Hot 🔥 Sauce Perfection: Chef does it again! Bringing you homemade hot sauces that tingle your taste buds with layers of flavor. With a keen eye for detail, Chef Jayson shares his techniques that make a difference in achieving your desired consistency, heat, and flavor profile. Slicing, dicing, blending, and straining – every step is meticulously explained, empowering you to experiment with your own garden and unleash your creativity in the kitchen.
CHAPTERS:
0:04 Welcome to the Kitchen!
1:55 We may have made a mistake?
2:27 The air in there
3:46 Red Fresno Chilies
5:26 Blended, not stirred…
7:07 Once more into The Strainer, dear friends
10:36 Don’t waste – Dehydrate!
12:22 Cleaning Time
TRANSCRIPT FROM VIDEO:
Chef Jayson (00:04):
Welcome back to the kitchen. We are having a good time in here today. We’ve got some cool stuff going on. Actually some things that are like completed and a ferment issue that I came across this week that I wanted to show you guys that’s, it’s pretty easy fix, but I don’t know why I just kind of spaced it. So I don’t want you to space it to when you’re using this type of equipment. So I’m gonna jump right into it ’cause it’s like on my mind.
Chef Jayson (00:30):
I started this ferment on 8/3. This is last Friday. Onions, jalapenos, a little bit of carrots, some garlic. This is a 3% solution and you can see that it started to ferment all that stuff down there. That’s lacto… Lactobacillus. It’s “lacto”. This is the spent spent product from the yeast converting, converting the yeast into sugar.
Chef Jayson (01:02):
So we are. What happened was I had this lock on top, and you can see right here that it’s all the water is in one side. This is actually Everclear. All the Everclear is in one side. It has been sitting flat like this pretty much all week where this was lower and it was just pretty much the same. Now, what happens is when you have an airtight container and the CO2 that is released from this from this process bubbles up through this thing and that way no oxygen or anything can get in it. However, when it’s sitting flat, that means either A, it’s not fermenting, but we know it’s fermenting ’cause we got all this stuff on, on the bottom here. Or you have an air leak. We had an air leak. What had happened is when we, when I got this thing, it comes completely disassembled.
Chef Jayson (01:55):
So you actually have to put this grommet right in the top. There’s just a hole screwed in there. What happened is, I did not get the grommet underneath this pad. And this pad, it’s a piece of plastic. You see that, that is what creates the seal on the rim of the jar. So I just didn’t get the grommet past this thing like I did with this one. So I changed it out and as soon as I did, I shook it up just a little bit like this and released a little bit of the air bubbles and it immediately started bubbling.
Chef Jayson (02:27):
So that was it. Air lock. Air is the enemy when you are doing fermentations. If you don’t have everything submerged, you could leave it open air if you wanted to, but if there’s any kind of organic matter floating around on top, it will go bad. It’s oxidizing. So the whole point of fermentation is to create an oxygen free environment where the yeast can just roam freely and eat as much as it wants to. So I was pretty happy we saved that.
Chef Jayson (02:56):
And another fun little tip, if you can get it real close, you can see that kind of green basket looking thing right there. That, that is one of these. I just basically cut the bottom off, put it in there, and it’s the perfect size to help keep your your vegetables, your produce, whatever you’re trying to keep under the water, under the water, and extremely inexpensive. Like they sell weights and they sell all kinds of stuff. I mean, you could literally put this in there, put a jar of water in it to weigh it down, and you should be good to go. So anyway, I’m really excited about this. We’re gonna come back to this in about three weeks or so. So let’s say right after Labor Day weekend, we’re gonna revisit it at 30 days and make a sauce out of it.
Chef Jayson (03:46):
So speaking of sauce, I know you’ve kind of got it in the background here, but our Fresno chilies are ready. This has been going since 7/9. I was gonna do it yesterday, but I thought that I would save it and show you guys. So I’m really excited about this. So let’s cut the corner off of this bad boy and see how she smells.
Chef Jayson (04:08):
Oh, I can already smell it. Oh, man, I describing the smell. If you’ve had sauerkraut, like when you open the sauerkraut and that’s their first kind of sour, sharp, pungent smell, but then there’s like heat and garlic behind it, you can smell the peppers. It’s really amazing.
Chef Jayson (04:37):
So I’m gonna do this in a couple batches. I’m gonna pour, look how bright red that is. I’m gonna pour this about halfway. People in the first six rows will get wet. I’ll pop that right on there.
Chef Jayson (04:57):
All right, here we go. Start out low and then just move it up.
