Fermented Lemon Drop Hot Pepper Sauce

I finished the fermented hot sauce I started back in October in time to give a bottle away as a Yule gift and keep a bottle for myself. When I made my previous post, the peppers were still bubbling in their jars, and I was unsure of how long to wait.

It turned out that about a month after I first mixed up the chopped peppers, wine, and salt in the jar, the bubbling stopped. After waiting a couple of days to make sure it had really stopped, I decided that it must mean the peppers were done.

 

I drained the peppers, reserving the brine (to use to jump-start my next fermentation), and pureed them in the blender. Then I strained them with my food mill to get out the seeds and skins. I ended up with a nice smooth bright yellow pepper puree. I took a little taste, and the fruity taste of the Lemon Drop peppers had been preserved... along with a LOT of heat that hits you right afterward!



 

 

 

I finished off the sauce with some white wine vinegar, to give a little bit of bright acidity (and it will probably help the shelf life too), and some honey to take a little bit of the edge off. I put in about a quarter cup of vinegar and two tablespoons of honey for a little over a pint of pepper puree.

 

But these amounts are all "to taste" and I think they might need some tweaking. After refrigerating the sauce for a while (I'm not sure if it's acidic enough to be kept in the pantry, so I'm playing it safe), it got so thick I couldn't get it out of the bottle. It was like ketchup. I ended up adding some of the reserved brine back in, and some more vinegar until it was thin enough to pour out of the bottle, but not so thin that it pours out too fast.

 

By the way, I'm using reused bottles that held other sauces or vinegars. I just wash them in the dishwasher and peel the labels off. You can buy new hot sauce bottles, but this seems to work fine for the small amounts I've been making so far. Plus it's one of the three R's.

 

I'm pretty happy with the hot sauce I got, but I'll do some more experimenting with my next hot pepper crop. My Lemon Drop plants are covered in frost blanket, but I'm not sure if that's been enough, since we've had a colder winter this year than last year. They look pretty dead right now, but maybe they'll come back once it warms up out there.

 

I started some Habanero and Serrano pepper seeds to grow this year. Both should make good hot sauces.

 

I even found a recipe for making your own fermented Sriracha sauce that I'd like to try some time. You're supposed to use red jalapenos, which are hard to find unless you grow them yourself. I had a couple of jalapeno plants that I'm also trying to overwinter, but just like with the Lemon Drops next to them, I worry this winter was too hard for them.

 

I wonder if red Serranos or maybe even some other varieties would work too.

 

I wonder what Sriracha with Lemon Drops would be like.

 

A lot of fermented hot sauce recipes, including that Sriracha recipe, call for garlic. I didn't put any in my Lemon Drop sauce, but I'd like to try it in a future batch.

 

I hope my peppers do well in 2014 so I can try some more hot sauce variations!



Starting Fermented Hot Sauce

Last year I tried to make Lemon Drop Hot Sauce by simply pureeing together Lemon Drop peppers, vinegar, and some spices. Now I wish that post wasn't getting as many hits as it is, because the sauce really didn't turn out well. The vinegar was totally overwhelming, so it only tasted like vinegar with a capsaicin burn. I actually ended up throwing it out.

This year I decided to try something different. I'm actually fermenting my Lemon Drop peppers, which is how the pros make hot sauce. When you ferment vegetables, Lactobacillus bacteria release lactic acid, which is milder in taste than vinegar (acetic acid). Hopefully this will allow me to make a hot sauce that is sour and hot, but the fruity and sweet notes of the peppers will also be able to come through.

I've got a few books on fermentation on my Amazon Wish List, but I didn't want to wait to get started, so I did a bit of Googling to find instructions. One of the first hits I got was this Joy of Cooking site, so I started with these instructions.

I got so many Lemon Drops last year that I still had a bag of them in the freezer. I decided to use some of those in addition to some that I'm harvesting now from those same plants which survived last winter (I guess peppers are perennial in my climate now). I doubt the freezing would hurt things. If anything, it might make the process easier since the cell walls are damaged, and that might make it easier for the bacteria to munch on them.

