The spice cabinet in your kitchen is never complete until you add a bottle of hot sauce. However, your favourite sauce can go bad if not stored correctly despite its long shelf life.
This article is for you if you wonder how much longer to keep your sauce in your cabinet without going bad. Read on to discover how long a bottle can last and how to tell when your hot sauce has expired.
The biggest way to up your hot sauce game is to learn how to ferment hot peppers. During fermentation, tiny microorganisms break down larger compounds into more flavourful smaller compounds. Thus, producing new flavours altogether and enhancing some of the existing flavours of the hot peppers.
Fermentation may sound scary but it is in fact really easy to do.
In short, this is how to ferment hot peppers for hot sauce:
Place hot peppers in a clean mason jar or similar vessel. Create a salt brine of at least 2.5-5% salt content and pour just enough brine to cover the hot peppers. Weigh down the peppers to help keep them under the brine, sometimes they can float. Rest the jar out of direct sunlight for 1 to 2 weeks, or however long you want.
Let’s explore this process in a bit more detail. Also, there is an awesome Fermented Mango Habanero recipe at the bottom of this article so you can try fermenting at home!