Homemade Sriracha
seriouseats.com
seriouseats.com
I recommend fermenting the hot peppers in a brine, instead of as a paste. In my experience, this reduces the likelihoods of both mold (because only saline is in contact with the air) and exploding containers (because you can leave the lid more loose, allowing air to escape).
I recommend this video's technique for the fermentation step: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL8UJPQ_zoU
Also, the salt level is incredibly important for both food safety and flavor - Noma's fermentation guide recommends using 2% of the weight of the ferment (both solids and any water). It's worth using a scale for this.
I've had issues with fermenting mashes in bags in the past. My suspicion is that blending ahead of time may have killed natural lactic acid bacteria on the vegetables. So, you could counter this by adding some ferment brine at the end (e.g., from store-bought kimchi). But, I now blend for the final texture after the fermentation rather than before.
it makes for a very fun hobby, with interesting rewards.
I would highly recommend others to try it if they get a chance, but as you said, the salinity is extremely important.
I had the worst issue with kahm in a fairly low garlic fermentation, but am happy to try different amounts and report back.
editing to add:
I had 2 batches side by side, jalapeño, Fresno, garlic, and one had Thai bird, the other habanero. the habanero had a yeast growth, the Thai bird did not. all other variables were as close as possible to each other.
Botulism gives up a lot of vigor for its sporing ability and doesn't do well with salt at all. The situations where it's a problem are when you don't have a source of acidity, like when you use heat which wipes the LABs but not botulism. Which is the domain of canning and things, not fermentation. Combining them is advanced level for this reason exactly though.
My kids love it, my 4yo helps make lots of things. Fermented tomatoes (pulp is amazing, the liquid you get then is incredible in vinaigrettes and to poach fish in), fermented mushrooms, green beans are popular, kimchi (which is great because it's so expensive to buy here), strawberries. We've got some red sauerkraut on the go right now.
There's a reason most people start with sandor katz.
I think many here would like the style - it's a cover of the history, why and how something works and then a set of examples to showcase the variety with tips on how to use them.
For example, it'll explain what lacto-fermentation is & how it works, then give an example of fruit / berry / vegetable / mushroom / something else. Each comes with "how we'd use this at Noma". Given that it was a restaurant regularly chosen as the best in the world, sometimes they are a bit "extra". The base things aren't, but while I've made vinegar from things we picked I've not embarked on the more out-there projects. For anyone who hasn't read it, it'll also go into koji, shiso, misos, garums, kombuchas and vinegars.
> Those results will be incredibly interesting almost unique ingredients in their own right and for that reason will not be easy to just substitute in for other things.
I'm not sure I'd quite agree but I don't think we're at opposite ends here. The results are lots of base ingredients and information on how to use them. Substituting things is heavily encouraged (it's not saying here's how to do blackberries it's "here's how to do things like blackberries"). I've walked away from sections of the book with many more ideas and more confidence about what could be done.
I find it a very interesting book because it's less about giving a set of rigid things to do and more about showing the range and variety of what you can achieve. Also, it's written in a way that's not flowery but very passionate. I find it hard not to be excited when reading it.
I think a lot of techies would like it, but other sources are also excellent for taking you through how to use something.
An alternative is to use a lid with a built-in water seal apparatus that acts as one-way valve to vent the carbon dioxide. Not having to think about manual venting or ingress of oxygen makes it a more foolproof process.
For thick-walled peppers, e.g jalapeño, a salt mash works as well as a brine and allows better control over the liquid content at the end. With a salt mash the thicker peppers release a lot of water that essentially becomes the brine, albeit at lower volume. For thin-walled peppers like cayenne and habanero, I usually use a brine or a combination of mash and brine. A weight can help keep the fermenting peppers submerged and compacted to make they remain anaerobic.
2% salt by weight would be the very lowest I would consider personally. Usually I use 4-5%.
I don't know what it is, and it could be something natural, but what was there and now isn't is some kind of emulsifier.
Agree about not not turning them in to paste, to avoid mold.
If you're in the bay area, Serrano are spicy and easy to grow as an annual here (they don't overwinter well).
I have 7 pepper ferments from my garden this year. My favorite is with some sweet onions and garlic added to the peppers. If the peppers are too hot you can use carrots. The best tops are not the ones with a water lock IMHO.
It's unfortunate that David Tran didn't learn from the Italians who sell their 900-year-old Parmigiano-Reggiano recipe to this day.