I let the frozen peppers thaw, and then whizzed them up in the food processor, since that was easier than chopping them by hand. If you do this, just be sure not to stick your face over the top when you open the lid! I mixed in 2% sea salt by weight of the peppers like the instructions said. The only sea salt I have is pretty coarse, but that shouldn't matter if you do it by weight.

The instructions say to pour in Riesling wine until the peppers are submerged. I only had Chardonnay, so I used that. Chardonnay is oaked and Riesling isn't, but maybe that will make my sauce taste like it was aged in oak barrels like some commercial hot sauces are. (But it probably just won't make a difference).

The instructions don't specifically say why they use wine. Most other instructions say to use water, but wine probably adds sugars which help feed the bacteria. I thought it might taste nice with the fruity flavor of the Lemon Drop peppers. Once it was all mixed up, it did smell really sweet and fruity. I started this batch on October 16, covered it with some folded up cheesecloth held down with a canning ring, and let it sit on the counter.

Then I started doing some more searching online. I soon found out there are tons of instructions out there for fermented hot sauce, and they're all different! Argh! Most use water and not wine, but some add sugar to the water. Salt amounts range from 2-10%. Some folks use airlocks like you do to homebrew wine. Others use crocks like you use for sauerkraut. There appears to be no right way to do it.

That's a lot different than canning foods, where you're supposed to follow exact formulas tested by the USDA. Then again, with canning you're trying to keep all bacteria out. With fermenting, you're trying to colonize your food with good bacteria, and they protect your food from bad bacteria. Once you get the good bacteria going, they do most of the work for you.


A couple of weeks went by and I started getting worried. Some sites said I should see bubbles in only a few days, but there was nothing. I had to scrape off a tiny bit of white mold once, but that was it. Mostly it seemed like absolutely nothing was happening.

I started to wonder if the alcohol in the wine was preserving it. Maybe things would pick up once the alcohol evaporated.

On November 2, I had a big bowl of freshly harvested peppers again. Things seemed to have settled in the jar a lot, so I thinly sliced those peppers and added them to the jar. I topped it off with more wine, and added another teaspoon of salt. I didn't weigh the salt this time, because I was lazy and realized this wasn't exact anyway.

I kind of forgot about the jar for a few days.

Then about three days ago I noticed this...

Bubbles! I thought maybe it was air that was caught in the peppers from the last time I stirred it, so I banged the jar a bit to release the bubbles, but the next day there were more bubbles. That confirmed that these were bacteria farts bubbles being made by the bacteria fermenting my peppers!

The pepper mash had also been changing in smell. At first it smelled fresh and fruity, from the mixture of the fresh Lemon Drop peppers and wine, but pretty soon it started to smell more... well, fermented. Still sweet and fruity, but with a musty or yeasty undertone. By the time the bubbles started really going, it was smelling more sour and pickle-like.

By this time the plants in my garden were really cranking out more fruit, since we've been getting so much rain lately. So yesterday I decided to start another jar!

This time I added a tablespoon of sea salt to the chopped peppers, and let them soak overnight before adding the wine. Then I've been adding more peppers and more wine as I harvest more peppers from the garden. I'll keep doing that until the second jar is full, which won't be much longer at the rate I'm harvesting peppers. I also tried to speed up the fermentation this time by skimming off a few spoonfuls of brine from the first jar and adding it to the second jar. That should inoculate it with the bacteria that's working on the first jar, so the second jar doesn't have to wait as long to be colonized.

The next thing I'll need to figure out is how long to wait until the first jar is done fermenting. Again, instructions range from 6 weeks to a year! I have a food mill now, so I plan on blending it up in the blender first, then running it through the food mill to get it smooth. Most instructions say to add vinegar, but I'm going to be careful with that so the vinegar doesn't overwhelm the flavor of the sauce. Again, the whole point of doing all this is because I want a hot sauce that mostly tastes like peppers, not vinegar.

