After at least a month-long ferment (I don’t remember exactly when we processed the peppers), our three hot sauces are ready for bottling, labelling and, besides personal use, gift-giving. Just a warning that if you make your own hot sauce with lots of delicious fermented peppers, many people will say it is the best they ever had and you are sort of stuck making it every year once it becomes an expected gift. But that is okay, we enjoy it.
This year’s varieties are:
Aji Fire (red): A mixture of Aji Crystal and Aji Colorado, with a few Big Red Mommas added to give it a little authority. I also halved 2 large Prairie Fire peppers to use on top under the glass weight since the larger size holds the peppers down below it. 4 big cloves or hard neck garlic added to the 2-quart jar full of peppers and brine to ferment. We strained all the brine before blending, added about 1/2 cup of unfiltered apple cider vinegar and a tablespoon of honey to blend it all. Thick, tangy and all that good funky fermented flavor with what most people would consider a low to medium heat.
Fatal Peach (yellow): A repeat from last year after a lot of rave reviews. This is about 80% Sugar Rush Peach and 20% Fatale. Besides the garlic, we added a large peach to the ferment, cut into slices and skinned. Same additions at blending as above. Thick, tangy, with a hint of fruit, slightly sweeter and a little less of the funky flavor with medium heat.
Orange You In Pain (orange): We had tons of production on the Fatale plant and a lot of very large, thick-skinned orange Roger’s Giant Habaneros from one of those plants, so we mixed those together and added a couple of nice red Prairie Fire peppers at the top. Same additions at blending as above. This is another great-tasting sauce (at least to my palate), but the heat is up there closer to the top of my range. For me, when a hot sauce gets too hot I use so little that I never get any of the actual sauce flavor.
Sorry I don’t have any of the pictures of the jars from fermenting. I’ll try to do that next year. To process them, we cut all peppers in half, take out the membrane and seeds and pack them in about as tight as they can go into the jars. We use a glass weight to keep them under the brine and a fermenting cap. We ferment in either 1-quart or 2-quart ball jars, depending on how many peppers we have for a given mix.
Here are a few of the bottles. We wound up with 8-10 of each type.
) ).
