Tabasco at Home: Making Home-made Fermented Pepper Sauce

By Tom Freeland HottyToddy.com blogger

Robb Walsh, Texas barbecue/food maven/etc. first blogged about and then produced a book, The Hot Sauce Cookbook, inspired in part by his experience founding and judging a hot sauce contest in Texas, and in part by his experiments with making hot sauce.

I got the cookbook at Square Books in Oxford.  If you want to pursue this subject in depth (for instance, how to make the pepper mash into a variety of things like Sriracha– essentially, Robb takes a global approach to hot sauce) you should BUY THIS BOOK.  I’m only going to write here about the one route I took.  My back-and-forth about the recipes is just how I cook, and not a criticism of a book I really appreciate and highly recommend.  But I’m going to write about the two recipes I followed (more or less).

I bought 2.5 lbs of Thai birds-eye peppers at the farmers market in Jackson, Tennessee, from one of several farmers of Southeast Asian extraction. When I bought the chillies, the farmer’s son, I’m guessing a 5-7 year old,  went wide-eyed and said to his mom, “He’s buying a lot of peppers.”

After making this, I was startled to learn that these peppers were significantly (like 5 or more times) hotter than peppers I’d used regularly from Mexican cooking (like chile arbol and serrano) that I’d thought pretty hot, although in the range of peppers like pequin that I thought were in the top range (though a lot lower than habanero, which is now available at Kroger, weirdly enough).  I’ve used Thai chillies a fair amount, but had not fully realized how hot they were.

Regardless, this produced a very good, usable sauce.

I brought the peppers home…

Photo courtesy of Tom Freeland

I separated out any peppers that were more than a tiny bit green. I was really wanting the resulting sauce to have an intense red color. This paid off.

The first step was to dry them for a couple of days outdoors.

Photo courtesy of Tom Freeland

Then, you cut off the stems (I did that before drying them), and cut the peppers in half.

Cutting 2.5 lbs of Thai chillies in half is a big job. 2.5 lbs of these little fellows is a lot of chillies.

Here is where the recipe goes one way, and I would go another, but in part based on the difference use of chillies (although I would make this change regardless of what chili I used). The recipe notes that, if you leave the seeds in, it produces grit in the sauce. That makes sense. But the recipe proposes that you remove the seeds after fermenting (described below). Having tried that, I would do it differently: Pull off the seeds before mashing the peppers, when cutting them in half. That would be pretty easy, and accomplish the task with a lot less effort. It may be that the fact that the recipe was based on using red jalapeños may have made this function. I’m not sure. But I am sure that removing the seeds after fermenting did not really work for me.  I have an enormous tolerance for big kitchen projects, and the seed removal came close to my limits.

After cutting the chillies in half (and removing the seeds?), put them in a big stainless steel bowl and mash with a potato masher, a lot. At some point, sprinkle with kosher salt. If you are using 2 lbs. of chillies, use 1/4 cup fine kosher salt. Mash some more. You should mash it enough to really smush the chillies while leaving them more or less intact.

Let sit on the counter overnight.

Photo courtesy of Tom Freeland

Now you want to put it in a container to ferment. Add a cup of spring water if you are using 2 lb. of chili.

I used a crock. Rob Walsh’s recipe uses a glass jar, loosely tightened; I have to wonder if a lot of tries of that would eventually produce an exploded jar. I used a crock I got at the hardware store on the square in Holly Springs, perhaps the last real hardware store in the area (as in old-school, unfinished hardwood floors, bins of nails and screws, and housewares like pickling crocks), the smallest one they had, which would probably have been big enough for 7-8 lbs of these peppers.

I left it open a few days to the air, wanting to give it a chance to catch what it needed to ferment, but covered it with a couple of layers of cheesecloth. Then, I cut a wedge out of the bottom of a cabbage head to cover the pepper with that so it would not get mold on top. Walsh notes that you can just remove the mold and not worry about it, but recommends the cabbage. After putting the cabbage on, I decided to cover the crock with a salad plate, which worked just right.

Let it ferment one to two weeks. I went with ten days.

When I toured the Tabasco plant at aged 14, they allowed folks to go in the big brick warehouse where they were fermenting pepper sauce. They said that they fermented the stuff in oak barrels with holes cut in the tops and the tops covered in salt for a year. I have no idea. What I do know is that the smell in that place came back to me entirely as I was finishing this pepper sauce.

So here’s the crock…

Photo courtesy of Tom Freeland

The next stage in the recipe in the book involves removing the seeds.

Photo courtesy of Tom Freeland

Walsh recommends this method: Wearing food handler’s gloves, swish each chili around in the brine from the liquid to remove the seeds, then put the chilies in a food processor or blender bowl. Strain the brine to remove the seeds.

This really did not work with the Thai chillies. What I made work was using a wide mesh strainer that the seeds could drop through, on top of a fine mesh strainer to trap the seeds. It really was a pain; you need to make sure you trap as much of the liquid as possible, but get as many of the seeds out as you can (YOU WILL NEVER GET THEM ALL so don’t stress about it). I really think you want to pull the seeds at an earlier stage, as described above.

Photo courtesy of Joyce Freeland

Put the peppers in a blender/food processor (I used a Vitaprep, and was very happy with the results) along with 2 tbs of vinegar and blend until a fine puree.

What vinegar? This is a four ingredient dish in which one is salt and one is water. The vinegar is a critical point here. Walsh suggests three: Steen’s Cane Vinegar, sherry wine vinegar, or rice wine vinegar. I have all three as panty staples, and tasted the first two in deciding what i would do. And decided to go a different direction from all of Robb’s suggestions.

The whole point of this recipe, for me, was to work on a barbecue sauce that’s a product of 20+ years of tinkering (I’m proud to report that Joe York has told me that earlier versions were his favorite bbq sauce, and that my son used it to produce a special when he was cooking at Herbsaint in New Orleans). One of the ingredients was apple cider vinegar, and sometime in the last year (I think perhaps in a Food and Wine survey of pantry staples?) I learned of an organic and unfiltered cider vinegar on the Bragg label.  This stuff is incredible and  has earned a permanent place in my kitchen.

You can buy it in the natural food section of Kroger, and you cannot get a better vinegar at Kroger.  You can see the bottle in a couple of the removing-the-seeds photos above.  As much as I love using Steen cane vinegar and sherry wine vinegar, the Bragg Apple Cider is what you want to use for this application, I think.

So that’s what I used for this whole recipe.

The recipe above produces a pepper mash that Robb says will keep for months in the refrigerator.  Personally, I am worried a bit about mold and don’t want to lose any bit of this.  But the real question is how to turn this pepper mash into a usable hot sauce.  And here’s what Robb suggests:

For a half cup of mash, add a third to a half cup of vinegar and that’s that.  I  split the difference.

You still need to keep it in the ‘fridge.  Commercial pepper sauce has a lot more vinegar, to keep it shelf-stable, but for flavor purposes you want to reduce the vinegar here.  And Robb is absolutely right about this.

Photo courtesy of Tom Freeland

The whole point of this was making a barbecue sauce, which I will be making for the Texas A&M game tailgating.  Email me if you are interested.

Read more blog posts by Tom Freeland at his NMissCommentor blog page.