Canning hot peppers is a wonderful way to preserve your extra produce and give your salads and sandwiches a spicy kick.
You can even mix peppers based on your preferences to create beautiful, colorful jars that stay safely preserved and delicious for months. Learn how you can preserve and store your hot peppers today.
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!