Hot sauce
Fermented habanero hot sauce
Fermenting chillies before you blend them gives hot sauce a deeper, tangier flavour than vinegar alone. It's simple: chillies, garlic and carrot in a salt brine, left on the bench for one to two weeks, then blended. Habaneros bring fruity flavour and serious heat.
Red Habanero gives a classic orange-red sauce; White Habanero makes a paler one. The times below don't include the one to two weeks of fermenting.
- Prep 20 min
- Makes about 400 ml
Ingredients
- 200 g ripe habaneros, stems removed
- 1 carrot, peeled and sliced
- 4 cloves garlic
- 500 ml non-chlorinated water (filtered, or boiled and cooled)
- 15 g non-iodised sea salt
- 80 ml white vinegar
Method
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Step 1
Make the brine
Stir the salt into the water until dissolved. This makes about a 3% brine.
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Step 2
Pack the jar
Wearing gloves, halve the habaneros. Pack them into a clean 1 litre jar with the carrot and garlic.
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Step 3
Cover
Pour over the brine to cover completely, then weigh everything down with a small zip-lock bag of brine or a fermentation weight so nothing pokes above the liquid.
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Step 4
Ferment
Cover loosely and leave at room temperature, out of direct sun, for 7 to 14 days. Bubbles and cloudy brine are normal. Fuzzy mould means something went wrong, so throw the batch out.
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Step 5
Blend
Drain, keeping the brine. Blend the vegetables with the vinegar and enough brine to get the consistency you like.
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Step 6
Bottle
Pour into sterilised bottles and keep in the fridge for up to 6 months.
Grow your own
The chillies in this recipe are easy to grow from seed in New Zealand.
