help keep this sauce tasty even after two months in the fridge.
Note that in any of the fermentation stages, the scent should be nice. If it has a bad odor (I doubt that will happen) just discard, and start again. The white yeast that appears in fermentation is fine and harmless (See for example the yeast sediment at the bottom of unfiltered beer bottles). This is different than mold which is fuzzy, hairy, colored, or smells bad.
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