Maybe the first batch will be ready in time to give as holiday gifts. Too bad everyone else in my family are wimps who don't like spicy food.





Roasted Tomatillo Sauce

I ended up getting about 3 lbs. of tomatillos from my 3 surviving plants. That's actually not much. Tomatillos are supposed to be very prolific. I blame the deer and chickens for damaging the plants so they didn't yield as well.

Tomatillos keep well in their husks in the vegetable drawer in the fridge. I was able to stash them in there until I had enough saved up for a batch of roasted tomatillo sauce. I got the recipe off the internet, but soon found out this isn't really something that needs a recipe. Everything can be done to taste.

Peel the husks off like 2 or 3 lbs. of tomatillos and rinse them. Lay them out on a baking sheet with some serranos and/or jalapenos (cut the stems off) and peel whole garlic cloves. As you can see, the peppers I used had already turned red, which was not intentional, but I didn't get to them while they were still green.

Put under the broiler until the veggies are getting brown in spots and soften. The tomatillos will sort of get squishy and collapse and the juice will run out. Yum.

Let it cool, and then scrape everything in the blender, making sure to get all the juice in. Add cilantro, salt, and lime juice to taste. Blend until smooth.

I put mine in plastic containers and froze it. You can also water-bath can this, but in that case you'd need to be much more careful with the ratios and use an exact recipe. It's especially important to put enough lime juice in to make it acidic enough to be safe.

I didn't put much lime juice in so I can slather it over enchiladas, but more lime would probably be better if you wanted it as a dip. When I tasted it, it also turned out hotter than I intended. I made the mistake of not de-seeding the peppers, and peppers you grow yourself tend to get hotter when the weather is hotter and the plants are under stress. But otherwise it was really tasty.

Speaking of chickens, one day the neighbor's chickens jumped the back fence (they usually stay in the front), and dug through my herb garden. Then two of them forgot how to get back out and just kept pacing back and forth by the fence like they wanted to go home but forgot they can jump over. Stupid chickens! We had to open the gate and herd them out.

The Thunder Moon

Once again, the Thunder Moon is a good name for this month's full moon (which was about a week ago - oops), since we got a bit more rain. The Cenizo in the front is in full bloom with its beautiful lavender flowers. My husband has built a nice xeric garden around it with some agaves and prickly pear cactus.

In the back, the Tatume squash is doing very well. Usually C. pepo varieties are very susceptible to borers, but I haven't done anything to protect it from squash vine borers, and it's still producing some fruit. The borers have gotten some of the vines, but it has plenty more.

I have some fruits at various stages on the vines. Here's a little baby one with the flower still attached.

When they get bigger they turn a dark green, similar to a big round zucchini.

And here's one that's fully ripe. Even though Tatume is supposed to be a summer squash, I'm letting some ripen to collect seeds. I'm just excited to have found a summer squash that doesn't get killed by squash vine borers!

The Moon and Stars Watermelon had one little melon on it, but it ended up shriveling up and dying. Now it's just growing vines. I hope I get some melons from it eventually.

The okra are growing among the watermelon vines. I planted them a bit late, so no fruit yet, but the plants themselves are doing OK.

The peppers I planted in the back aren't doing too great. For some reason, they aren't making a lot of fruits, and the ones they have made either got sunburned or pecked by birds.

Some of the sweet potatoes are doing well, and some aren't. This variety, an orange one called Diane, is doing the best so far, making some long vines.

The Calico lima beans are growing into lush vines, but with hardly any bean pods. I've harvested maybe seven beans so far. I'm starting to wonder if they need bean inoculant. I've never used it before, but ever since I've been growing beans at this location, they just don't yield well, and the beans I do get are puny.

The Dr. Carolyn tomatoes are the last tomatoes I have still producing. Their flavor wasn't that impressive at first, but as it's gotten later in the year, they seem to be getting sweeter. Maybe the heat concentrates the flavor.

