After a couple weeks souring with lactobacillus, I concluded that not much new was happening with the hot peppers, so I pureed them and added some white vinegar to knock off the fermentation. Not very precise, I know, but I can’t remember exactly how much vinegar – I just added a bit at a time until the sauce had a consistency I liked.
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- The pale spirals are not your eyes fooling with you, they’re the little roots inside pepper seeds, exposed during the pureeing.
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- With the vinegar added, it had the consistency of tomato sauce.
This sauce has sat in my fridge for a couple more weeks, and I tried it tonight. Dee-lish. It tastes a lot like Tabasco sauce (surprise, surprise), but because it isn’t strained out, it is much thicker – almost like tomato sauce, and has some bits of seeds and skins noticable. It is not crazy hot – probably similar to Tobasco sauce (although I haven’t tried it in years) – but is strong enough.
I usually have a tub of chipotle sauce in the fridge (just a can of chipotles in adobo sauce, which I puree). I am slightly addicted to it, but sometimes you want the heat without the smoke. And that salty lactic-acetic tang in this sauce is also habit forming.
Don’t know if it’ll last me until the next harvest, but I can conclude that this was a dead easy process that did not take much time or preparation, so I will probably repeat it next fall, in a larger quantity.
