I recently found a “Latin Market” in the next town over this week, so I stopped in to see if (on the off chance) they carried fresh manzano peppers. Lucky me, as it turns out, they did. I grabbed all of the “decent” (aka not mushy, lol) ones that they had. Walked out with 4lbs of them at $6/lb. Some of these, I’m going to de-seed, smoke, dehydrate and grind into powder. The rest of them, however, are (probably) going to go into a batch of A.J.’s purée, which brings me to my question…
I’m fairly well versed in (home) hot sauce making; enough to know that the
salt content doesn’t “scale up”, like other ingredients, without ruining the product. For example, if this is the original recipe…
100 grams fresh peppers
60 ml 5% White Distilled Vinegar
1 tsp agave nectar
1/4 tsp sea salt
…and I wanted to use, say, 800g of peppers (these manzanos weigh approximately 100g each), there’s no way in Hell I’m going to use 2 full teaspoons of salt in that batch, or 3 teaspoons in a 1200g batch. That seems like an absolutely
absurd amount of salt to use, and would probably be the only thing you’d taste.
So, for anyone with experience in making “larger batch” hot sauces, scaling up recipes, etc., do you think cutting the salt in half would be the way to go? Hell, as I’m typing this, I’m thinking that even THAT seems like an excessive amount of salt. 1.5 teaspoons of salt for 12 peppers that are roughly the size of a tennis ball?
I
do understand that salt acts as a preservative as well as adding flavor (and heat, if you wanna go there!
), but I don’t want to ruin the flavor of these delicious pods.
@salsalady @SmokenFire? Anybody else?
Any input/advice is appreciated. Thanks!