I'm a fan of lacto-fermentation, and have a batch of peppers fermenting right now.
I recommend fermenting the hot peppers in a brine, instead of as a paste. In my experience, this reduces the likelihoods of both mold (because only saline is in contact with the air) and exploding containers (because you can leave the lid more loose, allowing air to escape).
Also, the salt level is incredibly important for both food safety and flavor - Noma's fermentation guide recommends using 2% of the weight of the ferment (both solids and any water). It's worth using a scale for this.
An alternative is to use a lid with a built-in water seal apparatus that acts as one-way valve to vent the carbon dioxide. Not having to think about manual venting or ingress of oxygen makes it a more foolproof process.
For thick-walled peppers, e.g jalapeño, a salt mash works as well as a brine and allows better control over the liquid content at the end. With a salt mash the thicker peppers release a lot of water that essentially becomes the brine, albeit at lower volume. For thin-walled peppers like cayenne and habanero, I usually use a brine or a combination of mash and brine. A weight can help keep the fermenting peppers submerged and compacted to make they remain anaerobic.
2% salt by weight would be the very lowest I would consider personally. Usually I use 4-5%.
A winemaker once gave me a sample of his own hot sauce which was great. The next year's batch he gave me, the body of it seems to separate a lot more to the point where it ends up with the sauce settled at the bottom and then brine/oil/whatever up top. In commercial sauces, I'm sure they have additives that keep it consistent, but I doubt he's doing anything like that. What's likely caused that difference over the previous batch?
I'll throw another recommendation that people try it out. I got the Noma book (The Noma Guide to Fermentation, a really wonderfully written book) and got started with it. You can ferment such a variety of stuff.
My kids love it, my 4yo helps make lots of things. Fermented tomatoes (pulp is amazing, the liquid you get then is incredible in vinaigrettes and to poach fish in), fermented mushrooms, green beans are popular, kimchi (which is great because it's so expensive to buy here), strawberries. We've got some red sauerkraut on the go right now.
This book is excellent if you're a skilled enough cook to extrapolate the techniques out to other ingredients and make use of the results. Those results will be incredibly interesting almost unique ingredients in their own right and for that reason will not be easy to just substitute in for other things.
There's a reason most people start with sandor katz.
Yes, it's very much not a recipe book, that's good to highlight.
I think many here would like the style - it's a cover of the history, why and how something works and then a set of examples to showcase the variety with tips on how to use them.
For example, it'll explain what lacto-fermentation is & how it works, then give an example of fruit / berry / vegetable / mushroom / something else. Each comes with "how we'd use this at Noma". Given that it was a restaurant regularly chosen as the best in the world, sometimes they are a bit "extra". The base things aren't, but while I've made vinegar from things we picked I've not embarked on the more out-there projects. For anyone who hasn't read it, it'll also go into koji, shiso, misos, garums, kombuchas and vinegars.
> Those results will be incredibly interesting almost unique ingredients in their own right and for that reason will not be easy to just substitute in for other things.
I'm not sure I'd quite agree but I don't think we're at opposite ends here. The results are lots of base ingredients and information on how to use them. Substituting things is heavily encouraged (it's not saying here's how to do blackberries it's "here's how to do things like blackberries"). I've walked away from sections of the book with many more ideas and more confidence about what could be done.
I find it a very interesting book because it's less about giving a set of rigid things to do and more about showing the range and variety of what you can achieve. Also, it's written in a way that's not flowery but very passionate. I find it hard not to be excited when reading it.
I think a lot of techies would like it, but other sources are also excellent for taking you through how to use something.
It's worth a visit to Noma's fermentation lab + restaurant, too. It's a fun place. My favorite "bite" in the lab was fermented black truffles, which was such a unique and vibrant flavor.
I have found that fermentation with garlic leads to lots of kahm yeast, do you have issues with it? It may just be an issue with my salinity. I only have success brining whole or halved peppers.
Same and similarly I find onion impedes fermentation. I'm considering adding all of this after. With garlic there's the botulism concern, I'm not sure if this matters if you add acid to the mix after the fact.
"The botulism concern" isn't limited to garlic, botulism spores will be present on nearly anything you can ferment. Since lacto is also anaerobic, you're depending on the halotolerance of the lactobacteria to outcompete botulism early, and then they produce their own lactic acid to make it completely inhospitable.