The rest of the tomatoes look like this. Still a few green leaves, but no more fruits.

The eggplant is still the only thing in the front garden the deer haven't munched, which is interesting. That's not what I expected.

The peppers in the front, which are the ones that survived last winter, are finally growing back after we put chicken wire around them to protect them from the chickens and deer.

I've got only two Waltham butternut plants left that might now get a chance to grow since we put chicken wire around them.

The Rattlesnake pole beans are still getting eaten like crazy by the deer. Well, now I know not to plant beans in the front without a lot of protection.

 

We actually aren't have too bad of a summer this year. We actually got a couple of good rainstorms, once of which dumped 4 inches of rain on us. The deer and chickens are causing a much bigger problem than the weather this year.

 

 



The Firefly Moon and Summer Solstice

The summer solstice was last weekend, so the days are getting shorter again. However, we're still just starting the hottest time of the year, and temperatures have been going over 100 for the last several days.

In the back garden, the Tatume squash is sending out long vines, but Squash Vine Borers are getting some of them. It hasn't set any fruit yet. I'm not giving it any special help to see if it really is resistant to SVB's. It would sure be nice to find a variety of C. pepo that can produce a good crop despite SVB's.

The Moon and Stars watermelon is sending out vines too. To be fair, I did plant the cucurbits late. I'm not sure if they're going to have enough time to make a good crop.

The Christmas Lima beans are getting very lush. No sign of any beans yet though, but the vines sure are impressive.

The Corno di Toro and Chapeau de Frade peppers I have in the back are starting to make little fruits.

The French Red Shallots are still very green, even though it looks like it's time to dig up the potatoes and garlic. I'm not sure how dead-looking the tops of shallots are supposed to be before you dig them, but probably more than this.

In the front garden, my husband has been building wire cages around the tomatoes to protect them from the deer, which keep eating the fruits and new leaves. It's helping to protect what tomatoes are left, but a lot of damage was done already. Looks like I'm going to have to go to the trouble of building a fence around the whole garden eventually.

The contrast between the Rattlesnake beans in the front and the lima beans in the back shows the kind of damage the deer can do. They've had all their leaves eaten right at deer-level.

The peppers in the front were being eaten badly too. They weren't eating enough of the plants to kill them, but were making it hard for them to grow a good crop of fruits by stunting their growth. Now that Daniel has cages around them I hope that they can catch up.

The butternut squash I planted in the front are also getting badly eaten. I'm kind of surprised deer even like squash plants, because they have those irritating hairs. I don't like touching them myself.



Weirdly, they still don't like eggplants. I'm getting a good crop of eggplants except for the occassional one pecked by the neighbor's chickens (but apparently the chickens don't actually like them either because they just peck them a time or two and then stop). No sign of any eggplant leaves being eaten by deer.

Finally, I did get a good crop of tomatillos, which I've been accumulating in the fridge to make roasted tomatillo sauce, but the tomatillo plants seem to be dying off. They were the first nightshades to be planted, but I'm surprised they're tiring out before the tomatoes.

I have decided to take cuttings from the tomatillos and tomatoes, and root them in water to try planting for a fall crop. If you'll remember, last year I tried to grow a fall crop of tomatoes from seed, but they didn't get to ripen in time. It may end up being another waste of time, but I wonder if cuttings will go faster. I have room in the back garden (where the deer don't go!), so I think it's worth a try.

Greening Moon - belated full moon update

I'm back! Last week we went on vacation to the Big Bend area, and before that I was really busy with final exams and getting final grades in, so May's full moon post is about two weeks late.

May is supposed to be our wettest month, and we did get around 3 inches of rain, which isn't actually that much, but better than we have been getting.

Lots of things have been happening in the garden that probably deserve their own post. First the neighbor's chickens were causing a lot of damage digging up things in the front garden, then while we were on vacation the deer found it! I also got my sweet potato plants from Duck Creek Farms and planted them. I've been harvesting a few paste tomatoes, but I think the deer are eating a lot of them too. That makes comparing yields from the different varieties I planted difficult. I might have to leave out that bit of data this time around and just compare things like plant vigor and heat tolerance.

