Preparation time: Not listed
Cooking time: Not listed
Recipe overview:
I've had a few requests for this since posting a picture in my vege garden. The recipe I use was adapted from a great book called "Salt" which has a chapter on the salt caves on Avery Island in Louisiana and how this and the local pepper crop resulted in resulted in Tabasco ® Sauce ... long story short it's a process of salt pickling (up to 3 years) followed by blending with vinegar.
Ingredients
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Method of preparation / cooking
Wait till the peppers are really red hot as the redder they are the hotter the sauce, but old or over dried peppers will fail to ferment. Don't forget gloves when mashing chillies as touching ones eyes (or any other sensitive body part) with chilli hands is deadly!
Bung the crop through the juicer and then blending the pulp back into the juice. If you don't have a juicer then you will need to grind the peppers in a mortar.
Add add salt, officially the mix is 1:32 of salt to mash (I used 1 cup of salt per 1.5 kg of mash).
Leave the salted mash in a large sterilized glass jar with a secure lid to age / ferment. A liquid will form at the bottom and you may see fine bubbles form through the mash to indicate it is fermenting. Allow fermenting until the mash stops fermenting (I leave mine for 6 months - taking the lid off from time to time to let the gas escape)
After aging is finished, place mash in a new clean and sterilized jar. Add white wine vinegar to taste ( I added about 1:3 vinegar to mash) and age for another two weeks.
Finally throw it all into a bowl lined with cheesecloth, fold the cheesecloth up into a ball and twist & squeeze until the juice is extracted. Bottle the juice and keep in the refrigerator.
Tobasco sauce and Salsa
As this recipe doesn't contain an artificial binding agent you will need to shake the bottle prior to using it.
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