Downriver
eXtreme
@thoroughburro So TB, have you made any progress with your experiment(s) yet? If so, I'd like to read about your results! I've got ripe jalapeños comin, ha.I haven’t been able to buy Huy Fong Sriracha locally for a long time, now. I’ve been using Tabasco‘s version, but it’s pretty bad — very pronounced garlic powder flavor, and the regular Tabasco they mix in tastes out of place. I don’t use a ton of sriracha, but it’s essential for certain dishes, so I need a homemade backup.
The recipes that currently exist, even those which claim to copy Huy Fong, seem instead to be their own (albeit delicious) thing. They take more inspiration from traditional fermented recipes than Huy Fong’s thicker, brighter, sweeter version. That’s usually a solid bet — going back to older, less industrialized recipes to gain more flavor — but, at least for me, it misses the simple appeal that made the green-capped sauce rightfully famous.
A number of accounts exist of Huy Fong’s process. The most detailed and credible I’ve seen is Mashed’s summary of Eater’s video (what a world we live in):
I’ve read elsewhere that they only manufacture a month’s worth of product at a time, to ensure it’s fresh on the shelf. Anyone who has had poorly-stored sriracha knows how necessary this is, and no wonder: this sauce is basically fresh!
Naturally, the “only a month at a time” can’t quite be the whole story… it would leave them with no product to sell over winter. I think a reasonable guess is that their warehoused base mash (of coarsely ground peppers, salt, vinegar, potassium sorbate, and sodium bisulfite) sits longer than that, at least in the off season, but that final mixing, bottling, and distribution takes place within a month. It’s also likely that the same base mash is used for all of Huy Fong’s products; photos of the mash in barrels show a coarse consistency, similar to their sambal oelek and chili garlic sauce.
The “many of the ingredients remain a secret” is a typical smokescreen. There is no room for them in the labeled ingredients: chili, sugar, salt, garlic, distilled vinegar, potassium sorbate, sodium bisulfite and xanthan gum. I’ve seen bottles with minor variations of these over the years, but there have never been “spices” or “natural flavors” or anywhere else to hide secret ingredients. Instead, I believe the secret is simply in their famously close relationship with their farmer suppliers and the resulting quality of their peppers.
There is also a somewhat unintuitive open secret hidden in their ingredients list and nutrition facts panel: by weight, there’s more salt in the recipe than there is vinegar. To a home cook, that sounds wild — it should be unpalatably salty. However, 75 mg of sodium (about 187.5 mg of salt) in 1 tsp (5 mL, about 5 g) of sauce indicates their salinity is about 3.8%. (Most hot sauces are 2-4%, so it’s salty but not outlandish.) How can there be less vinegar than that?
The answer is that they must be using highly concentrated vinegar or glacial acetic acid. Typical vinegar is 95% water and only 5% acetic acid, but glacial acetic acid is less than 0.5% water and more than 99.5% acetic acid. With that little mystery sorted, we can make an educated guess at ingredient proportions.
I always work in “baker’s math” for recipes. The weight of the main ingredient (flour in baking, peppers for hot sauce) is always reckoned at 100%, and everything else (also by weight) is in proportion to it. This makes it easy to harvest and use, say, 793 g of peppers and still use one master recipe: peppers = 100% = 793 g, so then if garlic is listed at 5% in the recipe, that’s 5% of 793 = 39.65 g of garlic in your odd-sized batch. It’s a different way to work, but it makes things easy in the long run.
The limits are set by the ingredients list: by weight, peppers must be > sugar which is > salt … > vinegar … > xanthan gum. (I’m dropping the preservatives from my home recipe.) We know from the nutrition facts that final salinity is about 3.8% and sugar is about 20%. So, a first attempt could be:
- 100% ripe jalapeños
- 22% sugar
- 5.012% salt
- 2% garlic powder (will also try fresh in mine, but Huy Fong uses powder)
- 1% glacial acetic acid
- 0.3% xanthan gum
Yield: 125.3% (plus salt)
Salinity: 4%
pH: about 2.82 (according to a random calculator, but it doesn’t seem wild)
I guess they could be using a lot less acetic acid, or else maybe they’re using a vinegar strength in between 5% and 99%. (This resonates with @Siv.) I’ll need to experiment and tweak.
The process as described relies on mixing to achieve smoothness, rather than straining, which makes it very easy. Additionally, I’m skipping the base mash at first. I may want to separate it out again later to enable winter production.
- Stem and wash the peppers.
- Slice them to about 0.5”.
- Mix them with the sugar and salt, add to blender, wait for salt to draw out some liquid.
- Add remaining ingredients and blend until smooth.
- Bottle and refrigerate.
How well blending will work without industrial equipment with this dry a mix is an open question. I have a Blend-Tec, but it’ll no doubt take some coaxing and stirring to extract enough liquid from the peppers to get a proper blend going.
Now I just need to wait for the peppers to ripen, or indeed to sprout.
Edit: corrected terminology
