Turbo's Slog (Hot Sauce Log with a silent H)

[turbo]

Instead of having a different for each sauce I want to share with folks, I decided to make a Slog...a Hot Sauce Log with a silent H.
 
Roasted peppers with strawberry and mango ferment (take 1)
 
Haven't made any hot sauce all year because I've been going through last year's surplus.  So for my first sauce of the year I figured I'd go with a ferment.  I've been jonesing something charred and fruity.
 
Ingredients:
roasted habaneros, rocotos, and red chilis
one red onion
3 inch hunk of ginger
head of garlic (7 cloves)
1 mango
1 pint of strawberries
 
I think/hope that the fruit will add enough sugar to sustain a good ferment. 
 
Once its finished fermenting, I'm guessing it'll be pretty two dimensional and need a little something else for richness / complexity.  I'm thinking a bit of red wine and/or apple cider vinegar and/or soy sauce would really level out the sauce.  We'll see when the time comes.
 

 
Everything all ready to go in the food processor for a whirl tomorrow morning. 
 

 

[Chili Monsta]

Turbo,....All the stirring does is help release the co2 bubbles that are trapped in the pulp...so they will rise to the surface and displace any existing oxygen. 14-16 days is a solid base for a fermentation cycle. And there are times when visible activity is minimal.Cooking the veggies initially introduced another variable....But the ultimate and conclusive test for me is"smell" and the pH level. Don't despair just yet.....mother nature can be forgiving of us humans from time to time...
Cm

 

[turbo]

Fatalii Lemon Drop Pineapple Sauce
 
I've finally picked enough lemon drops and fataliis to make a sauce.  I swear these are the smallest fatallis ever, but they still have great flavor and good heat.
 

 
Ingredients

• grated peel of 1/2 a lemon
• 1/3 cup water
• 1/2 cup white wine vinegar
• 1/4 cup chopped walla walla sweet onion
• 1 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1/2 cup pineapple
• 1/4 cup cilantro (use coriander next time)
• 1/4 teaspoon cumin

Cooked peppers, garlic and onion over med-low heat to soften up a bit then poured in water and vinegar and let simmer for about 5 min.
Then slammed them into a blender with all the other ingredients and blended until smooth.
 
I thought cilantro would be nice in this sauce and I always prefer fresh over dried spices, but I wish I had used coriander seed instead.  The sauce was beautifully bright yellow before I added the cilantro, then it became a green mushy color after.  Its not an unattractive color now, but I liked the way it was before adding cilantro.
 

 
The final product after a pass through a sieve to strain out the big bits.  The color has grown on me a bit I have to admit.  Love the flavor of this sauce.  Right at first there is almost no heat, but a great fresh slightly sweet flavor.  Then after a second or two the heat hits the back of the throat and grows and grows, then after 10 seconds it just disappears.  Its a very forgiving sauce
 

 
(GRRRRrrrr...I use tinypic.com for my image hosting and it always rotates any picture to landscape layout. I need a better image hosting service)

 

[Chili Monsta]

Turbo...That sauce of yours sounds and looks great... what a beautiful color!!
 
Lemon drops are one of my favorites.....plus i add cilantro,& cumin to my recipes whenever possible.(or I can get away with it)
 
While I don't have any fataliis (never tasted or grown them) I have an abundance of lemon drop ,peach habs, and scotch bonnets,Plus a local mexican grocery always has fresh monzano (apple) peppers that are also a favorite with plenty of heat for me.
My taste buds are already kicking in just thinking about the flavor ...can't wait to try your recipe this coming weekend.
Thanks for posting
CM

 

[turbo]

Strawberry and mango pepper ferment (take 2, update 1)

I'm going to give this another show.  My first attempt at this never kicked off a ferment.  Even after a month I got nothing.  So lessons learned.  Don't roast peppers your going to ferment, and add garlic AFTER the ferment.
 
Ingredients:
Scotch Bonnets, Big Sun Habs, Paper Lantern Habs, Manzanas, a couple of cayennes
1/4 walla walla sweet onion
3 inch hunk of ginger
1 small mango
1/2 pint of strawberries
 
It turns out I have this mental disorder called "I can't ever do anything the simple way".  I had read a couple blog posts before of people doing a pepper ferment using a sweet white wine like a Riesling or a Gewurztraminer.  So I decided to give that a try as well, so I filled the jar with 1 part water and 3 parts Chateau Ste. Michelle Sweet Riesling (a Washington winery).  Since I like vinegar based hot sauces anyway, I figured this might be a fun thing to try, since in the end the fermentation will use the sugar in the wine to turn it into vinegar.
 

