Hot Sauce

Making fermented pepper mashes from this summer’s pods

The Impetus
I had a few cayenne plants this year that gave me some pods that I want to make into a fermented mash. If you recall the first mash I made from early growth pods earlier in the year went marvelously well, but the final product was too salty because I was a moron and re-salted the sauce after I’d forgot the mash already had a high salt content. I had a lot of cayenne peppers before the frosts hit, a few jalapeños, and a slew of Trinidad 7-pots (yellow and red). For all these plants I waited until the pods were fully ripened before picking. Since they all ripen at different intervals, I went ahead and threw them in a freezer bag as I picked them to preserve the pods. Water makes up over 90 percent of the weight of most produce and is held within the fairly rigid cell walls that give support, structure and texture to the fruit or vegetable. Freezing fruits and vegetables actually consists of freezing the water contained in the plant cell. When the water freezes, it expands, and the ice crystals cause the cell walls to rupture. The texture of the thawed produce will be much softer than it was when raw., but since these were going into a salt mash to undergo lactic acid fermentation anyway, I don’t care if their firm texture holds up. So into the freezer they go! 

The Approach
Since cayennes were the dominating variety, I decided to make one jar of mash out of purely cayennes, and another jar w/ mixed reds. The peppers were de-stemmed, and thrown into a blender with a splash of water. Since Cayennes are very thin pods with not a lot of water and flesh, you have to help them along a bit by adding water in the blender. I didn’t bother de-seeding them because this will come later when the mash is made into hot sauce. After I puree’d the cayennes, I scraped them into a jar and covered w/ 2 TBSP of kosher salt. I put the lid on loosely so any CO2 created by the fermentation could escape. I didn’t add any lactobacillus starter like yogurt cultures as I want to see if I can get this one to spontaneously ferment. In fact, I think I’ll probably need to remove the lid for a day or so to help this along and simply cover with a cheese cloth before adding the lid back on. 

The 2nd mash I made, I used the residual cayenne puree from the blender, but also added red Jalapeño and red Trinidad 7-pot peppers to the mix. I removed the seeds from the 7-pots, so this mash doesn’t have as many seeds as the cayenne mash. This is going to be an odd blend, but we’ll see how it comes out. This time I didn’t have to add any water to the mix since the jalapeños and 7-pots were sufficiently juicy to make the puree the right consistency. I did however add about a teaspoon of bhut jolokia mash as a starter to this mix… because fuck it why not? Again I covered the top of the mash w/ 2 TBSP of kosher salt and put the lid on gently. 

The results
These mashes will take about 2 months to complete fermentation, so we’ll check back on them around St. Patty’s day to see how they’re doing. With any luck, I’ll have a couple jars of usable mash I can use for some hot sauces to kick up my Proper Irish Breakfast™ on St. Patty’s day. In the mean time, I’ll probably just give them a quick stir every week or so, but that’s it.

A Tale of Two Peppers: The Taste Test

The true test of which hot sauce comes out on top: Taquitos Al Pastor. If the sauce sucks on this… it just sucks. 

Sad to say, my usual stand-by, the Jalapeno, didn’t measure up. After coming out of the fridge from an overnight meld the sauce I made with Red Serrano mash was far superior in every way. Color, texture, homogenization, flavor, and to boot I was even able to stretch it more since it was thicker. MOAR SOSS = MOAR OSSUM. 

Surprisingly though, neither one of these had the capsaicin content I usually expect out of such pepper mashes. I’d wager to say it’s because capsaicin mellows over time in fermented mashes. No worries, I have some Red Savina mash and Bhut Jolokia mash that will remedy that issue REAL quick. And shortly, either Trinidad Scorpion or Trinidad 7-pot mash. ;) But those are in the works… This is a good thing! It’s much easier to work with a sauce that’s not hot enough, than have one that’s insanely too hot for the average palette. You can always add heat, but you can’t take it out. 

Now unless the cayenne mash turns out better than the Red Serrano (doubtful) I think I have a good base to work with for Aztec Empire 1323. 

