Hot Sauce Completed

So after letting the pepper mash ferment for about two months, I decided to bottle it up.  Back when it started fermenting, some small spots of white mold started to form on the surface of the pepper mash that was above the brine.  So I topped off the jug with more water so that it was completely filled with pepper mash and brine.  The first 2 weeks of fermentation was fairly aggressive, as it forced all the pepper mash to the top of the jug, and pushed some up through the airlock, which made a mess.

You can see the pepper mash changed from a greenish color to more brownish, and even after the fermentation slowed down, all the mash was still forced up against the top of the jug:

It definitely had a sourish strong aroma, a little funky.  Upon tasting the mash, two things were clear.  One, that I used way too much salt (6 oz).  Two, that either the Tabasco peppers or Fish peppers were VERY hot.  I hoped that most of the salt was in the brine, so I strained the liquid from the mash.

That definitely helped.  But the pepper mash was much too hot (and too thick) to use as straight hot sauce for "everyday" uses like on eggs or tacos.  So I thawed a container of tomato puree that we had frozen from the garden.  Since the tomato puree was just blended whole tomatoes that were cooked down, it was very thin and could thin out the pepper mash and cut some of the heat. I made three variations, X, XX, and XXX, increasing in heat.  Most of the sauce was made as the milder X recipe which has a nice balance of flavor and slow burn heat, with just few bottles of the others.  The variations:

X - 1 part pepper mash to 4 parts tomato puree, with rice vinegar and brown sugar to taste

XX- Equal parts pepper mash and tomato puree, again with rice vinegar and brown sugar

XXX- Pepper mash, with some rice vinegar and water to thin it out a bit. 

For reference, the mix of varieties of peppers was:

1/2 lb Red Zavory

1/2 lb Fish 

1/2 lb Tabasco

1/2 lb Jalapeno

2 lb Salsa

2 lb Poblano

1.5 lb Sweet Bell

Hot Pepper Jelly and Fermented Hot Sauce

We canned a batch of hot pepper jelly from some of the Red Zavory and Jalepeno peppers.  

Then for the last batch of radom peppers, I decided to try to make some fermented hot sauce. 

 The peppers were stemmed, then pureed, then salt added, and some whey off the top of some yogurt, to give it some "good" bacteria to ferment.

 Similar to the method for traditional pickles or sauerkraut. The salt brine is enough to kill off bad bacteria so that Lactobacillus can ferment the sugars and create lactic acid, which is a natural preservative, as it lowers the pH. It's supposed to give the peppers a better flavor.