Lacto Fermented Hot Sauce 

There’s nothing quite like the taste of a lacto fermented hot sauce. This process tends to concentrate flavors in a way that you just can’t achieve by processing vegetables alone. Here is my very simplistic base recipe that I use as a starting point for every hot sauce I make with my home grown peppers at the end of every season. You can take this basic recipe and expand on it in many ways and never create the same exact sauce twice.

Lacto Fermented Portion

Ingredients (enough for a quart jar)

• 150g of similarly colored hot peppers 
• One large sweet pepper the same color of your hot peppers 
• Half of carrot
• One half large red onion 
• 5 cloves of garlic 

Preparation

1. Sanitize glass jars with soap + hot water
2. Top and slice peppers in half (wearing disposable gloves is a good idea!)
3. Slice the remaining vegetables and combine in jars with hot peppers 
4. Top jars with an appropriate amount of salt to make a brine. For most of my hot sauces, I like to target a 3% brine. I calculate this by the volume of the vessel that I’m fermenting in. Basically, I add 15 g of fine sea salt for every 500 ml volume in my fermenting vessel.
5. Fill jars with filtered water making sure that all of the vegetables are fully submerged. Weigh down with pickling weights, or use fermentation springs like I do.
6. If you have a lid with an airlock, use it. If not, leave a small amount of headspace to reduce pressure buildup 
7. Let this mixture sit at room temperature in a dark spot for 2 weeks while occasionally releasing pressure if needed Note: If white film appears it is fine. If peppers get fuzzy throw them out (if the ones under them are fine keep them). 

Finalizing the Lacto Fermented Hot Sauce

Additional Ingredients

• medium carrot 
• medium onion
• 3 – 4 sweet peppers matching the color of the hot peppers that you used. 
• 6 small cloves of garlic 

Preparation

1. Separate the fermented vegetables and the brine (save the brine for later) 
2. Add the fermented vegetables to a blender with 300ml of brine 
3. Add the non-fermented veggies and continue to blend
4. Now the fun part, making it taste great! I like to start with 1 tsp ground ginger, some dill, an 1/8th cup of local honey and some salt.
5. Add 1/3 cup of apple cider vinegar and the juice of one lime. Keeping the salt ratio high and the pH low will allow your hot sauce to last longer.
6. Continue blending and adding necessary ingredients until you get the hot sauce tasting the way you like and at your desired consistency.
7. You can filter the solids out with a strainer or cheesecloth if you would like, but I usually keep the mash thicker.
8. Finally, pour into sanitized containers and refrigerate.