What I have left to figure out is 
A) How much extra heat can I add and still not scare everyone off
B) What sort of demand/marketing balance I’ll get
C) How to do this at bulk production scale to meet demand
D) What is a reasonable price to charge

Oh yeah, and bottles! :D

Same Sauce, Different Mashes

The Impetus
I ordered a few different types of pepper mash from LA Pepper exchange, and want to test them out. I had to leave out the Cayenne unfortunately because they sent the wrong kind, but I have Red Jalapeno and Red Serrano to test. 

The Approach
These are going to be a simple sauce - Aged Pepper Mash (salt included), lime juice, single garlic clove, vinegar, and in the case of Red Serrano, a bit of water to thin it out (Red Serrano is a thick mash for some reason). I combined the ingredients in a food processor, strained them into a pot, and heated them on the stove. Simple. This is mainly going to be done just so I can get a sense of what differentiates the peppers. 

The Results
So I didn’t think there was going to be a noticeable difference in flavor. Boy was I wrong. The Jalapeno sauce has a much more very fruity, floral flavor, while the Red Serrano is a bit more earthy and smokey. The consistency of each is perfect, but the color… the Red Serrano is almost the exact color of ketchup - DEEP red, where the Red Jalapeno is slightly more ‘burnt sienna’. I’ll have to wait until they’re out of the fridge tomorrow to give a better description. 

Final Thoughts
I didn’t think there was going to be such a huge difference in flavor just using two slightly different peppers. When you slice Jalapenos and Serranos open and taste them fresh, while they’re still green, there’s very little difference. However after they’ve fully ripened and undergone lactic acid fermentation, the difference is almost night and day. We’ll see if either of these mashes are good enough to make it into the first round of Pablo’s brand. If neither on their own seem to stand out enough, I’ll likely be trying a mash blend to add complexity and depth of flavor.

So here’s what 30 lbs. of pepper mash looks like

Next iteration of Aztec Empire

The Impetus
I’m still working on improving the recipe for my first hot sauce launch. I’ve settled on using the Red Serrano mash as a base, but it needs a bit of a kick. For this iteration instead of lime juice I’m using lime zest. The last batch was slightly less hot than I wanted, so I’m adding a couple spoons of Red Habanero mash to jack up the heat a smidge. I’m also including a couple teaspoons of cumin for a slightly more smokey quality. 

The approach
Nothing fancy, zest up a lime, throw in a clove of garlic, two tablespoons of habanero mash, fill it up w/ red serrano mash, add vinegar to thin. Spin it up in the processor, strain it into a pot, bring it up to barely a simmer, take off the heat and let sit in fridge overnight. 

Final thoughts
I’ll have to post final thoughts in a comment here as I haven’t had a chance to let it sit in the fridge and meld yet. The initial tasting off the burner seemed pretty good. It may be slightly more hot than I want, so if that’s the case, I’ll maybe flip it to someone that can take the heat and the next batch will use less habanero mash. We’ll just have to wait and see. Perhaps I could even blend the final sauce with the weaker one to split the difference in heat? Who knows, maybe it’ll be perfect and I won’t have to do a thing. :D

Chasing Melinda

The Impetus
One of my current favorites is Melinda’s Naga Jolokia hot sauce. 

It is terrifyingly spicy and has a depth of flavor that sends chills down my spine. It’s one of the few super-hot sauces that I really enjoy because the flavor is so amazing. It’s based on Naga Jolokia peppers (these are sometimes called Ghost Peppers) which are native to India. They used to be the world’s hottest until this year, and they have a super intense flavor in addition to ridiculous heat. You can really taste what these peppers are capable of in Melinda’s Naga Jolokia. 

So I’ve set out to pay tribute and hopefully come up with something I like equally well. The ingredients list in Melinda’s Naga Jolokia is as follows: Naga Jolokia Peppers (likely a fermented mash), carrots, papayas, lime juice, vinegar, onions, passion fruit, citric acid, garlic, salt, xanthan gum. 

