If you’re anything like me, you’ll love a scorching hot chilli pepper sauce, and you can’t beat fermented 7Pot Brainstrain Yellows; they certainly pack a punch. These chillies can range between 800,000 and a million on the Scoville scale!
Adding Multiple Varieties of Chilli Peppers in a Sauce
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my years of fermenting and making hot sauces, it’s not to add too many chilli varieties into your sauce, as the unique flavour of each pepper can easily be lost.
Add or Remove Seeds from a Chilli Sauce?
Also, remember – you can choose to add the seeds to the fermentation or remove them; it’s down to your personal preference. Leaving the seeds in will increase the heat slightly.
This recipe makes 1 bottle of chilli sauce, but you can adjust the ingredients to affect overall volumes.
Insanely hot fermented 7Pot Brainstrain Chilli Sauce
Equipment
- 1 Jar
- Gloves to protect you from the burn
- 1 Knife
- 1 Measuring jug
- 1 Measuring scale
- 1 Sieve
Ingredients
- 14-20 whole Ripe 7Pot Brainstrain Yellow Peppers depending on size
- 4 cloves Garlic
- 5 grams Salt Kosher, Sea Salt or Pickling (for the brine)
- 205 ml Water
Instructions
Preparing your fermentation
- Select your jar – the bigger the jar, the greater the sauce volume.
- Make sure to use gloves if you're working with hot peppers.
- Firstly, peel your garlic cloves and add them to the jar.
- Select your chilli peppers, rinse them and remove the stalks. Slice the peppers in half and decide if you're going to remove the seeds.
- Add your peppers to the jar and squash them down.
- To make your 2% brine, place your measuring jug on the scale, and add 205ml of water and 5g of salt.
- Stir the salt to dissolve it into the water.
- You do want to leave a bit of headspace at the top of the jar because this will ferment, which means that it will release carbon dioxide, and you don't want this overflowing.
- You need to make sure that the peppers stay below the water's surface, which stops any nasties from growing on the top. You can use a cabbage leaf or an onion to squish your peppers below the surface.
- Then you can use aplastic bag over the top and secure it with an elastic band around the neck of the jar.
- Leave the ferment for at least two weeks at room temperature.
- You can check on the ferment in a few days; you'll know that your peppers are fermenting as you'll be able to see the top of the bag has bubbled up, and bubbles are rising to the top.
Making your sauce
- Firstly, sterilize your bottle. You just need a big pot filled with water, put our bottle and lid in, and let it boil away for about ten minutes.
- Strain the peppers to remove the brine, and take out the onion.
- Place your drained peppers into a blender and blend.
- To thin down your sauce, simply add white vinegar. This will reduce the pH level and add a slight acidity to your sauce whilst retaining the fabulous colour.
- Bottle and serve!
Video
Be Patient….this Fermented Chilli Sauce Gets Better with Time!
This sauce only gets better with time, so it tastes pretty damn good right now but leave it for a bit longer, and it mellows out, allowing all the flavours to come together. That doesn’t mean the heat mellows out….but the “green” taste you sometimes get with chillies goes away!
Enjoy, and Stay Spicy!
Adding/Leaving the seeds does NOT increase the heat! The most heat comes from the filaments to which the seeds are attached. You want VERY hot pepper, try making one with much more filaments in it. The seeds do NOT contain capsaicin, so technically leaving the seeds in would make the sauce less hot.
The seeds are secured to the chilli by the pith. Removing the seeds, removes most of the pith. Agreed, the seeds themselves don’t have heat…but what surrounds them does. Next time you are planting superhot chilli seeds, give one a taste…there will be heat.
There isn’t an onion listed in the ingredient list but you say to remove the onion in step2 of making the sauce instructions.
I’m confused 🫤
Hi Jennifer. Did you watch the video? The onion isn’t an ingredient, it’s one method I use to keep ingredients submerged when fermenting.