Hot Sauce

Difference between Lactic Acid Fermentation and Alcoholic fermentation

http://www.differencebetween.net/science/health/difference-between-alcohol-and-lactic-acid-fermentation/

Lactic Acid fermentation is used in Hot Sauce, Sauerkraut, Kimchi, etc.
Alcoholic Fermentation is used in Beer, Wine, Bread, Whisky, etc.

I think I’m going to experiment with doing fermented mashes of various fruits in addition to the peppers for hot sauces instead of using newly ripened fruit.

Trinidad Scorpion growth

It’s really weird how these peppers ripen. My jalapenos turn almost completely black, then turn red. These trinidad scorpion peppers seem to start turning yellow from the top down, then all at once start turning orange then bright red. 

Although none of them are really showing that characteristic pointy tail. I’m starting to think these are in fact a variety of Trinidad 7-pot.

Quick Update on World’s Hottest Pepper

This is the 1st Trinidad Scorpion pepper I grew that reached full maturity/ripeness. I decided to break it down, save the seeds, and freeze the sliced open pod. They smell marvelous. Your nose will tingle with the dark, smokey, spicy aroma these things give off when cut open. There weren’t many seeds in this one, maybe about 7-10? Surprisingly, it’s a very juicy pod. Much more than the orange habaneros I’m used to. I’m thinking it would mash really well due to the high moisture content. However, fermented mashes usually serve as the base of a hot sauce, and these are just entirely too hot to try and use as a base pepper. So I’m not sure I want to make a mash from it. Unless you’re just a nutbag and want to try a sauce using these as the base… maybe make a special request? Otherwise not going to happen. Likely what I’ll do is make a base sauce using cayenne mash, and throw one of these in there fresh as a “punctuation mark”. 

Okay, yes, I couldn’t resist tasting the juice on the knife and tasting the underside of the cap to see just how hot these things are. What? It’s got the immediate, up front heat of a habanero without the bright, citrusy flavor. It’s much more earthy and dark tasting. Did I mentio…. OH FUCK OH MY FUCKING GOD FUCK ME IT FUCKING BURNS… FUCK!

The heat lasts about 15-20 minutes and doesn’t really dissipate at all. It just keeps burning and burning and burning at the same ridiculous level the whole time. Habaneros hit you hard like this, say start out at a 10 but then go away more quickly… dissipating to a 4-5 within minutes. Bhut Jolokias slowly build on you and are a much slower heat before they reach the apex of their burn. They start out at a 6 and then build to a steady 10 before letting go to a 6 again and then dissipating. Trinidad Scorpions give you the level of heat the Bhut Jolokia eventually build up to, but do so immediately and don’t ever let up. They’re an 11, and stay at 11 until it dissipates completely. Keep a tall glass of milk nearby if you’re going to try this. And don’t ever, EVER think about eating a whole one. You’ll be sorry. You have been warned. 

I now have a healthy respect for these pods and a good idea of how to handle them in future hot sauces and food prep. They are no joke.

Checking on the fermented cayenne mash

Checking in on my fermenting cayenne mash. It’s looking just like it should, submerged under the water weight. When I lifted the weight to give it a stir it definitely had the correct acidic, fermented scent. It’s not quite ready yet, but getting there. I can tell it’s being broken down into a more mushy consistency. The skins still need a little more time to fully break down

Official Google Plus page for Pablo’s Hot Sauce

So here’s the official Google Plus page for Pablo’s Hot Sauce -https://plus.google.com/u/1/b/111557082308109818406/

I’ll still post updates, findings, recipes, pepper-related horticulture/cultivation, etc… on G+ as myself, but anything that’s going to be related to the business-side will go on the Pablo’s Hot Sauce G+ page. So things like product launches, contact info., ordering info, etc… you’ll find there. 

