If you enjoy mild or medium “hot sauce” to add exciting flavor to eggs, fish, meat, veggies (almost any foods), you will want to try this homemade, fermented, and colorful delight.
Gather and rinse about 1.5 pounds of peppers, hot, medium, and mild. These can include Bell, Lunchbox, Jimmy Nardello, or other sweet peppers. Anaheim is a good medium pepper to use, and Jalapeños, Serrano, Hungarian Hot Wax, Poblano, or other hot peppers will work. Leaning toward colors in the red-orange-yellow spectrum will produce a beautiful sauce. Slice them open and remove seeds and veins (or leave them if you like). Peel and chop a few cloves of garlic. Cut a half or whole red or white onion into chunks. A little horseradish is nice as well. Pack these into a wide-mouth quart mason jar.
Mix up brine = 1 teaspoon per cup of water (so for a quart jar, use 3 teaspoons salt in 3 cups water). Heat it up to make sure all the salt gets dissolved, then cool it to room temperature. Pour the cooled brine over the pepper mixture making sure it is all submerged, then cover with a loose-fitting lid or a cloth with a rubber band. Place in a warm, dark spot for about a week, until the brine looks cloudy and small bubbles appear when you tap the side of the jar. Perfect.
After a week, the fermentation should be complete. Strain out the brine (saving it into a bowl) and put the fermented peppers, garlic, onion, horseradish, et cetera, into a blender. Add in a cup of the strained off brine plus 1/3 cup of good raw apple cider vinegar. Push the button and let it blend into a smooth consistency, adding more brine as necessary.
Sample it to make sure it is as good as I say it is, then transfer it into a convenient bottle and put it into the refrigerator. It should be good for up to 6 months, but it will probably be gone long before then.
Obviously, if you like really hot sauce, don’t add the sweet peppers, and if you prefer mild, go easy on the hot ones. As for us, we don’t like it too hot, but we use about 1/4 sweet peppers and 3/4 Serrano and Jalapeño peppers. The fermentation tends to mellow out the hot peppers a lot. This year we doubled the recipe (stuffed a half gallon Ball jar) and used 1/2 Jimmy Nardello sweet peppers, 1/4 Jalapeños, and 1/4 Hungarian Hot Wax peppers. I also added a couple little pieces of horseradish root and a few coriander seeds. It is downstairs on the work bench now fermenting away.
Renée is the one who researched this hot sauce method, and we have named it after her name-sake bird, the Rock Wren.
Hope you enjoy, and let me know how yours turns out.
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