Fermented Hot Sauce With Fresno Chiles, Garlic, and Tamari Recipe

Making fermented hot sauce can be as simple or involved a process as you want. This recipe employs a few more intensive, left-field techniques than your standard hot sauce: Charring the peppers; fermenting a mash in a modified brine; and emulsifying that sauce with an infused oil. These techniques produce a smooth, velvety sauce with savory depth and a complex balance of smokiness and funky acidity. If you’re looking for something a bit simpler, check out our recipes for double berry habanero or chipotle, garlic, and cumin hot sauce.

Charring peppers brings out their natural sweetness and concentrates flavor; it also adds a slight smokiness that persists even after fermentation. Here I choose thin-walled, relatively fleshy chiles like Fresno peppers (which have a medium heat level), which can withstand charring or broiling without burning altogether. Because such high temperatures destroy beneficial lactic acid bacteria required to initiate fermentation, I set aside a measured amount of fresh Fresno chiles to incorporate into a coarsely pureed mash along with the charred chiles. A bit of tamari provides an umami boost that mellows slightly after fermentation and melds seamlessly with the sauceit also acts as an additional source of salt to inhibit unwanted microbial growth.

The tamari also factors into a liquid salt brine. Fermenting the mash in a small amount of salt brine helps to fill any pockets of air in the mash, encourages an anaerobic environment, and helps mitigate unwanted kahm yeast growth.

To finish the sauce, I blend the mash with vinegar and season it. Of course, I could stop there. But because we’re being extra fancy, I slowly blend in roasted garlic oil until the sauce is rich and emulsified. The oil lightens the texture of the sauce and gives it body; it also brings a kick of roasted allium flavor that complements the smokiness of the charred peppers.* Finally, straining yields a velvety, ultra-smooth sauce that looks perfect on the plate.

*To those of you out there worried about the risk of botulism and garlic, I’ve got a few points. First, properly oven-roasted garlic confit oil relies on temperatures and timing that far exceed the recommended temperature and time to kill botulism toxin and its spores. Second, botulism is typically a concern for low-acid food products above a pH of 4.6. In most of my tests, this sauce averaged a pH around 3.4—a level at which botulism cannot grow and toxin formation is completely inhibited. Third, growth of botulism is also slowed or inhibited by competing microorganisms present in a system—in this case, lactic acid bacteria.

This fermented hot sauce is all about building layers of flavor throughout the process. The choices I make all produce intense flavors in their own right. But because I implement those choices at different stages of fermentation and processing, they have the space to meld and balance each other. That’s probably an overly complicated way of saying: There’s no wrong way to go with fermented hot sauce. My hope is that this recipe gives you some inspiration to explore your own flavors, combinations, and treatments.