I knew I was risking things by planting my Rattlesnake beans in the front, and sure enough, the deer have been eating the leaves off of them. The funny thing is it looks like my deer are lazy, and are only eating the leaves in the middle of the vine, not bothering to bend down to eat the ones near the ground, or stand up to reach the higher ones.

The chickens dug up a lot of the beans, so in their place I planted the rest of my Waltham Butternut squash seeds. There were from Seed Savers Exchange in 2009, and I guess they were getting old because I was having trouble getting them to germinate. I went ahead and planted all the rest of my seeds in the ground before we left, and when we came back some of them were sprouting.

The deer are also eating the ends of the shoots on the tomatoes and peppers. I guess the new growth is more tender. Some of my peppers are getting fruit anyway, but I'm sure the deer have eaten a lot of the blossoms.

Weirdly, they don't seem to like the eggplants. The remaining eggplants I have that didn't get dug up by the chickens are making fruits now. This variety is Fengyuan Purple, and the eggplants growing on it are really long and skinny! The biggest one I have so far looks like it's over a foot long. Guess I need to make some more Thai Green Curry paste to make these into curry with.

The tomatillos aren't looking so good. I've harvested a lot of them, but now it looks like they're starting to die down. I don't know if it's because they aren't getting enough water or something else. The deer haven't bothered them either, even the ones outside the wire cage my husband made for them.

I should be harvesting lots of tomatoes now, but the deer have been mostly beating me to them. When I got back from vacation there were hardly any ripe ones to be found, except for a few that look like this. This is a nice big Red Brandywine with a big chomp out of it. Another annoying this is it appears deer don't know the difference between a ripe and an unripe tomato. Maybe because they're colorblind? I found lots of green tomatoes, including a really nice Opalka that was the size of a Poblano pepper with bites out of them.

The only thing I have left to plant is my okra. Some of them took a really long time to come up, which isn't that unusual with okra. I got three varieties from Native Seeds/SEARCH, all from Texas: Beck's Gardenville, Eagle Pass, and Hill Country Red. I know I'm a bit late on okra planting, but okra can really take the heat, so I think they'll be OK.

Taking a quick look at the herb garden, the Esperanza is starting to overwhelm things again, like I knew it would. The other plants aren't doing too bad though. Herbs really like being in the ground much more than in pots. Once I planted all my herbs in the ground, ones that had been in pots on my apartment balcony for years, they really took off. In the background here is the Mexican oregano flowering like crazy. To the gnome's right is marjoram, while to his left is thyme. Elsewhere in the herb garden I've got Greek oregano, rosemary, peppermint, orange mint, catmint, catnip, lemon balm, yarrow, skullcap, horehound, parsley, and now a few different kinds of basil.

I'm still waiting on the potatoes to die down. It's taking longer than I thought it would. I also haven't harvested the garlic or shallots yet. The garlic still doesn't look good, but the shallots are still pretty green.

This is Tatume squash, a Mexican heirloom that is in the C. pepo species but is supposed to be more resistant to squash vine borers. I planted five, and it looks like the borers already got one, but the others are doing pretty well, so we'll see.

The Moon and Stars watermelon plants are also doing well. I planted four of them. I also just planted three Melon de Castilla plants, a cantaloupe from Native Seeds/SEARCH. 

The Christmas Lima beans are in the back, so the deer aren't eating them, and they're doing great. They're just starting to get blossoms.

Here are my sweet potatoes I just planted right before we went on vacation. They probably deserve a post of their own. They've just gotten settled after transplanting and are starting to grow.

The fava beans just aren't doing too great though. It started getting hot just as they were making pods, so I think they just didn't have enough time. This fall I'll have to plant them much sooner.

OK, that's my update. By now I should be getting my summer crops in if it wasn't for the darn deer.