Sending Aztec Empire to HPLC lab

Quick Update:
The batch of hot sauce I made during the G+ video hangout I feel is good enough to be the basis for the first line of the Pablo’s Hot Sauce brand. I’m tentatively calling it Aztec Empire because it’s made entirely from ingredients native to Central Mexico where the Aztec Empire flourished. This area of the world is also dear to me since it’s where my mother grew up. It will get a couple minor tweaks before the recipe is solidified and mass-produced. I’m sending off a bottle of the early recipe today to Alan McDonald for High Performance Liquid Chromatography analysis, and will post the results once that’s complete.

Simple Red Habanero sauce using Mash

The Impetus
I have a huge jar of red savina mash, and wanted to make a sauce that’s comparable to August in Austin -http://www.tearsofjoysauces.com/august-austin-sauce-p-213.html. August in Austin is fast becoming one of my favorites and has won many awards; and with good reason, the guys at Tears of Joy in Austin are no joke.

The Approach
This will be a simple sauce. The ingredients list is just Habanero mash, vinegar, garlic, onion, lime zest, and salt. With mash-based sauces, you fortunately get enough acidity from the fermented mash, so it doesn’t require a bunch of extra vinegar for acidity. This also means you can make a thicker sauce more easily. For this sauce, I didn’t want a thicker consistency like ketchup, but I didn’t want it to be completely runny like tabasco either. This sauce’s consistency will be more like the consistency of a buffalo wing sauce.

First I chopped up half an onion, and sauteed it in some butter. After the onion was sufficiently caramelized, I dumped 3 roughly chopped cloves of garlic in the pan to brown slightly. I immediately threw this mix along with the zest of one lime into the blender and let it cool a bit. Then I spooned in about 6-8 tablespoons of the habanero mash into the blender and spun the entire mixture all up. The resulting mix is quite thick, but here’s where I start adding vinegar to thin it out. I stack the sauce w/ vinegar, blend, stack, blend, etc… until it’s the right consistency. Strain the mix into a pot, bring it up to temperature (just until it steams out a bit, you don’t want it to boil!). Then kill the heat, bottle the sauce, pop into the refrigerator to meld.

Final Thoughts
The red habanero mash makes for a very, very awesome heat. The capsaicin is immediately apparent as habaneros typically are - very bright and up front. However, the heat then seems to dissipate a bit and you think you’re getting a bit of relief… but then something very bizarre happens. The heat comes right back at you and lingers. I’m not sure why this sauce has this kind of, “boomerang” effect, but perhaps it’s due to the use of a mash, and in particular the type of pepper that’s used in the mash. The consistency is exactly what I was after, but I think next time I make it, I’m going to omit the onions, and perhaps if I decide to make this one of my staple sauces, I’ll use lime juice instead of zest for ease of bulk production. The onions don’t really add much in terms of flavor depth, but they do impart a strong aroma in the scent of the sauce. It’s not offensive or anything, but it’s a little unexpected I think. Also, the lime zest is fantastic tasting, but would be impossible to source reliably at scale for mass production.

Trying Out a Fermented Pepper Mash

Trying Out a Fermented Pepper Mash

The Impetus
I recently discovered a few suppliers of fermented pepper mash. Fermented mashes are nice because you can control the heat easily - no surprise capsaicin explosion from shocked peppers, and the fermented flavor is able to take the place of some of the vinegar in your sauces. Less vinegar means you can control the thickness of the sauce using water - which is much more desirable I think. This particular pepper mash is red habanero mash from http://dannycash.com (yes, that was definitely a shameless plug!). Danny is awesome if you ever get a chance to talk to him. So this sauce is going to be made with stuff I have laying around, and will use Danny Cash’s Red Habanero mash. I’m thinking this one will be a sweeter, south-meets-the-west-indies kinda sauce. The type that goes well with jerk chicken and red beans on saffron rice. 

The Approach
Slice up a couple fresh peaches, dump ‘em in the blender, and start stacking the accoutrements till it tastes like something I want to put on jerk chicken. Sounds easy, right? It’s not. Getting the flavor balance of sweet, salty, spicy, sour, and that certain “zingy” flavor that comes from fermentation… it’s tricky, and requires lots and lots of tasting. Not to mention getting the consistency to where it’s easy to pour, but won’t come flowing out too fast. 

