This is my second attempt at lactofermentation pickling. I tried for the first time last year and it went horribly wrong, so I haven’t tried again since.
I received some self-burping jars and glass weights as a gift and have decided to give it another try.
This is 1lb of serrano peppers that I hope to turn into hot sauce when it’s all said and done. The jars were much more full initially; the glass weights have condensed the peppers considerably at this point.
Today is day 4 (of maybe a 14 day fermentation period). The brine has started to get cloudy and I can see bubbles forming beneath the surface, which seem to be good signs.
Fingers crossed. If the whole process goes well, I’d like to bring some home-made fermented hot sauce to Thanksgiving this year.
If you want to go above and beyond impressing people with homemade hot sauce grab something like these: https://www.nicebottles.com/catalog/5ozwoozyshrinks
I used to make my own hot sauces and printed off custom labels too. Throw them in a woozy with the plastic heat seal and people lose their shit over them
I wrote down a handful of my recipes somewhere if you want any of them
Haha, I’ve contemplated buying my own bottles for the extra panache once I get the hang of the actual fermenting process.
Until then, I’ve recycled a dozen or so hot sauce bottles from my hot sauce rack for this purpose.
I certainly won’t say no to a recipe. This is the recipe I’m currently using (though I didn’t follow these specific fermentation steps because they are not done by weight) . If you have anything in a similar vein, I’d love to compare and contrast them.
Most of the time I fermented garlic in the jar with the peppers, and depending on what I was doing I’d also ferment them with onion, carrots, or pears. You can also use cheesecloth and twine to make a little fermenting tea bag for things like peppercorns and mustard seed to keep in with the peppers.
As for the post ferment my staples were: caramelized onion, honey, lime juice and/or apple vinegar, msg. I’d often add fresh bell peppers for a little brightness, mango or pineapple, fresh or roast garlic, you can really play around in this stage. You can also run fermented honey garlic alongside and add that in after the peppers ferment.
My better recipe notes are going to be harder to find they’re in a notebook somewhere but here’s some of my digital ones. The section header shows what was in the jar during ferment (so like ‘hab + garl’ means habanero and garlic) with the other stuff being what was added post ferment. Ferm juice is the brine, truff is truffle oil. All of these also have an unlisted amount of canola oil I’d slowly add in during blending until the immersion felt right.
Dear lord. I’ll have to look into that one, haha.
Thanks for the recipes! I’ll have to experiment with these as I get more comfortable with the fermentation process