Description

Hot sauce, like Tabasco sauce, Sriracha sauce, and hot chili sauce get their heat from hot chili peppers and their flavors from the fruitiness of the peppers, from garlic, and from sugar. This hot sauce recipe is basic without the added ingredients you’d find in a store-bought hot sauce.

Ingredients

Scale

2 pounds red jalapeño peppers, stem removed
2 cups of filtered water
2 teaspoons Himalayan salt
6 cloves of garlic, peeled and split (optional)

Equipment:

1 fermentation lock lids like this one
Glass weight
1 quart wide-mouth jar with ring
Plate
Blender with jar

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Instructions

Clean and sanitize your fermentation lock lid, glass weight, and quart jar.
Wash the jalapeño peppers.
Wearing disposable gloves, slice jalapeño peppers into rings, retaining the membrane and seeds. Place in a sanitized wide-mouth quart jar. Fill the jar to the shoulders, shaking the jar to compact more pepper rings into the jar.
Mix salt and water in a glass measuring cup. Pour the prepared brine over the peppers to the shoulders of the jar, covering the peppers. Using a clean knife, dislodge any air bubbles in the jar.
Place the glass weight into the neck of the glass jar.
Top up the jar with more brine if necessary to fill the jar to the neck. Leave one inch of headspace to allow for the jar contents to expand during fermentation. Place the fermentation lock lid on top of the Mason jar. Screw the band to secure the lid in place.
Place the jar on a plate to catch any spills. Ferment at room temperature, away from direct sunlight.
After 24 to 30 hours you will notice fine bubbles forming inside the jar. Those bubbles will become coarser and more numerous over the next 48 hours. The pepper rings will rise in the jar and the chamber of the fermentation lock will fill with liquid.
The fermentation stops in the jar when the peppers sink to the bottom of the jar and you no longer see any bubbles rising in the jar.
Remove the fermentation lid and weight. At this point, you have pickled jalapeño peppers. You can serve them at this point or take it one more step to make hot sauce.
Move the pickled jalapeño rings into the jar of a blender. Leave the liquid behind, only using enough of the pickling brine, in the blend, to get your preferred thickness of hot pepper sauce.
Blend on medium speed until you no longer see any seeds in the mixture and the hot pepper sauce is of a uniform consistency. Add more brine from the ferment to make the batch more liquid, if you prefer. It will thicken as it is blended.

Notes

Use your hot sauce by the drop not by the tablespoon. Kept refrigerated or stored in a cold storage room or root cellar, this hot sauce will last a year or more. The live lacto-bacteria helps to keep the hot sauce preserved.