It was supposed to be a hot sauce. I'm hoping someone can tell me where I went wrong. I was kind of loosely basing it on a sambal oelek recipe I found online, but I was taking all sorts of liberties as well.
First off, I started last weekend with a half dozen medium size green jalapenos that I had left over. I puree'd them in the food processor with salt and set them aside on the counter to age a bit. I put the puree in a bowl that I covered with plastic wrap and wrote "Salted Jalapeno Mash 6/6/09" on it and left it there all week.
Around Tuesday my wife brought home a small bag of green Thai bird eye peppers she bought at an Asian market. I put them in a bag with an apple to ripen them a little and left them there until today. That was four days with the Apple. They did ripen a little, but none were red.. just a few yellow ones.
So I set up to make a sauce tonight with these ingredients.
1. First I boiled a cup of water, put in the chopped up bird peppers and jalapeno mash and brought it up to a boil again. Then I covered and reduced heat and simmered for 15 minutes.
2. Next I got the food processor ready and dumped the boiled peppers in it and pureed it all.
3. I added a tablespoon of rice vinegar.
4. I added a large clove of garlic.
5. I added just less than a tablespoon of oil.
6. I added about a teaspoon of sugar.
After it'd had a good whiz for a while, I stopped it and tasted it. It tasted like bad vomit. It was slightly salty (salt from the mash) and with a pronounced bitterness. It ended with a burst of heat. Not what I was looking for.
Next I tried adding a the juice of half a lime. Still tasted bitter.
Then I tried adding more sugar. It was sweeter, but still bitter and awful.
I sauteed some onions and pureed those into the mix with the food processor until it was smooth. Still gross. As a last resort I added a little dark soy sauce and it was still awful.
Finally I turned off the pot of water I was boiling to sterilize the bottle and gave up. I didn't even bottle my bitter green sludge. There was no point. I took a picture of the resulting "sauce" and came in here to post this.
A real head scratcher. Where did I go wrong? The green thai peppers? Putting some green jalapeno mash up to ferment a bit is a bad idea maybe? Maybe I should have put it in a dark place instead of on the counter covered with Glad wrap?
I need to make an awesome sauce tomorrow to redeem myself. I have to learn the error of my ways... I hate to waste peppers. There's a fine line between making a bad hot sauce and just torturing a bunch of peppers before dumping them down the drain.
:-)
Steve