Part 1: The Hot Sauce Saga Begins!

Hello, Fellow Chili Heads!

Ham and I have been prowling the farmer’s market every week looking for peppers, and they’re finally here! I know the calendar claims it’s fall, but the market still reads summer. The stands are filled with strawberries, sweet corn, heirloom tomatoes, and finally, peppers! Sweet and hot peppers in green, red, yellow, orange, orange-yellow, orange-red, and all the other in-between colors have arrived.

Last year, Ham made the greatest hot sauce of all time. Seriously, step aside, Cholula green! It was just aji amarillo and sugar peach rush peppers fermented with salt and blended with garlic and vinegar. The sauce was fruity, funky, and just hot enough, all thanks to those fantastic peppers. This year we’re stepping it up and have decided to blend our own hot sauce vintage. Just like a fine wine, we are fermenting and blitzing each pepper separately before we sniff, taste, and combine the sauces into...

THE ULTIMATE 2021 HOT SAUCE!!!

This is a two-part journey—week one is all about fermentation. Each pepper has been stemmed, roughly chopped, and combined with two percent of its weight in salt. Since we’re using organic peppers, we’re not rinsing them, keeping all that good bacteria on the surface of the peppers to help the fermentation along.

Then, we’ve placed the chopped peppers and salt into vacuum-sealed bags to ferment for about a week. (You can also use zipper-lock bags and the water displacement method to remove as much air as possible.) After fermenting, we’ll blend and season each variety separately. Stay tuned for part II of the great chili saucing of 2021!

These are the peppers we picked for our hot sauce adventure:

Fatalii Peppers

Hail from Southern and Central Africa and have the fruity, citrusy flavor of habanero with a little less heat.

Birds Beak Peppers

Also known as pimenta biquinho (which means little beak), they are from Brazil and have a medium heat level with bright and floral aromatics.

Aji Rico

Aji is the generic term for chili in South America, and rico means delicious, so these delicious chiles are mild and citrusy.

Sugar Peach Rush Pepper

Have super sweet flesh and smoky seeds with mild heat. These are superb raw and even better fermented.

Numex Suave Orange Pepper

Grown by the New Mexico State University and have all the flavor of habanero but only mild heat.

Habanero

Very hot, very floral.

Head over to Union Square Farmer’s market if you want to join in on the pepper fun. The Fatalli peppers are from Eckerton Hill Farm, while the rest are all sold by Norwich Meadows Farm.

Other fun food things from this week:

The last of our five-episode mini-series, Mystery Menu, just aired on Friday! In each episode, Ham and I have one hour to make a meal with a mystery ingredient. We loved working on this series and this episode in particular where we made a 4-course PB&J tasting menu. The whole team was a blast to work with, and yes, the time limit is very real, so head over to the NYT Cooking YouTube channel to watch us sweat in all five episodes now!

Last week, Yewande Komolafe cooked up three plantain recipes (also on NYT Cooking’s YouTube channel), and we immediately picked up a big ol’ bunch. Plantains were a childhood favorite, but I often forget about their sweet-starchy glory. Thanks for the reminder, Yewande! Our plantains are finally blackened and jammy, so we roasted them whole and stuffed them with salty, melty cheese for dinner.

My greatest accomplishment in life is that I’ve somehow landed on Jeni’s radar, and they send me ice cream every few months. Jeni’s Cream Puff Ice Cream flavor tastes like a bowl of Frosted Flakes that have gone all soggy, but like, really, really good. Every Jeni’s flavor is my favorite, but I might actually love this one more than my dogs! Grab a pint if you spot one, and be prepared to eat it all in one sitting.

See you next week!

sohla