My sauce is as follows: Aged Bhut Jolokia pepper (mash from http://www.dannycash.com), water, fresh cherries, carrots, onions, garlic, lime juice, vinegar, honey, salt, worcestershire sauce, liquid smoke. 

I didn’t have passion fruit or papaya laying around so I used the sweeteners I had laying around - cherries and honey. The carrots and onions are used as thickening agents that offer a bit of flavor depth. Also you’ll notice I’m using a bigger food processor than normal, the Kitchen Aid. It does a MUCH better job of creating a puree than the dinky white processor I use for small batches. 

The Approach
Set the carrots and onions to boil, spoon in a bunch of ghost pepper mash, squeeze in the lime juice, and start adding remaining ingredients into the food processor (except honey). Once the carrots and onions are soft enough, scoop them out of the pot and add them into the processor. Give it a thorough spin, and use the water you were boiling the carrots/onions in to thin it out as necessary. Strain into a pot, give it a taste, and add honey as needed for additional sweetness - but be careful this stuff is SUPER hot. Bring up the sauce to a slight simmer on the stove. I would recommend doing this on an outdoor kitchen burner as this stuff is potent enough to mace everyone in your kitchen as it heats (just ask my wife! Sorry sweetie!). I noticed the sauce had a bit of a bitter quality that the honey seemed to offset decently well. I’m not sure where this is coming from, but I’m suspecting the cheap vinegar I’m using. I’ll have to grab some higher quality vinegar in the future. 

Final Thoughts
Have you ever aimed a blow torch into your mouth? Yeah this one’s a little like that.  My taste buds are cauterized after doing a few tastings of this sauce as I was cooking it.  However after it sits for a week or so, something magical happens.  The upfront heat mostly disappears, and you’re left with this really sweet flavor upfront.  The bitterness is gone entirely.  The heat on the back end however, is RIGHTEOUS.  You try a small bit and go “oh come on this is nothing”, and then 5 min. later you start feeling an intense burning heat that doesn’t let go.  This one is a slow burn that really sneaks up on you.  I’m going to make a few tweaks and probably call it Chupacabra.  

First batch of testers on their way out

Shipped out some of my hot sauce to taste-test.  Will post anonymized reactions later.

The last couple batches I’ve made are approaching production quality. I have a couple things I want to tweak still before I solidify the recipes, build up a stock, and start marketing; but I wanted other taste-testers to confirm my suspicions. 

I had 4 bottles of a ghost-pepper based sauce I’m tentatively calling Chupacabra and 2 bottles of another batch I’m simply referring to by the main ingredients: Serrano Lime #1. I think I’ve managed to tame the other-worldly heat in ghost pepper sauce enough to make it enjoyable, and the Serrano Lime sauce has a great southwestern US zest going on. 

But I wanted to hear what you think! So the first 6 people that posted a “dibs” reply on my G+ thread got dibs on the sauces. 

Happy Holidays from Pablo’s Hot Sauce. :)

Home-made cayenne pepper mash follow up

The Impetus
This summer, I had way way way more cayenne peppers than I knew what to do with. So after doing a bit of research, I decided to try my hand at making a home-made pepper mash as a base for an upcoming hot sauce. This would likely be a Louisiana-style sauce, but really could be anything.

The Approach
Wild fermentation of peppers takes roughly 8 weeks to fully develop. Unlike beer/wine fermentation which uses yeasts, vegetable fermentation involves lactic acid from cultures in the air, or from starter cultures like you’d find in Yogurt, cottage cheese, or Kefir. Peppers don’t have much sugars to feed on, so it takes a little while to get started, which means you have to add salt to keep other more nasty bacteria from developing while you’re waiting for lactic acid fermentation to take hold. The salt has the added benefit of drawing the liquid out of the crushed up pods. As pepper mash fermentation takes place, you want as little contact with the air as possible, so people use weights to keep the mash down, and the liquid on top to form a water seal from the air. Occasionally you’ll get yeast growing on the top of the liquid, but it’s harmless and can be scooped off. 

