Recipe by Luke Jefford

I have to admit, I carried this hot sauce around in my bag for nearly one week awaiting the right opportunity to take a fancy picture of our fermented love child. Big mistake! Exploded everywhere!! We’ve had worse things on our persons though, being parents. Thankfully our eyes were saved from any spicy injuries.

Nikki loves hot sauce! Me, not so much. My genetic makeup just can’t handle it, I wish it could. We tried to find a common ground on chillies. Green birdseye chillies seemed to be the ones. Almost akin to Padron Peppers, some are hot, some are not.

This took around 4 weeks to ferment. You could leave it for months, provided all of your ingredients are below the brine. We just didn’t see the need. It’s delicious as it is.

To help with explosive injuries you could pasteurise the ferment after blending to stop any further fermentation. Simply bring the blended solution to 82 celsius (180F) for 10 minutes. You could always add some vinegar also in this process. I guess it depends on where you plan to store it. We chose to freeze the final ferment in eco-friendly vacuum pack bags, which stopped any further fermentation.

You could pass this sauce through a sieve to make it extra thin, and more shop saucey. But, we really like the texture of it as it is. No need to throw anything away!

You could make this in any quantity you want, not necessarily with our ingredients. You could just go ahead and make with chillies, water, salt and wild garlic if you wanted. A 4-5% brine is essential. Simply weigh up all your ingredients and use www.percentagecalculator.net to achieve this.

Ingredients

• 450g Green Chillies (Chopped)

• 450g Green Or Yellow Tomatoes (Chopped)

• 2 Sticks Lemongrass (Chopped)

• 1 Apple (Peeled and Diced)

• 2 Green Bell Peppers (Diced/No Seeds)

• 600g Wild Garlic (Chopped)

• 70g Honey (We Went Organic)

• 400g Water

• 78g Sea Salt (Non-Iodized)

Method

It is really important to make sure all of your utensils are sterilised before starting.

Step 1

Chop, chop, chop.

Step 2

Chop a little more.

Step 3

Add all of your ingredients (apart from water and salt) to a fermentation vessel with an airlock. It’s important to make sure no oxygen is present.

Step 4

Bring your water and salt up to a slow boil or until the salt has dissolved. And leave to cool. Pour over the rest of your ingredients. You could add mare water here if you wanted for a thinner sauce. We like ours with a nice viscosity. Remember to adjust your salt content if you plan to do this.

Step 5

Make sure all of your ingredients are weighed down below the brine.

Step 6

After 4 weeks, simply blend the ingredients together with a machine of your choice. And follow our advice above (pasteurisation or freezing).

Step 7

Do not leave in your bag for photos!