I’m curious what you like and how you use them in food.
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Hot sauces in YOUR area
Beer
If you’re making stoverij with Sint Bernardus, beer is definitely a sauce and a great one at that!
Canada, Mostly imports. We do a lot of sauerkraut which is used as topping (sauce adjacent), same with kimchi.
For true sauces it’s a lot of fermented hot sauces, or sauces with butter milk.
Buttermilk sauces, sounds good. I am Dutch and never heard or thought of using buttermilk for a sauce. Any Canadian sauce recipe you like to share?
Most sauerkraut is pasteurized which, as I understand it, makes it not fermented anymore.
Fermentation is the process, right? Having undergone fermentation, you can’t really be un-fermented, right?
My understanding is fermented foods have good microbes in them. They are, essentially, alive.
If you pasteurize them, it kills off those communities. The heat won’t distinguish between good and bad microbes so it’s all dead after fermentation.
We pasteurize milk to kill the bad microbes (feacal colliforms, food poisoning, etc.) for mass production. It works well, …very well. It’s needed at that scale, period. But if you are looking for the living microbes, it can’t be pasteurized.
Fermented foods have good microbes in them while they are fermenting up until something kills them - they are still very much fermented though regardless of whether the microbes are alive or not. The fundamental alteration has already happened.
Now, if you’re looking to eat them specifically for the microbes, and not for the flavour, then you’d have to look for something that has not had the microbes killed off, for sure.
My girlfriend is a professional fermenter, so I have endless amounts of fermented sauces in my immediate surroundings.
I would say the most hyped one in her network is this strawberry gochujang she’s making.
Fish sauce! Most common use is to mix with sugar, garlic, chili, and lime as a dipping sauce. It sort of goes in everything though,
Mam tom is awesome too. It’s made by fermenting small shrimp. The sauce comes out purple with a bunch of black dots (shrimp eyes). It sounds and smells terrible, but tastes great. Typically we mix it with lime, sugar, chili, and a little pork fat. Often this makes it start fizzing and bubbling. Then it’s a dipping sauce for tofu, vegetables, and deep fried stuff. It’s really great.
I make my own fermented hot sauces. It is so easy to make. Use them in anything from curry’s, bami or nasi, omelettes, or just on the side.
Oh now come on! “It’s so easy” but no details?! You’re killing me here. Do tell me your secrets please!
Woops.
Basically. Bunch of peppers, put them in a clean jar, fill with water with 6 procent of salt, so 1 liter water + 60 grams of salt. You can vary from 3 to 10 procent. Make sure the peppers are under the brine, so they don’t come in contact with air. Turn lid every day to let CO2 escape and close again, don’t take the lid off the jar. After a week you already have a nice fermented hot sauce if the jar is in a warm place, but you can ferment way longer. I like 2 to 3 weeks. Blender or a stick blender the peppers with some of the brine. You can use the left over brine to marinate meat, make other sauces or gravies, salad dressing and so on.
I like to add onions, lots of garlic and herbs like thai basil too in the fermenting process.
- Do you use whole peppers, or are you cutting them up.
- What varieties of peppers are best?
- Are fresh peppers better, or is this just as effective for old peppers?
- What is the bacteria source and how do you think your water/cleaning/environmental variables contribute if at all?
Not the original poster, but hopefully still helps: I chopped the peppers very roughly. Essentially, I made sure that the liquid could reach the insides easily. For small peppers, I just halved them. For the larger ones, I took out the seeds. But I didn’t do it perfectly. Some people say the seeds will make the sauce bitter. I didn’t have that problem.
I have used a wild mix of peppers. A friends sent some from his garden, we had some on our plants, so we just threw them all together. I only used yellow, orange, and red in the batch, because I didn’t want puke-colored hot sauce but technically, the color doesn’t matter. I’ve used cayenne, habanero, elephant, thai, lila luzy, and another one I don’t remember the name of. For a milder sauce, you can also add some non-spicy bell peppers.
You should have at least 1/2 of them fresh but can add dried ones to bulk things up. You need some fresh ones to get the fermentation going, though. Definitely, no moldy ones!
It’s a lactic acid fermentation. Don’t overthink it. There is a shitton of salt in hot sauce that keeps most things in check. The fact that the fermentation happens under brine (i.e. not in air) takes care of the rest. Of course, do your own research, but hot sauce is rather easy. I just clean the jars under hot soapy water, then again to get rid of any and all remnants of soap, and then fill with tap water. But I’m in Europe, so there’s no chlorine in the water where I live. You might need to use another kind of water or do some water treatment (chlorine evaporates if you leave the water open somewhere).
After the fermentation, we used a blender to mix it all together with some vinegar. The brine is great for chicken. We didn’t filter the final sauce, so ours had some seeds in it. It was great on egg and toast or in cooking. You can filter again at the end to get a smoother, more liquid hot sauce.
- I half them, leave the stems on and seeds in.
- I use lombok, birds eye, madame jeanette, scotch bonnet, jalapenos, anything I can get my hands on really, all peppers are best.
- Fresh ones, dont use ripe, old or frozen, ripe is a gamble, old will get mold and frozen will be sterile. You can add frozen peppers with the fresh ones but you need fresh ingredients to start lacto fermentation.
- lacto bacteria, it is everywhere all around you, even on your face. You do need a sterile jar and the enviromental influences kept to a minimal.
Henderson’s Relish - it’s similar to Worcestershire but hyper local to Sheffield (and it’s vegan cos no anchovies) and we’re all weirdly proud of it
When I was working in the Barnsley area I used to pick it up to bring it home to the south. The last time I was there I made sure to stock up on it, now you can just get it anywhere - they sell it in my local Sainsbury’s and Waitrose now.
Fermented tofu, it sounds horrible but it’s just akin to cheese.
Think how the Chinese feel about heavily fermented milk? Ha!
As a fan of both tofu and basically anything fermented…this sounds great!
It is a strong flavour but works really well as part of your sauce bowl when you’re dipping cooked hotpot ingredients in it.
I think it can also be added to noodles for some spiciness.
Asian/Chinese supermarkets must have it, it’s a jar of something white/slightly yellowed immersed in a watery chilli sauce.
Worcestershire sauce… use on and in anything you want.
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