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cooking Fermented Sauce: To cook or not to cook?

Pnak0tic

Pnak0tic

Hi, I've been making my own sauce (and lurking this board) for a while and I've started doing fermentation last year and had 2 or 3 good mashes that I turned into sauces, but I'm still far from an expert on the subject
 
For now all the ferments I've been doing I have simply just processed the mixture and added vinegar or lime juice, but I've seen a lot of people here mention that they simmer the processed mash before bottling it
 
I have a new mash coming of age soon and I was wondering if I should maybe try this, my question is: what exactly do you get from cooking the processed mash before bottling? Does it alter the taste in a significant way? Is it just a texture thing?
 
I'd like to know the opinions of people doing both cooked and uncooked so I can know better what to do with the one that's coming. As mentionned earlier I've done a few ferments already but since it was always with wildly different ingredients it's kind of hard to compare.
 
 
Thanks in advance
 
 
Also, here is a picture of my mash, I've made it with leftover habaneros from another sauce I made that had habs and bhuts. The mash is habaneros, peach and carrots and I used whey from plain yoghurt as a starter. I don't have an airlock so I just do the old burping method, but now that it's been a while there isn't much pressure building up inside the jar and I don't have to burp it as much as in the first few days
 
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If you don't cook it. Then bacteria will continue to change the flavor of the sauce. If you are going to use the sauce fairly quickly this won't be an issue. Other wise I would cook it.
 
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Cooking will smooth out the texture a bit and will also allow you to hot fill/hold in woozy bottles for a shelf stable product.  Check out Making Hot Sauce 101 for more info on that.  Also, after cooking, using a food mill or food processor will further smooth out the consistency/texture. 
 
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Why would you ferment and then add vinegar and citrus?

Cooking is used to soften the ingredients for blending, and then cooked again (boiled for at least 20min) to sterilize the sauce.


SR.
 
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Shorerider said:
Why would you ferment and then add vinegar and citrus?
Click to expand...
 
Why not? That's hot sauce. Mash is just a base.
 
Franks. Aged cayenne mash + Vinegar
Tabasco. Aged tabasco mash + Vinegar (uncooked).
Sriracha. Fermented red jalapenos + Vinegar.
Etc.
Etc.
 
Many hot sauce companies buy mash to make sauce.
 
Mash is usually a base. And usually just peppers and salt.
 
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I'm yet to delve into fermentation but I see it happening in the near future. I guess there are other things that happen during fermentation that add another twist on the flavor of the end product.

Go ahead and add vinegar if that's what taste you're after, but if the fermentation has done its thing, it isn't necessary.


SR.
 
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I like a balanced sauce. To me the mash is step one. It's usually just peppers and salt or vinegar.
 
You take your mash (which is very thick) and make your sauce by adding your liquid; vinegar, lime, whatever... onions, garlic, plums, or whatever. The mash is the base. The same way corn mash for bourbon is just mashed corn. And the base to hot sauce is a pepper mash. If you want to just eat the mash, cool.
 
Maybe you guys are using the term wrong. It's mashed peppers, not a bunch of fermented ingredients. Peppers and salt. Like this: http://lapepperexchange.com/shopsite/product20.html
 
The picture in this post looks more like a myriad of roughly chopped ingredients in a liquid. Not a mash.
 
I'm sure it can make a fine sauce.
 
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I feel like the word vinegar scares people.
 
In a balanced sauce you don't actually taste it, you just experience the sharpness and tanginess it adds. Also it adds fluidity and preservation, so it's win-win.
 
There's definitely sauces that have too much vinegar. And vinegar does not taste good by itself, so when you can detect it, you might shy away from all vinegar sauces, thinking it is there only as a cheap preservative, when in fact, there's a reason more that 90% of sauces have it. You can find alternatives, but there are also good vinegars for sauce, like cane, and rice wine, depending on your sauce. Never used citrus (instead), well, in salsa, sure. But I feel citrus provides more of a sourness/tartness than a zippy tang. There's just something about vinegar that gives it that familiar hot sauce taste.
 
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Looks tasty, I like the rusty color, are there chocolate pods, chipotles, or worchestershire?
 
I'm too busy to get any sauces right now anyway, maybe at a later date we can work it out. :)
 
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Thanks for the replies
 
The reason I add vinegar to my fermented sauce is mainly for the taste, as I find it does tend to cut some of the bitterness of the mash. And especially when using habaneros or hotter peppers, I find that adding vinegar doesn't waste the taste as you would have to add a lot of it for the sauce to actually taste vinegar-y
 
I usually used citrus in my cooked sauces, don't think I've used it with fermented mash, but I like to do something like 1/3 lime juice 2/3 vinegar, as the lime juice does add some sweetness and fruityness to the sauce
 
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Unfortunately I'm unsure of the type of Chilli used as I got a hold of some powder from my dried fruit/nut lady. She did tell me that it was sourced from India though.
 
The one on the left contains no Chilli at all (for the family). Good fresh pods are hard to get here at the moment,  but that should change with my grow bigger than ever this year.
 
Let me know when things settle down at your end and if you're happy to pay postage, you can have a bottle for free.
 
 
SR.
 
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Newbie to the hot sauce world here. Can someone help me understand why Tabasco isn't hot packed? Just watched a video explaining how vinegar helps to preserve the sauce and hot packing is not needed. Also, is Sriracha hot packed? Grazie!
 
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:welcome: pimentao
 
The fresh chiles Tabasco uses are fermented (aged) for 3 years, which makes the pH of the mash very low.  Vinegar is added to the fermented peppers, it's blended/agitated for (3 weeks???) which breaks down all the pulp.  I don't know what the pH of Tabasco sauce is, but I'm guessing it's 3.0 or below, in which case it does not need to be hot packed. 
 
HotFill/Hold is a process used for sauces mostly between 3.0 and 4.0 pH.  
Here's some more info on processing-http://thehotpepper.com/topic/29501-making-hot-sauce-101/
 
and some definitions and explanations of terms- http://thehotpepper.com/topic/49801-chile-pepper-weights-measures-and-other-things/

ps- don't know about Sriracha~
 
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