Botulism gives up a lot of vigor for its sporing ability and doesn't do well with salt at all. The situations where it's a problem are when you don't have a source of acidity, like when you use heat which wipes the LABs but not botulism. Which is the domain of canning and things, not fermentation. Combining them is advanced level for this reason exactly though.
it hasn't been too much of a problem, doing a very good wash of the garlic itself helps with this, and salinity helps as well.
I had the worst issue with kahm in a fairly low garlic fermentation, but am happy to try different amounts and report back.
editing to add:
I had 2 batches side by side, jalapeño, Fresno, garlic, and one had Thai bird, the other habanero. the habanero had a yeast growth, the Thai bird did not. all other variables were as close as possible to each other.
This technique works incredibly well with berries.
I've had issues with fermenting mashes in bags in the past. My suspicion is that blending ahead of time may have killed natural lactic acid bacteria on the vegetables. So, you could counter this by adding some ferment brine at the end (e.g., from store-bought kimchi). But, I now blend for the final texture after the fermentation rather than before.
A few years ago, I discovered that I love making hot sauces. We grow peppers (jalapeno, serrano, habanero, bell peppers) and make gallons of fermented hot sauce each year from just 50 square feet of garden.
Agree about not not turning them in to paste, to avoid mold.
If you're in the bay area, Serrano are spicy and easy to grow as an annual here (they don't overwinter well).
My twist is to ferment them in (live) kombucha, and then constantly backslop new batches, adding different vegetables or fruit as bulk. No need for salt with this approach.
You aren’t using fermenting lids??? I wouldn’t recommend this for anyone because your jars are going to explode.
I have 7 pepper ferments from my garden this year. My favorite is with some sweet onions and garlic added to the peppers. If the peppers are too hot you can use carrots. The best tops are not the ones with a water lock IMHO.
Huy Fong Sriracha: The end of an era. If there's a lesson to be learned here, you don't backstab your sole supplier of 28 years overnight and just go somewhere else.
It's unfortunate that David Tran didn't learn from the Italians who sell their 900-year-old Parmigiano-Reggiano recipe to this day.
It's a shame, it seemed like the brand was only getting started and becoming recognized globally as a household name. A small battle with their favored supplier costed them much.
There are a few billion-dollar recipes in the world and the rooster sriracha was one of them. That family fucked up their golden goose... and now all these competing recipes are getting their shine.
There's a cigar company that did the same thing (not naming names because I'm friends with everyone involved). Over 20 years ago, a famous Cuban cigar roller came to the US to start his own cigar business. He worked out of a small factory with other rollers in Miami, and sourced all of his tobacco from a specific farm out of Nicaragua. The deal was that the farm owner would be a part-owner of his tobacco business in exchange for the tobacco since he came from Cuba with nothing.
Well, years later the cigar roller is now a cigar magnate, and he wanted his business to be owned by himself and his children, not his business partner. So he started another company on the side and started pushing all of his new brands through that company. The farm owner found out, sued him, and they settled out of court for millions with the caveat that the roller would no longer be able to use any of his farm's tobacco.
Cigar roller shrugged his shoulders and kept going. Bought some farmland in Nicaragua and other places, built a fermentation barn, and started growing his own tobacco too, at least what he couldn't source from elsewhere. He also largely stopped making third party cigars aside from his son in law's by way of jacking up the prices on almost all long-run projects by over 100% (to get out of making them). In 20 years he went from being near penniless to being one of the most successful people in the business.
Are the cigars as good as they used to be? Hell no. He used to create cigars for third party vendors that would put most of the best Cuban marcas to shame even when you found a quality box of them. But they're good enough for people who don't remember what they used to be, and that's what counts.
Ah ok, I think I have a good idea of who you're talking about, that's nuts. I never knew that side of their history. It's too bad there's not an HN herf to hang out and chat about this type of stuff. Thanks for the clue!
In the UK at least I haven't seen them in a supermarket for a long time, whereas many ripoffs with different animal logos are available instead. It was previously very popular here.
I believe it was banned in the EU by the EFSA a few years back due to it containing E222 (sodium hydrogen sulphite)[0]. Googling suggests it's also banned in the UK, but finding reliable sources proved hard.
Huy Fong, the “rooster brand” and a family owned company in LA that was sort of an immigrant success story, made a deal with Underwood Farms (also around LA and of which Huy Fong worked with personally since the start of Huy Fong) to buy peppers to help them purchase/lease new land but then reneged on the deal and sent undercover executives to Underwood to steal their methods of production. Underwood sued and won and Huy Fong was forced to purchase peppers from other suppliers, most of which seem to be having problems supplying peppers.
