Well it’s Xmas Eve 2020, so off to the allotment to get our veg for dinner tomorrow. A wet and cold day but it’s good to get outside with Covid lockdown still going on.
Picked the Cabbage (Kilaton F1) that I had set aside for the big day, and it proved to be a very good one, really tight head of cabbage. Two stalks of Brussels Sprouts (‘Bright’ F1 Hybrid), the sprouts are still quite small but there are plenty there for dinner or two. One full head of the Kale Borecole Vates Blue Curled. Some more Parsnip Gladiator F1 to roast.
From the freezer we will be also cooking some Cobra green beans that with grew earlier in the season. Home made Red Currant jelly and a Black Currant wine from fruit we also grew this year.
So on the dinner table tomorrow will be SEVEN items that we grew and/or made ourselves.
Hot Sauce time again, using up all of the Tabasco chilli from the allotment greenhouse. 391g of ripe and unripe chillies. Harvested the plants clean.
So to make Sriracha, it’s just chilli, garlic and salt from looking around the internet. I’ve added some white onion as well.
Recipe so Far :
391g Tabasco chilli.
89g White Onion, rough chopped.
47g Fresh garlic, crushed.
300g Water.
21g Sea Salt.
Using the same method for the brine as last time.
527g Veg + 300g Water x 0.025 = Salt for brine (20.67g) 2.5%
There is a cabbage leaf keeping it all under the brine, hopefully that will help things along.
I still have to work out the quantities of vinegar and sugar etc, but the shop bought Sriracha I have in the fridge, says on the WWW that it’s ingredients are,
With 5g salt per 100ml and 21g Carbohydrate, of which 17g sugars.
So that will give me something to work from, so to break it down so far.
61% Pickled Red Chillies Mash
10% Garlic
5% Salt
So that leaves me with 24% of something else. 17% sugar I guess, so only 7% left. However if you go to the products website and look in the back of the bottle. The ingredients are:
So to reproduce it that’s thrown in a problem, I guess the 37% Chilli is without the 24% pickling brine included.
So as a break down of what I have fermenting and the final recipe I think the following ingredients will work for a litre of sauce :
391g Fermented Chilli
47g Fermented Garlic
89g White onion
170g Sugar
50g Brine from the Ferment
200g Red Wine Vinegar
5g Mild Smoked paprika
Day 13: 11th Dec 2020
The ferment seems to have finished now, so time to make the sauce up.
Into the blender went:
530g of the Brine soaked Chillies, Garlic and Onion.
56g of the fermenting Brine.
118g sugar.
202g Red Wine Vinegar.
5g Mild smoked Paprika.
Blended all together until it was as smooth as possible. Then passed it through a sieve to remove the remaining solids. Heated the smooth sauce in pan for 5 mins to help pasteurise the sauce, returned to the blender, whizzed up the hot sauce and slowly added 5g of Xanthan gum. Decanted hot into clean sanitised bottles.
Dam this sauce is very very hot, the consistency is perfect for a Sriracha, full favoured with a great taste of the chillies and garlic. But it’s so spicy hot, i’ll do this again, but really need to temper the heat down some next time.
After months of growing 9 Tabasco plants, today was the day it was time to turn them into the hot chilli sauce I had planned, it’s been a long process from start to finish and the plants have been very poor at ripening the fruit. Good job I did as many plants as I did, else I might have got next to none ripe chilli this year.
I decided to make this sauce today as there where slight signs of Kahm yeast appearing on the top of the ferment and all signs of bubbles had stopped. As there was a little Kahm yeast on top, I thought it a good idea to also cook this sauce a little, to both stop any future fermenting, and kill off any yeast that might spoil the taste while it sits on the shelf.
The seeds where planted on Jan 1st 2020, so from seed to sauce it’s taken 11 months.
The very 1st harvest was on the 26th of August, but they where another type of chilli I grow called Medina that over wintered last year. Only 50g worth. Added these to my fermenting jar with 100g of water and 5g of sea salt to start the ferment.
Over the next weeks and months the fermenting jar was added to as the chillies ripened.
DATE
CHILLI
WATER
SALT
26-08-20
Medina 50g
100g
5g
05-09-20
Medina 30g
30g
1.5g
13-09-20
Tabasco 8g
none
none
20-09-20
Tabasco 2g
none
none
23-09-20
Medina 18g
none
none
26-09-20
Tabasco 13g
16g
none
04-10-20
Tabasco 91g
60g
6.5g
04-10-20
Bell Pepper (sweet) 100g
none
none
12-10-20
Tabasco 109g
100g
5.1g
22-10-20
Tabasco 84g
107g
5g
Chilli + H2o x 0.025 = salt
I used the Formula (Chilli + H2o x 0.025 = salt) to keep the brine at 2.5% as I added each addition to the fermenting jar.
So in total that was =505g Chilli + 413g water = 22.95 Salt (I put in 23.1g Salt in total)
So into a pan it all went, chillies and brine, this was then cooked on a gentle simmer for 15 mins to pasteurize everything. The smell coming of this pan is fantastic. I checked the pH as well post boil, and was happy to see 3.4 pH
After the simmer, the whole lot then went into the blender with 50% in weight of vinegar, so in this case it was just over 377g of distilled white malt vinegar, I started with 25% but the liquid was to thick for this type of sauce. Gave this another spin in the blender. Again checked the pH and with the vinegar added it had dropped to 2.8 pH.
Checked on the consistency of the liquid and it looked about right. Ran it through a sieve to remove the skins and seeds that the blender had not broken down, then bottled into clean 150ml woozy bottles.
Had a quick taste test. I wanted this sauce to show off the Tabasco chilli and it really does. I think it’s slightly to salty, but not overly salty for my taste, but maybe next time I may reduce the brine content by about 50%. Real Tabasco sauce has 1.8g per 100ml, and only 19% chilli pepper,so my bottles have about 2.6g per 100ml so 0.8 of a gram to much, but a lot more chilli pepper.
It’s great tasting “MOSTLY TABASCO” and quite on the spicy side, and not bad for a 1st go at a Tabasco sauce I think.
The last of the tomatoes from the polytunnel turned into green tomato chutney, with hubbys tabasco and medina chillies so hot stuff ♨️♨️♨️🌶🌶🌶 Tastes amazing and well worth the hours of stirring 😂 From Alys Fowlers Abundance book, love this book for preserving, not had a dud recipe from it yet!
The Cabin Brewery and Smoke House, Allotment plot 119 