Chef Jayson (05:26):
All right, blurp. So now you could see a lot of the seeds have gone away. When you saw it, when we first started blending, there was like tons of seeds in there. So we’ve now blended those seeds right into the sauce. And that’s why I was talking about kind of the power of the Vitamix. With a lot of other blenders, you can’t get that level of pulverization.
Chef Jayson (05:47):
Now, most of the time I would just take this sauce, add my vinegar 1-to-1. Now, people that were like, oh, that’s not really a fermented sauce there, then is it? If you add vinegar to it, I said, well, it was a… It was fermented. It is fermented. We added vinegar to stop the fermentation. Because If we don’t stop the fermentation, then you put it in a bottle and you seal it, it’s going to explode. So there has to be some kind of equalizer or stabilizer that we need to add to make sure that this, 1, is shelf stable. You add vinegar to it. There’s a reason you could keep ketchup on the counter ’cause it has a ton of sugar, a ton of vinegar, and a ton of salt, which are three of the main preservatives. So we’re gonna add vinegar to this 1-to-1, whatever it is. If we’ve got 16 ounces, 16 ounces of vinegar, now we can’t go one more step.
Chef Jayson (06:42):
And this is a coulis method or a straining method. We have our, we call this a China hat. This is a sieve or a strainer, but it’s very, very, very fine mesh. And it’s actually multi screened. There’s multi-layers in there. So what I would do if I wanted to get real fancy and I wanted to make this really smooth, check that out.
Chef Jayson (07:07):
Pretty cool. I mean, that is smooth. So I take this, I’ll put it in my, my China hat like this, and then I’m gonna start pressing that through with a spatula. And what this does is it takes out all the little chunky bits, all the little grains, and not that it’s like sandy or anything. But this, I like doing this with the red sauce in particular. Because at the end, you can take this matter that you have left over, pop it in the dehydrator and dry it out for this: fermented Fresno chili powder. I add this to a lot of stuff. It’s got good heat, it’s got a little tang to it, like a yogurt tang to it. So this is another way that we don’t have to throw that stuff away, dry it out, powderize it. Now you’ve got an extra little condiment for avocado, toast, eggs, whatever you want to put on it.
Chef Jayson (08:20):
So look at the difference, now. That’s fermented. This is fermented and blended. And then check out how smooth that is. And it is a little thin. It’s okay. Tabasco’s thin. We could thicken this up with a couple different ways. We could cook it down. We could add something like xanthin gum or corn starch, something like that to make it a little bit thicker. But I think what I’m gonna do is cook it down just a little bit, maybe reduce it by about a third and then add my vinegar to that mixture. So anyway, I’m pretty excited about this. Just the smell alone is killing me right now. It’s so good.
Chef Jayson (09:12):
See, slowly but surely this is, you know, kind of labor of love. So if I were doing this like mass production, like you wanted to make and sell hot sauces, I would probably skip this step and just leave it a little chunkier. But you guys tell me, do you like your hot sauce is super smooth. Do you like a little chunk to it? You like ’em a little thicker, you like ’em a little thinner? I would love to hear your feedback.
Chef Jayson (09:42):
Yeah, this does take a second. And your wrist will probably get pretty tired, <laugh> if you’re not used to doing it. Look how chunky that is. Now. You could see it’s even starting to dry out just a little bit, starting to chunk and crack. So that means I’m getting all the sauce out of it. That’s a good sign. And then I’m gonna take that little bit right there. I’m gonna grab a sheet pan and a silicone mat.
Chef Jayson (10:36):
Get that off of there. Bloop. There you go. And we’ll just kind of like even this out, a little bit. Thin layer. Yeah, perfect. If we do this really high heat, it’s gonna change the color. You saw how bright the powder in that jar was. I want to maintain that brightness in that color. So we’re gonna put it on 115. Super low, almost like an air dry. Like if I put this out in the Arizona Sun <laugh>. So we’re just gonna pop this right in, just like that. Close it on up and we will see you tomorrow. Yeah, let’s go.
Chef Jayson (11:38):
So anyway, that is the processing of, of the the hot sauce. Like I said, just add it. All you gotta do is weigh it out, put it in a cup, figure it out, whatever. 16 ounces, 16 ounces of vinegar. Very easy. If you want it a little thicker, reduce it down a little bit. Totally fine. Like we said corn starch or I know people in my hot sauce forums have used guar gum or Xanthin gum. I don’t recommend those, but totally up to you. I prefer to, to keep it as natural as I can, so I would prefer a reduction. Or leave some of, leave some of some of the matter in the sauce that’ll help thicken it up a little bit too.
Chef Jayson (12:22):
So well, I hope you learned something. I gotta clean up here. Otherwise, this hot sauce is just gonna be embedded in the kitchen. So I will see you next time. Thanks for coming.