Sriracha is not a brand but rather a type of regional sauce, of which Huy Fong’s version was not completely true to recipe (but still tasted great IMO), and so that’s why you see other brands creating a “sriracha” sauce. Huy Fong’s version is sweeter than the OG but I’ve noticed some other brands are even sweeter (like Trader Joe’s if I recall).
Incidentally, Underwood Farms started producing their own sriracha sauce.
> Incidentally, Underwood Farms started producing their own sriracha sauce.
Which is pretty much the only brand I buy now since I found it. It actually tastes like what I remember "Rooster Sauce" tasting like 20-25 years ago when I was first introduced to it at some hole-in-the-wall chinese takeout joint.
The Huy Fong stuff these days just does not taste the same as it used to. I actually found the above information OP posts about after 2 or 3 bottles just tasting "off" and wondering if there was a bad batch or an off year happening or something. It's quite noticeable to me.
Thanks for the recommendation. I’ve been looking for a replacement since Huy Fong has been impossible to buy for quite a while now. I tried a few and had recently given up after throwing away a full bottle of ‘Sky Valley’ brand - which had a strange fishy undertone that grossed me out.
Interesting... I thought the Sriracha guy has scruples after watching a documentary about him and is company. Do you have any links that refer to this unsavory sriracha behavior?
> Huy Fong, the “rooster brand” and a family owned company in LA that was sort of an immigrant success story, made a deal with Underwood Farms (also around LA and of which Huy Fong worked with personally since the start of Huy Fong) to buy peppers to help them purchase/lease new land but then reneged on the deal and sent undercover executives to Underwood to steal their methods of production.
And on that day, they truly became an "American" company.
DIY hot sauces are fine for kids and enthusiastic amateurs, but it's past time for major, open-source hot sauces to be produced with a memory-safe language like Rust.
Jokes aside - but there is so much knowledge out there made by passionate geeks that it begs to be gathered together. On any topic. And eventually kill the "lifehacks" videos with real stuff.
Fermentation of hot peppers, photography, homemade shawarma, woodworking, burn barrels, how to roll cords without tangling, bitters with soda when too full. All of those I looked up in the last month for one reason or another. And on some I improved but there is no organized way to give back the knowledge.
Bitters were digestives before they become cocktail flavoring, by soda I mean club soda aka carbonated water. You just need a ordwr of magnitude more bitters than go in a cocktails - like a teaspoon to tablespoon. If you feel bloated after a meal - a glass of this really helps.
In that this is the peak season for putting up peppers (and late summer produce of all kinds), yes, it's pretty predictable.
Fermented chili sauce is probably the highest ROI home fermentation projects and easy enough that anybody can do it, so if you've got access to interesting peppers, take a whack at it. It's a really good way to use peppers that are too hot to eat on their own, since it's much easier to control the dosing in a dish as a sauce.
I was going to disagree with that on the basis that almost anything is on par, but then I thought of sourdough starter/levain, which is surely the easiest, cheapest, most versatile, most useful (almost everyone eats at least one kind of at least slightly leavened bread) home fermentation project.
Once you get going it's very easy to always make your own bread, and it be lot better & cheaper (a sliding scale between them depending what you bought, but almost certainly both to some extent regardless) than what you bought before.
Beer is trickier than hot sauce for sure, but more differentiable, versatile, and satisfying (if you drink beer) perhaps to make up for it on an RoI basis? Certainly worth trying if you like this sort of thing anyway, I think.
Yoghurt is even easier than hot sauce, more versatile, though not really as interesting or variable. Such low investment though (milk, few chickpeas or chilli crowns) that if you use it at all it would be hard for it not to do very well on RoI basis.
This is a good observation (and the username checks out), but I just want to point out there are issues with the Jargon File and its occasional projections of ESR's odd views on interpersonal issues. The "portrait of J Random Hacker", in addition to being outdated, has a lot of weird stuff. Look at the "Gender and Ethnicity" section for instance.
With the success of "Hot Ones", hot sauce is the new identity craze.
I know, this is HN, so a dozen people are gonna say "Well, -I'VE- like hot sauce since insert year." I get it. You're badass.
But this is just the latest trend. Which I enjoy. Sriracha is sugary syrup in my opinion, and lousiana style is just blah ... the Hot Sauce craze has led to some really tasty alternatives. See: Torchbearer.
