• If you have a question about commercial production or the hot sauce business, please post in Startup Help.

My run at it...

S.S.Tupperware

S.S.Tupperware

Well I have made many a hot sauce, but it was just the usual, grind mix cook eat. They were good, but after seeing some fermentation going on i decided it was worth a try... so I made a sour dough starter, 1 cup flour, 1 cup warm water... that was it. It only took 3 days to come together. i fed 1/2 cup flour and water each day. It bubbled nicly, and then just settled outwith the liquid on top. I put in 10 oz habs, 4 oz red and green japs, onion, 5 cloves garlic, juice of 1 lemon, fresh picked from out back, 1 teaspoon salt, and 3 table spoons hooch. Stopped by the brew shop for a 1 gallon glass bottle, bad idea, don't see how I will clean it, but wife has the perfect jars at her work, I did get 2 air locks and 2 stoppers in case i wanted to run 2 at the same time. Not sure how it'll come out, but ya got to start somewhere I guess. Then with the left over starter, wifey is makin a sourdough bread, sound good, but we'll see... Damn house smells like a sour dishrag... :rofl: Since she is a great baker/cook, I know It should be great. Plus there will be left over starter for the fridge now. I know no pics no proof, but I left my camera down at the lake while we were cookin/eatin oysters with my Buddie and his wife (Mr.&Mrs. Guzzles, Capt. Morgan Fans...)rained hard that night, got it dry and workin, but died a week later. Gonna get one soon. I guess it will be a while before I know whether or not the mash came out... But the bread on the other hand... we'll see later today. :beer:
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
Hey SST, your mix sound good. I have one that I do that's along the same line and it's one of my favorite sauces. I let the last batch of it go for 45 days, that's when the woozies arrived and I was excited to try it. I think next time I'll let it go for 3 months though. How did the bread turn out? Can't wait to see some pic's up here.

Cheers
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Sounds good. I didn't know you could make a starter without yeast (which goes to show you how much I know about it). I make sauces pretty regularly, and fermenting is on my list of things I want to try. You gotta post some pics and let us know how the sauce comes out when it's done fermenting.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
How are those peppers doing? Is the fermentation aggresive of just going along mildly? Remember you need to be taking care of that starter too. Best way to do that is making bread. I know it's tough work but tasty :dance:

Oh I was thinking about what you said about how your last bread didn't rise very well. Did you feed the starter before you made bread? I always feed my starter 2 Tbs Flour and 2 Tbs Water a couple of hours before making bread. If gets all the little yeasties woke up and going. I also add a couple of teaspoons of yeast to the dough to help it along.

Cheers
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
That's too bad. I've heard some people scrape it out and continue. I would like to have seen it though as sometimes the yeast will collect at the top looking like white granules which could be mistaken for mold
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Well one mistake I made was to buy a one gallon glass hooch bottle and thus no access thru the top. My wife saved me some 1 gallon pickle jars from works, so I will but the airlock on there, and it will be able to be scraped. I also might sterilize a mayo jar, and i can make one big batch with a few different changes and see what turns out. But me sour dough starter is goin goot, so I just need peppers now. :beer:
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
I am no expert, this all stuff I have either read or found to work by my experiences. so take my 2cents for what it's worth :beer:

Not sure on this but I've always read that when fermenting/aging you want to keep different peppers in different jars. imo, I'd leave the onions, lemon, garlic etc out of the recipe until your peppers have aged the 3 months or whatever timeframe you had in mind. They may mess with the ph of the mash also not sure on this but would the lemon prevent the lactobacillus bacteria from doing it's job? Also have heard that green peppers and more mild peppers don't ferment well, not sure if it's because of the ph level of those peppers or not. If that is true you may want to wait to add the Jalapenos until you are mixing the rest of the ingredients together. Also make sure you use Kosher salt or salt that doesn't have Iodide in it, the Iodide will keep the lactobacillus bacteria from forming. I use 6% salt by weight of mash. I don't ever use a starter, the fermentation will take place just fine without it but some people choose to use it and that's fine and it seems to work from what I read.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Hi Jonny5 welcome to the Forums. I’d like to address some of what you mention above. After having done several fermentations with no hitches and adding everything to the fermentation pot I can say that fermenting is as much about what and how you want to do it as anything else. A lot of people like to ferment just the peppers so that they can use them in different sauces/salsa just adding what other ingredients they want. So if I mash 5 pounds of Hab's I could make a savory hab tomato sauce and a sweet hab mango sauce with only 1 fermentation. i like running everything through the fermentation as it allows the flavors of the ingredients some time to marry and gives more food to the yeast. The addition of the other ingredients are not really going to mess with the ph as your adding Salt to bring the ph down to prevent an infection by any bad bacteria. Using lemon or lime juice, vinegar is adding an acid and doing the same thing in reducing the ph.

As the Lactobacillus feed off of the sugars in the ingredients, if milder peppers or green peppers are reputed to not ferment well it would be because of a low sugar content. So adding other ingredients that have a higher sugar content would actually aid in the fermentation process. I routinely ferment a sauce with Habaneros and Jalapenos and sometimes throw in some Serranos too. It always ferments very nicely.

Kosher salt works really well and I use it a lot though the preferred salt would be pickling salt as it has no additives at all. Kosher salt sometimes will contain an anti-caking ingredient which can affect the color of your sauces.

Like I said above though, how you want to do your fermentation and make your sauces is a personal thing. If we all made sauces the same way there would be only 1 thread here and only a few postings. The old saying that “Variety is the Spice of Life” comes to mind. One of the greatest things I love about making hot sauce is getting to experiment with all the different ingredients and methods. I love making sauces and posting them here even when they don’t work out like I think they will. See my thread on the Hot Beer Sauce and you’ll see what I mean.

“The Sauce Must Flow!”

Cheers,
RM
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Interesting, so you could add all your ingredients for your sauce into a mash to let it age? So long as your ph stays relatively low? And none of the properties of those ingredients (like the antibacterial properties of garlic) will not prevent or hinder the lacto bacteria from doing it's job? Something I've also never read is can your ph be too low (too acidic) for the lacto bacteria?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
If the garlic has done anything to any of my mashes it may have slowed down the fermentation process a bit but my starter is rather robust and when i add it to the jar it takes off like gang-busters so that, for me, would not be such a bad thing. In general we aim for our ph to be around 4 which seems to be the best range for the little buggies to do their work. As for whether or not the ph getting too low would affect the process I haven't ever heard of seen anything about it. Maybe Chili Monsta can chim in on this. He's been at it longet than I have. Main thing I was trying to say was have fun and if your thinking your idea is a little off the beatten path then go for it. Post on here what your thinking about doing and people will follow your progress and give help where / when needed. might even have someone chime in that they have tried the same thing before and can give you some pointers on what went well or what to watch out for. And above all post pictures, we all love the pic and if you don't post any well then it never happened. :crazy:

Cheers, :beer:
RM
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Oh I'm all for tryin new things and experimenting, I just like to expand my knowledge base a good amount before, otherwise I've just lost half my pepper harvest and months of waiting, probably wouldn't keep me in the hobby for long lol.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top