It's a shame, it seemed like the brand was only getting started and becoming recognized globally as a household name. A small battle with their favored supplier costed them much.
Greed will get you in the end!
Well, years later the cigar roller is now a cigar magnate, and he wanted his business to be owned by himself and his children, not his business partner. So he started another company on the side and started pushing all of his new brands through that company. The farm owner found out, sued him, and they settled out of court for millions with the caveat that the roller would no longer be able to use any of his farm's tobacco.
Cigar roller shrugged his shoulders and kept going. Bought some farmland in Nicaragua and other places, built a fermentation barn, and started growing his own tobacco too, at least what he couldn't source from elsewhere. He also largely stopped making third party cigars aside from his son in law's by way of jacking up the prices on almost all long-run projects by over 100% (to get out of making them). In 20 years he went from being near penniless to being one of the most successful people in the business.
Are the cigars as good as they used to be? Hell no. He used to create cigars for third party vendors that would put most of the best Cuban marcas to shame even when you found a quality box of them. But they're good enough for people who don't remember what they used to be, and that's what counts.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/hotsauce/comments/pcw7i0/huy_fong_s...
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/19/how-did-the-huy-fong-foods-s...
Sriracha is not a brand but rather a type of regional sauce, of which Huy Fong’s version was not completely true to recipe (but still tasted great IMO), and so that’s why you see other brands creating a “sriracha” sauce. Huy Fong’s version is sweeter than the OG but I’ve noticed some other brands are even sweeter (like Trader Joe’s if I recall).
Incidentally, Underwood Farms started producing their own sriracha sauce.
It exists, but it's certainly not inevitable.
I personally prefer this Thai Sriracha: Sriraja Panich, https://a.co/d/bbGQ3p2
Collaborating: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-sriracha-lawsui...
Which is pretty much the only brand I buy now since I found it. It actually tastes like what I remember "Rooster Sauce" tasting like 20-25 years ago when I was first introduced to it at some hole-in-the-wall chinese takeout joint.
The Huy Fong stuff these days just does not taste the same as it used to. I actually found the above information OP posts about after 2 or 3 bottles just tasting "off" and wondering if there was a bad batch or an off year happening or something. It's quite noticeable to me.
And on that day, they truly became an "American" company.
Fermented chili sauce is probably the highest ROI home fermentation projects and easy enough that anybody can do it, so if you've got access to interesting peppers, take a whack at it. It's a really good way to use peppers that are too hot to eat on their own, since it's much easier to control the dosing in a dish as a sauce.
Once you get going it's very easy to always make your own bread, and it be lot better & cheaper (a sliding scale between them depending what you bought, but almost certainly both to some extent regardless) than what you bought before.
Beer is trickier than hot sauce for sure, but more differentiable, versatile, and satisfying (if you drink beer) perhaps to make up for it on an RoI basis? Certainly worth trying if you like this sort of thing anyway, I think.
Yoghurt is even easier than hot sauce, more versatile, though not really as interesting or variable. Such low investment though (milk, few chickpeas or chilli crowns) that if you use it at all it would be hard for it not to do very well on RoI basis.
Others: quantified self/self-tracking; fermentation
Fermentation of hot peppers, photography, homemade shawarma, woodworking, burn barrels, how to roll cords without tangling, bitters with soda when too full. All of those I looked up in the last month for one reason or another. And on some I improved but there is no organized way to give back the knowledge.
Can you expand upon this? How does mixing bitters with soda help with being too full?
I know, this is HN, so a dozen people are gonna say "Well, -I'VE- like hot sauce since insert year." I get it. You're badass.
But this is just the latest trend. Which I enjoy. Sriracha is sugary syrup in my opinion, and lousiana style is just blah ... the Hot Sauce craze has led to some really tasty alternatives. See: Torchbearer.
But when the trend finally fades, we'll all go back to enjoying Sambal Oelek, the OG hotsauce.
I know this is the internet, and it's traditional to invent people to be mad at, but in this case the person you're mad at is .... someone who has liked hot sauce since before Hot Ones?
Of course that doesn't mean it can't be or isn't a current craze, but it's hardly been a niche interest since.. idk, some time not too long after Portuguese colonialism brought chillies out of South America ca. 16th-18th C.s?
Hot sauce is about as faddish as corn and tomatoes.
Seriously, do they not have curries where you live?