But when the trend finally fades, we'll all go back to enjoying Sambal Oelek, the OG hotsauce.
That's a goofy take. I'm not a badass, but I grew up with hot sauce in local restaurants. My dad loved hot foods before color television was a thing. Billions of people in equatorial regions have been eating hot peppers for centuries (and millennia, if you're Bolivian[0]).
Hot sauce is about as faddish as corn and tomatoes.
Seriously, do they not have curries where you live?
> I know, this is HN, so a dozen people are gonna say "Well, -I'VE- like hot sauce since insert year." I get it. You're badass.
I know this is the internet, and it's traditional to invent people to be mad at, but in this case the person you're mad at is .... someone who has liked hot sauce since before Hot Ones?
I don't even know what Hot Ones is, bizarre thing to say, as if 'hot sauce' is in any way a new concept or even just newly commercialised. I loved Tabasco hot sauce and chilli peppers in general as a small child (and forever since).
Of course that doesn't mean it can't be or isn't a current craze, but it's hardly been a niche interest since.. idk, some time not too long after Portuguese colonialism brought chillies out of South America ca. 16th-18th C.s?
Your point is absurd nonsense, at least without making any attempt to explain why/back up the claim that any significant number of people were somehow unaware of hot sauce until whatever Hot Ones is happened.
Not a comment about me, but anyone that has lived in the southwest has been exposed to hot sauce for at least as long as I've been alive. Not really sure about hot sauce being an identity craze.
Finding the right peppers at local groceries in the US is a challenge. You can find some bland jalapeños and even bland habaneros, and often not much else.
I’ve taken to growing my own peppers (Piri Piri) to go in the Portuguese food I like. I couldn’t find them fresh anywhere. It’s turned into a little hobby, and it is shocking how hot a well cared for jalapeño is.
If you want peppers beyond the occasional habenero; jalapenos, fresnos, sorranos, some others may be available, and very local dependent - you will need to grow yourself. Growing enough to meet the volumes for a large jar of peper sauce, etc. may be challenging.
My pepper endeavors this year (in Santa Cruz and high sierra) were mixed. Poblanos were nuts. Jalepenos ok. Hot peppers, not so much.
It's not sriracha... There is a reason why there is a Hoy Fong Sriracha shortage but not a shortage with off-brand variants. People want the particular recipe of the rooster sauce... It's a specific flavor. Same reason to me Heinz ketchup is the only ketchup I want for my fries.
I went to the grocery store a couple of weeks ago when my giant bottle that I had accidentally gotten before the shortage ran out. There were a couple alternatives there: Ox Brand and Kroger brand. I have only really used the Ox Brand so far, but I thought it was pretty good.
I guess I'm not so set on it having to be exactly the same. As long as it's got kind of the same chili plus garlic notes, I'm happy enough.
Heinz ketchup is grim, it's trivial to make a much better tasting tomato sauce with some canned chopped tomatoes, vinegar, sugar, and (if you like it) chillies, IMO.
Looks and tastes so much better, less congealed and processed, more vibrant and fresh.
I’ve found the Tabasco Sriracha to be the best of the alternatives I have tried. I’ve lol have to try the Hoy Fung brand again when available again but we will see. I was very surprised because I think Tabasco tastes awful.
I recently learned that the whole Sriracha (brand) shortage was a self-inflected wound due to a contract violation with their supplier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYdU1X2p2ro
This reminds me that I really need to learn to make gochujang. Sriracha is amazing, and I’ve learned to make various things in that style, but I still haven’t ventured into Korean hot pepper pastes. But they’re life changing. I’d love to find something like this for gochujang next time I have enough peppers. If anyone reading has any tips, I’m all ears.
Have a batch of this going right now. I also use this same recipe, minus the blending and vinegar at the end, to make a home made fermented chili-garlic sauce. Although for both the sriracha and the chili-garlic I cut the sugar in half from what the recipe recommends.
Chili peppers generally make up a pretty large chunk of what I grow every year, as they can often be preserved every which way you can imagine (fermented, dried, smoked, canned, or frozen).
-edit- The next pepper based thing I am probably going to try and figure out is how to make Tapatio/Cholula style hot sauce. If anyone has a link to a decent recipe, it would be much appreciated.
Take a look at this Cholula copycat recipe. I've made it probably 5-6 times and have really liked the results (the key, as with all cooking, is to taste and season to your preference)
I also like pickling, making vinegar and other based hot sauces. I eat carolina reapers when I feel stupid. `Hot Ones` is actually a brilliant show and their sauces are not bad.
