This is an experiment pickling smaller batches of peppers using my nifty Kimchi pickling jar. For those of you who have never made Kimchi before, I will write a post or maybe several, about this topic, but for now, let's discuss how to make your own Tabasco hot sauce.
For years, my hubby and I have grown the hottest peppers on the planet, long before it was posh or cool or hip to eat hot foods. I'm a Southern girl, raised on Tabasco.
My first garden here in Minnesota had 45 varieties of peppers growing in it and nothing else... My husband came to love the really really hot stuff after we started growing peppers on his apartment balcony when we were first dating. The rest is hot sauce history.I have posted the "recipe" for making pickled peppers the old fashioned way, using a Gartopf fermentation crock. However, I wanted to show you this way of doing it, too. The Kimchi jar was perfect! Not only did it allow us to make a smaller batch of hot sauce but we could also see the fermentation in action, which is kinda cool.
As is the case with the Gartopf crock, this jar has a "cup" on top of the mouth of the jar and a wide rim on the well which holds water to create a seal. The seal keeps critters and dust out while still allowing the jar to burp and gurgle to release the gases as the peppers begin to ferment.
The pickling liquid will also go from crystal clear to a milky, cloudy pickling liquid and this is your sign that fermentation has happened and may need to be slowed down. To slow it down, put this little jar in the fridge. This slows down the fermentation process and I find that the refrigeration step also allows the real tang to develop.
Of course you can eat these little devils just like they are. And we do. But another way we enjoy this bounty is by juicing the whole batch and making hot sauce. This is the trick to making a good hot sauce. You can blend, puree, mash the peppers but juicing them gives you the consistency of real hot sauce and also helps to keep the sauce homogenized. In other words, the sauce won't separate as easily if you put them through the juicer.As a precaution, we use clean and sterilized herbal supplement bottles (which are quite small and very appropriate) fitted with medicine drippers. This allows hot sauce lovers to drizzle the sauce drop by drop on their food instead of pouring it out of a bottle which can end in trauma if you pour too much. This method, which my hubby thought of, is the most perfect way of doing it I've ever seen. :)
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