Yo bartender, I’ll have what he’s having.
I’ve taken to growing my own peppers (Piri Piri) to go in the Portuguese food I like. I couldn’t find them fresh anywhere. It’s turned into a little hobby, and it is shocking how hot a well cared for jalapeño is.
My pepper endeavors this year (in Santa Cruz and high sierra) were mixed. Poblanos were nuts. Jalepenos ok. Hot peppers, not so much.
If I knew then what I know now, I'd have bought all of it and scalped it properly.
Alas.
I guess I'm not so set on it having to be exactly the same. As long as it's got kind of the same chili plus garlic notes, I'm happy enough.
Looks and tastes so much better, less congealed and processed, more vibrant and fresh.
Chili peppers generally make up a pretty large chunk of what I grow every year, as they can often be preserved every which way you can imagine (fermented, dried, smoked, canned, or frozen).
-edit- The next pepper based thing I am probably going to try and figure out is how to make Tapatio/Cholula style hot sauce. If anyone has a link to a decent recipe, it would be much appreciated.
More than you can possibly use. I'm trading mine for a neighbor's tomatoes.
https://thehotpepper.com/threads/cholula-copycat-recipe-reco...
I also like pickling, making vinegar and other based hot sauces. I eat carolina reapers when I feel stupid. `Hot Ones` is actually a brilliant show and their sauces are not bad.
The Rooster Sauce shortage and the DIY or link to the issue at large is why I appreciate HN.
I uusally have a fall hot pepper source, but noodle on the idea of a sustainable business around some of these niche culinary (etc) interests that come up.
Has anyone tried one of their flavors that has really knocked their socks off? Galangal, Tikka, Black Pepper and Kimchi sound good.
Sriracha sauce is a generic kind of sauce. This is not all about one particular brand. Whatever some Californian company calls it, it's not their own thing and never was. There are legions of brands of sriracha and apart from one country, in the other 200-odd countries of the world other brands outnumber Flying Goose or whatever it's called.
A decade ago, before the spat with their suppliers, I heard praise for this one American brand, so I went looking for it. I found some, bought it, and it was a good sauce. It was expensive, though, so I did not stay loyal, when I could buy actual Asian-made sriracha from Asian shops for 10% of the price of the American stuff. I have found that other Asian brands of sriracha are just as good to my taste, notably the amusingly-named Cock Sauce.
In fact the only thing that's notable to me is that since the successful viral promotion of Hoy Fong's stuff, lots of European supermarkets noticed that "sriracha" isn't a trademark and anyone can make and sell sriracha sauce. So now there is Tesco sriracha and Marks and Spencer sriracha and Albert Hein sriracha and so on...
Those are all rubbish with no heat and no flavour.
But if it comes in a clear plastic bottle with 3-4 non-European languages printed on it, it's probably good. :-)
And frankly, it's inexpensive and widespread so I am not going to bother making my own. Sorry. It's like bread: home made bread can be wonderful, but if you shop around, there is good bread to buy almost everywhere... even in the UK, home of the awful Chorleywood Process and some of the worst bread in the world.
If I can buy a loaf of good bread for £/$/€ 1.50-2 then I am not going to spend 4 hours making one.
Its Chinese-Vietnamese immigrant founder didn’t really know how to make it. He just kept experimenting until he got the flavor that he wanted, but it’s not an authentic flavor. Instead, it’s an original American hot sauce where just a few years ago most people in Asia were very unfamiliar with since the company doesn’t really like to do advertising.
And, yes, we’ve all seen that documentary on Netflix, too.
I’m not sure how my comment can be seen as a criticism for the Huy Fong company. it was meant to criticize the blog post instead
Ugh.
1 lbs jalapenos, 4 cloves garlic, 1 tbsp of salt, 2 tbsp of sugar, 1/4 cup water
blend - wait 6-7 days on the counter - check every day for bubbles.
simmer 15 min, 1/4 vinegar added at the end. Strain through a mess for less grains.
put in a bottle. I like it less sweet, but still enjoy the fermented taste. Getting a solid bottle is important.
It's 0.5 g per 5-g serving, i.e. 10% (roughly same as Coke which I guess is generally agreed to be sweet).
This particular siracha is based around red, ripe jalapenos. And [presumably green, unripened] jalapenos are already 4.1g of sugar per 100g of fruit all by themselves:
https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/168576/n...