I start by slicing up both peaches. I only used one to begin with to see how the puree would look. Unfortunately these peaches weren’t very sweet, so I needed to use honey to bring up the sweetness a bit. I tasted the peach/honey puree and it’s pretty good. We’re off to a good start. Now it’s time to add the heat - 2 teaspoons of the Habanero mash. Spin it, and taste - pretty hot. WAY hot. Okay, let’s do some more stacking, we can dilute with more peaches later. Spun in some lemon zest - fantastic addition, gives a great up-front punch. But now it needs a smidge more honey to balance. And still too hot. In goes more honey and the rest of the peaches. Now the heat is under control, not nearly as fierce. But now it’s a bit sweet and slightly spicy, and not much else. Let’s spin in another pinch of lemon zest, a couple teaspoons of vinegar and a pinch of salt. Give it a taste… pretty damn good now. Any more vinegar and it’d be ruined. However for some reason the heat is a bit weak now. One more teaspoon of mash and it’s perfect, ready for straining into the sauce pot. 

Heating the sauce is to kill any bacteria that may be present. The bottles are also sterlized by throwing a centimeter or two of water in the bottom and microwaving them on high for a couple minutes. The water boils, steams the inside, and the glass heats up significantly. Heat the sauce in the pot up just slightly below boiling, you don’t want it to boil. A little steam off the top is fine. Once it’s up to temperature, into the bottles with it.

Final thoughts
Will have to save final thoughts until the sauce has come down to temperature and can settle in the fridge for a bit. This one won’t be interchangeable with the Louisiana-style sauces, but on initial tasting should feel right at home on cajun food, north Mexican, and island-style cuisine. This one is likely going to get some tweaking, and going to become my the basis for Pablo’s Trinidad-style sauce. I haven’t settled on a name yet. Trinidad Volcano? Trinidad Terror? Trinidad Calypso? If you can throw out a name I like, maybe I’ll use it. :)

Creating a Fermented Pepper Mash

The Impetus
I have 3 cayenne pepper bushes that consistently put out more peppers than I know what to do with. I’ve been experimenting with different recipes and listening to the bigger hot sauce makers (Dave Hirschkop of Dave’s Insanity fame, Danny Cash, the McIlhenny’s, etc…), and I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to start trying out fermented pepper mashes rather than just using fresh peppers. I ordered a jar of Habanero mash from Leeners (http://www.leeners.com/) as well as 3 other types of mash from Danny Cash (http://www.dannycash.com/). But for this write-up I’m going to detail how I’m making my own out of cayennes. Cayennes fortunately are just potent enough that you can make a respectable fermented mash out of them and not have it spoil. The Chinense pepper family (habaneros, bhut jolokias, scotch bonnets, trinidads, etc…) are typically what people use for fermenting to add a stronger flavor to the peppers to match the high capsaicin content. Peppers lower in capsaicin like jalapenos, poblanos, etc… typically aren’t fermented, but I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps because the heat level is so low, adding the flavor component that comes with fermentation is maybe too strong?  I’ll have to experiment with some and find out.

The Approach
I’ve already got everything I need for this - blender, peppers, salt, starter, sterilized glassware, warm/dark closet, and time. So here’s how this works… first thing to do is prep the peppers - rinse them off under water and cut off the stems. Shove them all into the blender and blend them up into a pulp. I used only about a 1/2 oz. of water in the blender just so they’d mash up more easily, but if you’re diligent about scraping down the sides of the blender and making sure they’re all going through the blades at the bottom it’s not necessary. In fact you probably don’t want to use any additional liquid during this step if you can help it. Once you’ve got your mashed up peppers spoon them out seeds and all into your fermenting jar and press the mash down so the water from the pods squeezes up the sides.  This will let you know you have enough liquid in the jar. If it’s still too dry (i.e. you don’t see the water coming up) you should add just a touch of water.  This is so you can press the peppers down into the bottom and the water will cover the top of them ever so slightly and keep the pepper mash insulated from the air.  I used wide-mouth Ball™ pickling jar for mine. You want to make sure it’s sterilized first, and an easy way to do this is put it in a ziplock bag with 2 oz. of water and throw in the microwave for 2 min. on high (vent the bag slightly of course). The inside of the bag will steam quite vigorously and your jar will be sterilized. No need to boil on the stove! Nice right? I learned this trick when my wife had to sterilize milk bottles for my kiddo when he was younger. 

