Homemade Hot Sauce

Apparently I am turning into a fermento. That's a person that preserves food by the use of fermentation (think sauerkraut). Also, if I have an excess of something, like peppers, my first thought is to pickle them! My CSA has been overflowing with peppers and I'm not really someone that loves peppers in everything, so hot sauce seemed like something fun to try. I used a recipe from the Joy of Cooking, with a modification - I added an air lock to my jar so that I wouldn't have to stir the mash every day (mainly since I was going to be out of town) but also I didn't want to deal with mold.

The first thing you do is you weigh out your peppers to figure out what would be a 2% by weight salt brine.

Then you cut up the peppers and put in a jar. Add your salt and top with a sweet wine. As you can see, I added an air lock to my jar. I found this set up looking for recipes - it is a recap top, a #6 stopper with a drilled hole and then the air lock. The recap tops can be made to fit either wide mouth or regular mouth jars. Pretty nifty.

After about a month, the peppers look about the same - although my cool green heritage jar might not be helping with trying to see a difference.

I then put the peppers and brine in the blender and poured the mash through a strainer. I was thinking about saving the strained mash, but there are too many seeds.

Once the mash has been strained you measure what you have and add in half as vinegar. I used rice wine vinegar. In all, it's pretty liquidy, and hot, of course. More of a Tabasco-style sauce.

I got more peppers, so I'm going for a thicker sauce now. See you in a month, sauce.