 

[Chili Monsta]

Looks nice Turbo....and with the combination of mango,strawberries and Riesling...those carb loving lacto bacteria should have quite a feast.
But I'm not sure about the wine turning to vinegar though, since that requires oxygen. 
And I didn't mean to give you the impression that garlic would interfere with the fermentation process.It just doesn't bring much in the way of lacto bateria, and your first ferment with roasted peppers was probably already deficient in that regard. I include diced and whole cloves of garlic in my ferments all the time.
 
BTW...I don't see salt on your list of ingredients...
 

Oh ya...and over the weekend I decided to give your Lemon drop pineapple recipe a try......but fermented rather than cooked.
I'll post the recipe and pics .
CM

 

[Roguejim]

Fatalii Lemon Drop Pineapple Sauce
 
I've finally picked enough lemon drops and fataliis to make a sauce.  I swear these are the smallest fatallis ever, but they still have great flavor and good heat.
 

 
Ingredients

• grated peel of 1/2 a lemon
• 1/3 cup water
• 1/2 cup white wine vinegar
• 1/4 cup chopped walla walla sweet onion
• 1 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1/2 cup pineapple
• 1/4 cup cilantro (use coriander next time)
• 1/4 teaspoon cumin

Cooked peppers, garlic and onion over med-low heat to soften up a bit then poured in water and vinegar and let simmer for about 5 min.
Then slammed them into a blender with all the other ingredients and blended until smooth.
 
I thought cilantro would be nice in this sauce and I always prefer fresh over dried spices, but I wish I had used coriander seed instead.  The sauce was beautifully bright yellow before I added the cilantro, then it became a green mushy color after.  Its not an unattractive color now, but I liked the way it was before adding cilantro.
 

 
Does the cilantro retain its flavor pretty well after being cooked?
What food do you put this sauce on?
How do you cut those holes in the plastic lids for the airlocks?
The final product after a pass through a sieve to strain out the big bits.  The color has grown on me a bit I have to admit.  Love the flavor of this sauce.  Right at first there is almost no heat, but a great fresh slightly sweet flavor.  Then after a second or two the heat hits the back of the throat and grows and grows, then after 10 seconds it just disappears.  Its a very forgiving sauce
 

 
(GRRRRrrrr...I use tinypic.com for my image hosting and it always rotates any picture to landscape layout. I need a better image hosting service)

 

[turbo]

Looks nice Turbo....and with the combination of mango,strawberries and Riesling...those carb loving lacto bacteria should have quite a feast.
But I'm not sure about the wine turning to vinegar though, since that requires oxygen. 
And I didn't mean to give you the impression that garlic would interfere with the fermentation process.It just doesn't bring much in the way of lacto bateria, and your first ferment with roasted peppers was probably already deficient in that regard. I include diced and whole cloves of garlic in my ferments all the time.
 
BTW...I don't see salt on your list of ingredients...
 

Oh ya...and over the weekend I decided to give your Lemon drop pineapple recipe a try......but fermented rather than cooked.
I'll post the recipe and pics .
CM

 
Monsta,
Yea, it'll be interesting to see what happens to the wine in the end.  As far as garlic goes I've read that its ok to be in ferments, but also read not to put it in ferments because of its anti-bacterial qualities.  Don't know if that is an old wife's tale or not, but I figured this time why take the chance.  I can always put garlic in after the ferment.  I did put salt in, at 3.6% of mash weight.  Wasn't sure if I needed to adjust that amount since I used wine instead of water.  We'll see what happens.
 
I can't wait to see some pics and hear how the lemon drip pineapple ferment comes out!  Can you let me know when you have that posted?

Does the cilantro retain its flavor pretty well after being cooked?
What food do you put this sauce on?
How do you cut those holes in the plastic lids for the airlocks?

 
Hi Roguejim.  I actually put the cilantro into the blender fresh, instead of cooking it, as I really wanted to capture its freshness in flavor.  I have really liked this sauce on fish, shrimp, and scalops so far.  I know its pretty low brow, but I love tuna sandwiches and its great on that.  I'd also bet it would be good tossed into a ceviche just before serving.
 
My ferment jar is a jiffy peanut butter jar from Costco.  I used the airlock plug as a template on the lid, then used an x-acto hot knife (http://www.widgetsupply.com/product/SCG3-X73780.html) to cut the hole.  After that I used sandpaper to smooth out the whole so the airlock plug fit in nice and smooth without any gaps.
 