The Rooster Sauce shortage and the DIY or link to the issue at large is why I appreciate HN.
I uusally have a fall hot pepper source, but noodle on the idea of a sustainable business around some of these niche culinary (etc) interests that come up.
I know Huy Fong is the main brand in the US, being made there and all, but it really does not have anything on the Flying Goose brand, made in Thailand.
Notably American-tinged comments here. I mean, HN usually is, but especially so.
Sriracha sauce is a generic kind of sauce. This is not all about one particular brand. Whatever some Californian company calls it, it's not their own thing and never was. There are legions of brands of sriracha and apart from one country, in the other 200-odd countries of the world other brands outnumber Flying Goose or whatever it's called.
A decade ago, before the spat with their suppliers, I heard praise for this one American brand, so I went looking for it. I found some, bought it, and it was a good sauce. It was expensive, though, so I did not stay loyal, when I could buy actual Asian-made sriracha from Asian shops for 10% of the price of the American stuff. I have found that other Asian brands of sriracha are just as good to my taste, notably the amusingly-named Cock Sauce.
In fact the only thing that's notable to me is that since the successful viral promotion of Hoy Fong's stuff, lots of European supermarkets noticed that "sriracha" isn't a trademark and anyone can make and sell sriracha sauce. So now there is Tesco sriracha and Marks and Spencer sriracha and Albert Hein sriracha and so on...
Those are all rubbish with no heat and no flavour.
But if it comes in a clear plastic bottle with 3-4 non-European languages printed on it, it's probably good. :-)
And frankly, it's inexpensive and widespread so I am not going to bother making my own. Sorry. It's like bread: home made bread can be wonderful, but if you shop around, there is good bread to buy almost everywhere... even in the UK, home of the awful Chorleywood Process and some of the worst bread in the world.
If I can buy a loaf of good bread for £/$/€ 1.50-2 then I am not going to spend 4 hours making one.
I highly recommend trying lacto-fermentation of everything. I like to keep it as simple as possible. So why sugar? Why vinegar? The sauce is perfect (and more versatile) without.
Huy Fong’s sriracha (rooster sauce) is sriracha in name only. If that’s what you’re looking to replicate, then this blog post isn’t going to help you.
Its Chinese-Vietnamese immigrant founder didn’t really know how to make it. He just kept experimenting until he got the flavor that he wanted, but it’s not an authentic flavor. Instead, it’s an original American hot sauce where just a few years ago most people in Asia were very unfamiliar with since the company doesn’t really like to do advertising.
Inventing an original, homegrown American sauce is a good thing and something we should be proud of. Everyone loves rooster sauce including me, not just the Vietnamese community.
I’m not sure how my comment can be seen as a criticism for the Huy Fong company. it was meant to criticize the blog post instead
You raise an interesting point, but: That's the total sugars, not just added sugar.
This particular siracha is based around red, ripe jalapenos. And [presumably green, unripened] jalapenos are already 4.1g of sugar per 100g of fruit all by themselves:
That number is still about 500% off from their final sugar content, and lactofermentation consumes most of the sugars in the jalapenos. Added sugar is the second ingredient by weight in sriracha. It's not even an argument, you can so clearly taste that the product is fermented chilis and garlic powder doped up with spoonfuls of sugar.
Good Asian sriracha doesn't have sugar as a listed ingredient. I just checked my bottle which was obtained from a Korean market - peppers, garlic, salt, vinegar.
Huy Fong Rooster Sauce, yes, almost no sugar. But several Thai varieties do have sugar added. I think you're engaging in a potato / pahtahto dichotomy here.
In addition to their much more well known sriracha, Huy Fong makes chili garlic sauce, which contains no sugar. I believe that most Asian supermarkets carry it.
You wrote a variant of this comment earlier (you changed the hot sauce from Tabasco to Tapatio), and when it was downvoted to the bottom of the page, you cleared it out and reposted it. That's a lame Reddit trick and it has never been OK here.
I recommend fermenting the hot peppers in a brine, instead of as a paste. In my experience, this reduces the likelihoods of both mold (because only saline is in contact with the air) and exploding containers (because you can leave the lid more loose, allowing air to escape).
I recommend this video's technique for the fermentation step: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL8UJPQ_zoU
Also, the salt level is incredibly important for both food safety and flavor - Noma's fermentation guide recommends using 2% of the weight of the ferment (both solids and any water). It's worth using a scale for this.