Recipe by Luke Jefford

Water Pepper is also known as Arse-Smart, and we all know a few of those! Is a native alternative to chilli, with a serious packing pepper punch. Most loved in Asian cuisine, it has a strong peppery taste and is commonly used as a hot-tasting spice, food flavor and garnishing herb. Interestingly, it is a cultivated subspecies of Water Pepper that is most commonly used in Asian cuisine. It’s wild counterpart mentioned here, is MUCH HOTTER!

We’ve seen this plant akin to wasabi, which is a common theme amongst the foraging community. I do wonder how many have tried fresh wasabi, the taste is much more mild and fresh than ‘wasabi paste’. Which most of the time is mustard and food colouring, nothing like actual wasabi.

Anywho, I digress, you can read a lot more on Water Pepper and it’s history on the Water Pepper ID section of our website.

We’ve been playing with it a lot as an ingredient of late. It’s a pretty frustrating plant, ideally it is used fresh as its chilli-like punch diminishes after cooking or drying. This doesn’t leave much scope to enjoy it year round. Until we had light bulb moment the other day, why not try fermenting it fresh? Voilà, it works!

Using a 2% salt content (the same as sauerkraut). Yields something we can store with a lingering chilli punch for future use. We plan to blend it to create our own native ‘chilli’ paste. Also another batch will be kept with the leaf whole, to add into things like rice and pulses.

Please have a good read through our ID section, as this plant might not be suitable for everyone’s health and well-being.

Ingredients

• 400g Water Pepper Leaves (Or Plant Tips)

• 8g Non-Iodized Fine Sea Salt

Method

Step 1

Pick the leaves from the stems of the water pepper. You can leave the flower tips on also. The stems aren’t necessary here. You could however, save them to infuse into a stock.

Step 2

Weigh your water pepper leaves and using percentagecalculator.net figure out what 2% of your weight of leaves is. This 2% figure is going to be what your adding in salt. We had 400g of leaves, so 8g of salt was perfect. It is REALLY important to make sure you have a high quality non-iodized sea salt for fermentation projects. Nikki & I buy flakey sea salt and then blend to make a finer end product for better fermentation.

Step 3

Mix well with your santisied hands and press between two bowls over night. We like to fill the top bowl with water to aid in pressing the leaves as much as possible. This is to create its own natural brine.

Step 4

After this you need to press the mixture down into a jar as tightly as possible and place a weight on top to further extract that brine. You could add a 2% salt water brine to aid in this. We found that water pepper gave off enough of its own natural brine with some serious pressing. We used both a sanitised rock from the beach and a glass object when pressing the lid down on top. The mixture will need to be done anaerobically from here on in (without the presence of oxygen). So make sure you’re happy with whatever you decide to do, as it’ll need to be left to ferment for 4-6 weeks without fiddling.

Step 5

Leave for 4-6 weeks at room temperature and then place in the fridge. You can then either blend to create your own native ‘chilli paste’ or simply add the leaves in to recipes requiring a bit of a punch.