I really want to get one of these: https://www.etsy.com/listing/163357229/15-liter-lactofermentation-kit-ferment
I think they would be a pretty good ferment jar

 

[Chili Monsta]

Turbo,
Here's the link to my fermented(and small cooked)batch of your lemon drop recipe.
 
http://thehotpepper.com/topic/49211-lemondrop-pineapple-fermented-sauce/?p=1037983

 

[turbo]

Strawberry and mango pepper ferment (take 2, update 2)
 
It took about 4 days for a ferment to kick off, but its in full bubble now.  The pic below is just after giving the jar a little spin to encourage the bubbles to the surface.  Notice how the strawberries have had most their color leached out? 
 
I'm very excited to see what will happen to the wine once the fermentation is over.  Will it still be sweet wine?  Will it be slightly vinegar'ish?  Will it just be totally nasty?  Who knows...
 

 

[boostdemon]

I'm really excited about this with the wine. We have a local winery here that makes a chocolate infused wine i'd love to use in a ferment.

 

[laynlow]

Awesome SLOG!!    Thanks for sharing your recipes and experiences with us.

 

[turbo]

Cayenne Garlic Sauce
 
Cayenne really are one of my favorite tasting peppers, I just love the taste of a well done cayenne sauce.  They may not have much heat, but their flavor just so wonderful.
 
I didn't bother to grow my own cayennes this year, but my local farmers market has a farmer from Eastern Washington who usually has a great supply of cayennes, especially once we get into September.  This week I went and picked out a small selection of red and yellow cayennes, and two unknown purple peppers (bottom right of the picture) because I'm running out of last year's cayenne sauce.  I also put in an order for 2 pounds of Maule's cayenne peppers, which are thick and long and great for smoking.
 
For this sauce I also tossed in 2 Scotch Bonnets and 2 Congo Trinidads to get the heat level a bit higher.  
 

 
All chopped up and ready to cook
 

 
Tossed in a teaspoon of salt, a quarter of a Walla Walla sweet onion, and a full head of garlic.  I love me some garlic!  Then poured 1.5 cups of water into the pot and brought it to a low boil and let it simmer until most of the water was boiled off, about 35 minutes.  This leaves the peppers nice and soft and will blend up really easily.
 

 
Once the peppers were cooled, I blended them with about 1/2 cup of white wine vinegar and 1/4 cup water until really smooth.  I prefer a very smooth sauce; no seeds for me.  So I squished the sauce through a sieve to get rid of the seeds.
 
The end product has a great consistency; nice and thick, not runny at all.  This was the first time I boiled the peppers, onions, and garlic like that and I think maybe boiling them for that long helped bring out the natural pectin in the garlic and onion.
 
Oh, and it tastes great!
 

 

[tctenten]

Nice looking sauce. I do something very similar with my cayenne peppers.

 

[Seacowboy]

Enjoyed reading through here. I just went on a fermented sauce making stretch. Bottled 2 last week and refilled those 2 gal buckets and made 2 more in 5 gal buckets, man it takes a helluva a lot to fill those suckers. And now I get to buy bottles for all that, yay!

Keep up the good work and documentation.

 

[turbo]

Enjoyed reading through here. I just went on a fermented sauce making stretch. Bottled 2 last week and refilled those 2 gal buckets and made 2 more in 5 gal buckets, man it takes a helluva a lot to fill those suckers. And now I get to buy bottles for all that, yay!
Keep up the good work and documentation.

Wow, that is a LOT of sauce!

 

[turbo]

Happy Accidents in Sauce Thickening (or How I Discovered Optimal Pectin Activation in Onions)

Last week I made a simple cayenne garlic sauce.  Its the same sauce I've made for several years...Simple and good.  But I was in a bit of a hurry and did things a little bit differently this time and something very interesting happened.  The sauce was thick...like catchup thick!  This kind of blew me away because every time I've ever made this it comes out as thin as tabasco sauce, but for some reason this time it didn't.  I wasn't all that upset about this because I like a nice thick  smooth sauce.  

I assumed that something happened with the pectins naturally found in the ingredients (cayenne, garlic, onion) so I decided to do some searching and found this research paper from University of California.  It talks about the residual pectin found in dried onion powder, and the processing temps where the pectin is most and least active when mixing it with other foods.  This is important for example, because if you sell salsa and use low grade onion powder (higher in pectin), and don't heat it up past a certain point, you'll end up with a jar full of salsa jelly.  Fun!