So after 8 weeks of setting my cayenne pepper mash off on its voyage of fermentation, it was finally ready. After removing the lid and giving it a stir, the smell was amazing. It smelled like hot sauce already, and I hadn’t even done anything to it. Let’s make a proper sauce of it shall we?

We start by emptying the jar of fermented mash into the food processor, adding two cloves of garlic, a smidge of salt (which as we’ll see later should NOT have been done), and a bit of water. No vinegar. 

After getting the mash to puree nicely, we’d need to cook it. There’s active yeast that grew in the mash as it fermented, and unless you bring it up to temperature, will remain alive. Not what you want. 

The Results
As I started the puree, the smell was fantastic. Easily best I’ve made so far. However, I was reluctant to give the mash a taste before I brought it up to a simmer on the stove to sterilize it. Definitely didn’t want a trip to the ER from botulism poisoning or anything. As it started to cook, the smell permeated everything. Important to note, at this point I’ve used no vinegar. I’ve found vinegar has a much lower boiling temperature than water and is the first to evaporate if you cook with it. You’ll never taste it in the final product unless you add it at the end. 

Well after it came off the stove and cooled a bit, I gave it a taste. ACK!!! Entirely too salty. What a bummer, had to throw out the batch. In retrospect I forgot the mash was already salted, and didn’t need added salt the way I normally do with fresh pepper sauces. It was a hard lesson learned because I waited 8 weeks for this jar of mash to finish, and was teased with a fantastic aroma only to botch it by making it too salty. Will definitely NOT be making that mistake again. 

HOWEVER! The real payoff here was that my attempt at pepper mash fermentation worked successfully. I now know how to set it up properly, and what to look out for when making a mash. So even though the sauce was a bust, this is a big breakthrough for me. 

The other thing I’ve learned is it takes a LOT of peppers to make a sauce from mash. Much more than I have room to grow myself. For the peppers I grow myself I’ll be able to make sauces out of them easily, but only in small quantities. For production purposes under the Pablo’s Hot Sauce™ brand, I’ll have to buy mash from a distributor. Fortunately I found http://lapepperexchange.com/which do exactly this, and will scale up nicely from a gallon, to 55 gallon drums, to entire shipping containers full of mash of all different sorts. They even do blends. Sweet!

Salsa Yahualica: Rare Import

My folks just got back from Mexico. I only had two requests - salsa Yahualica and Tequila Almendrado de Orendain (Los Dos Gordos). The hot sauce is impossible to find state-side - I’ve been looking for an importer for years. I found a cached picture of it on the web ONCE, on the page of an grocery importer in UK, but it’s since vanished and the importer doesn’t carry it anymore. If you ever run across a store that carries it… BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY. And let me know where you found it so I don’t have to send a mule to San Miguel El Alto to pick it up! 

Yahualica is fantastic hot sauce with the most amazing, unique flavor you’ll ever try. If you think it’s just a Valentina/Tamazula/Huichol clone, think again. I’m going to be eating a lot of it now that I’ve managed to get my hands on two liter-sized bottles and use it as a reference for my indo-mexican style sauce. It uses peppers it calls Yahualica peppers (which I think may be a variant of Chile De Arbol), but I’m not sure how much of the unique flavor they impart. Apparently the Yahualica peppers are grown in lava rock so they have a slightly more earthy flavor than normal Chiles De Arbol.  There’s something in the spice blend additive that’s tossed in there that I think accounts for much of the unique flavor. It’s going to take a while before I can pick out all the flavors, but I’m working on it.  

If you live nearby and really want to try some, give me a shout. I’ve more than enough to share… for a little while at least. ;)

HPLC Lab results for Aztec Empire

Results of the HPLC lab are in for my hot sauce thanks to +Alan McDonald. The numbers are probably boring to most, but according to Alan, Aztec Empire is ~2.24x as hot as the Tabasco sauce they tested. This is a little higher than I wanted for this particular blend, but you can definitely feel the difference in the taste test. Before I mark it ready for production, it’s going to go through a few tweaks, one being to tame the heat a little more. :)