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Bitter Sauce - Help!

frickafricka

frickafricka

Hey everyone!
 
So the sauce I'm making is a blended, thicker sauce. It's whole fresnos (including the green 'crown' at the base of the stem -- but not the stem itself), sugar, salt, garlic, and white vinegar. It gets chopped, fermented, then cooked and blended. 
 
The problem is the final sauce -- once it's aged for a couple weeks -- tastes almost perfect , but it's a liiiiiittle bit bitter. The same way a bell pepper can be. But it's just a bit too much. I can't add more sugar or vinegar, as the tang and sweetness are already just right, and it's definitely salty enough. 
 
I've been told overcooking peppers can make them bitter. And in the cooking phase I've been boiling the hell out of the sauce for ten full minutes. And perhaps it's blended too much, and the seeds released some sort of bitter compound? 
 
Does ANYBODY have any suggestions? I definitely want to continue to use the whole pepper, so if there is another variable I can tweak, that would be amazing.
 
Thanks so much everyone!
 
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Why did you include the green part on the top of the pepper!?... not only is that bitter.. it also contains toxins.  (any members of the 'deadly nightshade' family contain these poisons in their green tissue.  In the case of potatoes, peppers, and tomatos, for example, all of the plant is poisonous except the fruits.... and the tuber in the case of potatoes.)
 
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+1 on the above post. Sorry dude... I think you're gonna have to dump the whole batch. I recommend you do the next one without the stem and calyx on each pod. If you still have issues with bitterness, I've found that brown sugar or coconut milk will help "iron out the rough spots"
 
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That's very interesting. I left them in the recipe because they add flavor to it, but I didn't know there were toxins. Not that I don't believe you, but is there anywhere you can point me where I could find some research on the subject? I'd love to learn all I can about it...
 
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frickafricka said:
That's very interesting. I left them in the recipe because they add flavor to it, but I didn't know there were toxins. Not that I don't believe you, but is there anywhere you can point me where I could find some research on the subject? I'd love to learn all I can about it...
Click to expand...
 
Peppers are a member of the Solanaceae (nightshade) family. Pretty much every plant in this family has toxic foliage. This includes deadly nightshade, potatoes, tomatoes & peppers. The concentration isn't that high in most plants so you would need to eat a bunch to get sick. Though quite rare the most common deaths occur from people eating a lot of green potatoes over a period of time.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanaceae
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanine
 
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What they said!
 
To reduce bitterness you can add a small amount of salt, it works better than sugar or acid. The other thing than can help is adding a tiny bit of baking soda (not baking powder). Try both in a small amount of your sauce and see if either can help you.
 
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+1 on what everyone else already wrote, but I also think that you're using the wrong pepper if you want absolutely no bitterness.  Fresnos are a tiny bit bitter.
 
Yes the seeds can also add bitterness especially if cut into, but 10 minutes is not a long time to simmer at all, I usually do it for over a half hour (with different peppers) unless the peppers were roasted beforehand.
 
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