The paper points out a couple things that were enlightening.  First, white onions have more pectin than yellow or red onions.  Also the "onion stem disks" section of the onion has a higher concentration of pectin than the rest of the bulb.  Then there is an optimum temperature when cooking the onion in a water/salt solution to achieve "optimal pectin activity" (see graph below)
 

And finally, when finished cooking the onion, submerge the pan into an ice bath to rapidly bring down to a cooler temperature.  

I did ALL OF THESE THINGS, and all of them are different than how I usually cook this sauce.  I usually use yellow onions for sauce (that's just what my wife buys) but this week we had white ones.  We had an onion in the fridge that we've been hacking pieces off all week for dinners, and the only part left was the lower third closest to the stem (or roots).  I boiled the peppers, onion and garlic in water because I didn't want to stink up the house with evaporated vinegar, and because I didn't want to wait for it to cool down I slammed it into an ice bath.

So I want to play around with this method a bit.  Isolate it and refine it.  I like the natural thickening result that you get from this, but don't necessarily want to always boil all my ingredients in water.  I may just use this process on the onion and garlic that my sauce requires, then combine the finished result with the rest of the sauce ingredients in the blender.

 

[turbo]

Thai Sweet Fatalii Dipping Sauce
 
I LOVE those sweet Thai sauces you get in Thai restaurants, so I figured I'd experiment with a couple recipes I've seen online, but with different peppers.  This time I chose Fatalii, though I think it would be good with Aji Lemon also.
 
Ingredients

• 5 Fatalii peppers
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1/4 cup rice vinegar
• 3/4 cup water
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• 2 tablespoons cold water

Toss all but the last two ingredients in a blender and puree, then pour into a small pot. 
Bring the pot up to a slow boil, then reduce heat and bring sauce to a slow simmer and cook for 3-5 minutes. 
Combine cornstarch and 2 tablespoons cold water into a slurry, then whisk into sauce in the pot. 
Keep whisking and let pot simmer for another minute.
Pull pot off heat and let cool.  Once cool pour into a small jar. 
Put it in your belly!
 
This stuff is REALLY good!!!  I want to go out and buy french fries right now just to dip them in this stuff.  It is a bit single dimensional in flavor though, and it asking for something else but I'm not sure what.  Maybe a tablespoon or two of orange juice...not quire sure.
 
Also, its pretty smooth.  The blender did a pretty good job of pureeing the peppers, and there are very few, very small pepper bits in the sauce.  I think next time I'll puree half of the peppers with the rest of the ingredients.  Then once its smooth put the other half of the peppers in and just pulse the blender to chop the peppers up, but not liquify them.  That would leave the sauce nice and chunky.
 

 
Things to play with next time to give it more complexity:

• orange juice (1 - 2 tablespoons)
• ginger
• fish sauce (teaspoon or less)
• sherry (teaspoon or less)
• very finely diced sweet white put in pot after blending
• brown sugar instead of white sugar, or maybe half and half

 
(Update: Later the same night): Thai Sweet Aji Pineapple Dipping Sauce
 
Made another batch last night.  I changed up the recipe a bit and use Aji Pineapple peppers instead. 
 
Same ingredients as before, but added

• 1 inch piece of ginger (added to blender)
• 1/4 cup of finely chopped white onion (added to pot, not blended)
• 2 tablespoons orange juice

I also only blended half the peppers, and finely chopped up the other half and added them to the pot (post blender) with the onions.  The pepper and onion chunks gives the sauce a good texture.
 
This dipping sauce has the flavor complexity the Fatalii sauce didn't.  The ginger and orange juice work perfectly with the Aji pepper flavor.  Its absolutely wonderful!  I think next time I make this, I will do a Fatalii / Aji Lemon / Aji Pineapple blend.
 

 

[boostdemon]

I think i figured out what its missing... sugar. 
 
(guessing you just forgot to add that to the ingredients and instructions?)

 

[turbo]

I think i figured out what its missing... sugar. 
 
(guessing you just forgot to add that to the ingredients and instructions?)

 
Good catch.  Yup, I sugar them out of the instructions.  Updated with sugar   Thanks!

 

[hoibot]

Turbo, these all look great, thanks for sharing.
 
Just a bit of info on the wine-added hot sauce and turning it into vinegar, acetobacter are aerobic bacteria, meaning they need access to oxygen to convert ethanol into acetic acid, so you'd have to age that one in an open air environment to get that transformation. i think there are some bacteria that will transform sugars straight into acetic acid, but the acetobacter would be the main organism doing that.
 
Looking forward to more sauces.