After you’ve dumped all the mashed up peppers into the jar, you’re going to want a starter for fermentation. Technically the contents will spontaneously ferment from airborne cultures if you leave the jar open to the air for a day or so, but this also increases the possibility of spoilage. For the lactic acid fermentation we’re shooting for I’ve heard you can use live yogurt cultures as a starter - just skim off the white liquid sitting on top of your yogurt and spoon in about a teaspoon full. But I’m going to use a hopefully more reliable method. I’m going to pull my starter from the jar of fermented habanero mash I ordered. In the picture you can see me putting in a dollop of the fermented habanero mash and mixing it in. After your starter is fully mixed into the mash, if you’re making a pickling jar sized quantity, you’ll want to spoon in about a tablespoon of kosher salt. 

In any fermented pepper mash you’ll want to use about 5-15% kosher salt. I believe this is mostly to draw out moisture from the peppers for cover since they’re not a vegetable that contains a lot of water (cayennes especially!), but also to slightly slow the fermentation process. I’m not entirely sure how lactic acid fermentation is affected by salt, but from everything I’ve read, too much salt will have an adverse affect on fermentation, as well as make the end result too salty to use in your pepper sauces. You want the flavor of the fermented peppers to come through, and control the salt content after the fact. But salt I believe is certainly necessary to control other less-desirable creatures from infecting your mash (mold, etc…)

Another consideration in fermentation is air contact. Since there’s many nasties floating around out there in the air that can spoil your product, you’ll want to limit the exposure. Having said that, a byproduct of fermentation is carbon dioxide gas, so you can’t just seal up the mash jar entirely or you’re going to have an expanding gaseous time-bomb on your hands. So you’ll want gas to be able to get OUT, but you don’t want to leave the jar open to the air and let all the nasties (mold, etc…) IN. How to do this? Well, in beer fermentation you typically use a special water-chambered air-lock device that lets gas bubble out but doesn’t let any air in. Beer is also considerably more vulnerable to infection than salted pepper mash, so special precautions like this are necessary. With salted pepper mash however, you still want the same effect, but we can achieve this more easily albeit less elegantly simply using a water bag. Simply double bag a plastic zip-top bag, fill it full of water, set it on top of the mash mixture and press it down on the mash so it serves as a weight. The water in the bag will press against all sides of the jar, and will let gas bubble out around the edges of the jar, but will limit the mash’s exposure to the outside air. This method is of course not nearly as precise as using a carboy airlock like you would for beer, but given the more hearty nature of what’s being fermented, it will work just fine. Just make sure you press the peppers down into the jar before placing the water bag and make sure there’s a skim of liquid covering the top of them.

That’s it! Just set the mixture in a dark place, if you can elevate the temperature slightly above room temp., (~75-80 degrees F) even better. Primary fermentation should happen in 3-5 days, and secondary fermentation will take 3-4 weeks after. 

I’ll create a follow-up post to this in about a month with the results of my fermentation. fingers crossed

Creating basic pepper sauce using Red Jalapenos

The Impetus: 
Make a basic pepper sauce using fresh red jalapenos.  This one will be similar to my basic cayenne sauce.  This is great way to make a fresh tasting hot sauce with all those jalapenos that keep piling up on you.

The Approach:

You take all the peppers, split them, and throw them in the stew pot w/ some garlic, onions, lime juice, and salt. Stew them a little while in vinegar, puree the result, and strain.  Heat the strained sauce over VERY low heat to 180 - you don’t want it to boil, then let it come down to room temp. and bottle.