Honey Garlic Habanero

Fermented Ingredients (1 Month):
• Habaneros 101g
• Garlic 40g
• Yellow Onion 114g
• Brine 1 Cup 

Fresh Ingredients:
• Yellow Bell Peppers 96g
• Garlic 132g
• Sweet Onions 112g
• Honey (Clover) 8oz
• White Vinegar 1 Cup
• Xanthan Gum 1/8tsp 

Saute the onion and the bell pepper lightly in olive oil. Once they start to sweat add the fresh garlic and cook until golden brown. Add everything into the blender except the xanthan and blend on high for five minutes, then simmer to a light boil for 10 minutes skimming solids off the top. Add back to the blender with the xanthan gum and blend on low for thirty seconds. Bottle, refrigerate. Yields about 28oz, pH 3.43 

Notes:
• Garlic was grown organically by Prima Farms, 2.5 heads netted the 130g
• Surprisingly, I kind of wish I used a bit more garlic. The honey comes through the strongest and edges the garlic out a bit
• Sweetness is right on the money. I took a shot in the dark on the amount of honey and it worked out perfect
• Good viscosity, I wondered if I used more vinegar would give me a bigger yield but I'm glad I left it where it was
• Way hotter than I would have expected for straight habs. Throwing a few super hots in might help out the flavor profile a bit but I like where it's at
• Curious where this will be in a week or two

Jesse's (a) Jerk Sauce

 Fermented Ingredients (7 months):
• Yellow Reapers 65g
• Habaneros 60g
• Yellow Onions 100g
• Garlic 43g
• Brine 1.5 cups

Fresh Ingredients:
• Mango 260g (is that two mangoes?)
• Yellow Onion 120g
• Pineapple Juice 18oz
• Apple Cider Vinegar .75 cups
• Limes 2 Juiced
• Honey .5 cups
• Allspice .25tbsp
• Cumin .25 tbsp
• Ground Clove .25 tbsp
• Ground Ginger .5 tbsp
• Xanthan 1/8 tsp

Additional Ingredients:
• Water 1 cup
• White Vinegar .5 cups


Sweet and spicy Caribbean inspired recipe. I sauteed the onion but other than that everything is straight into the blender. Blend on high for five minutes and simmer to a boil for twenty* minutes afterward. Add the xanthan and blend on low for 1 minute. Yield of 48oz, pH 3.3 

*My dumb ass got distracted and forgot to turn off the stove and let this thing boil for almost 45 minutes. It reduced down to an ooze, so I had to go through and re-hydrate the sauce with water and a bit more vinegar to get the viscosity back to where it was originally. I'm sure this would be better without having to do so but here I am and it's still pretty good 

Notes:
• I'm coming up on a year of the plunge into fermented super hots and this is a shot at the first sauce I made. I called it J's sweet heat but that's basically all my sauces now.
• I'd credit the website I found the initial recipe on but all I have is a screen shot of the ingredient list from last year.
• There are a few changes I made- the og calls for 1.5 lbs fermented habs (I don't have that many), I added onions to the jar (using 1.5 instead of 1), and there was nothing about reapers (which I didn't know were in the jar).
• I also added the xanthan gum which wasn't in the original either
• There was also supposed to be 24oz of pineapple juice but I thought that was just too much sugar
• It's also worth noting I didn't separate all the peppers, and just eyeballed about a 50:50 ratio.
• Jar was also 24oz instead of 16ozs so the yield was a bit larger.
• They wanted five cloves of garlic and I said fuck that and tripled it
• Honestly really complex, most ingredients of anything I've made

The sauce itself is pretty good! I actually really like the extra kick from the reapers and they play well with the spices and habanero base. Really sweet and tropical but an almost christmas like spice with an earthy ground. Better than I remember that first sauce being

Ideas:
• Use a sweet onion, ferment the entire thing
• Add some additional salt instead of just relying on the brine. Maybe .5 tbsp
• A pound and a half of habs is a lot of peppers. Idk if that'd add to the body of the sauce more but as far as heat goes the reapers worked just fine
• Lean into the Caribbean angle and use Trinidadian scorpions
• A bit more cumin, double it up to .5 tbsp
• Keep the reapers but move to a lower ratio, 1:4 maybe
• Set a timer or don't walk away from from the stove :(
• Maybe 12oz of the pineapple juice also. I think all the extra liquid was to handle the yield from having so many peppers from the original recipe. That might help balance out the sugar a bit, or consider cutting down the mangoes. Keep the honey though
• A bit more runny than I'd like it but better than being too thick
• Might be a fun anniversary sauce to make every July

Sicilian Scorpion

 Ingredients:
• Scorpion Peppers 5 pods (23g)
• Red Bell Peppers 128g
• Yellow Onions 181g
• Garlic 38g (14 cloves)
• Smoked Sun Dried Tomatoes 3oz
• Italian Parsley 1tbsp
• Salt 1 tbsp
• Black Pepper 1tbsp
• Olive Oil 2tbsp
• Sweet Vermouth 2 tbsp
• Apple Cider Vinegar 3 cups
• White Vinegar 1/3 cups
• Water 1/2 cups

First thing to mention is that this is a hot ones recipe I wanted to try out. There were a few things I did differently here. My store didn't have sweet onions so I got yellow ones instead and threw some brown sugar on them to caramelize a bit on the stove. I also sauteed the bells and garlic, the recipe had them blended raw. Also I chose smoked tomatoes over the regular ones because I thought it could add a layer of complexity. I don't know if that was a mistake or not but it's not something I'd do again

I also broke from the recipe by adding the water and white vinegar. It was like 10:30pm making this and I didn't want to wake up my building, so I did a lighter blend than normal. I don't think more time would have helped much, but this stuff pours like Ragu. All the solid ingredients clump up together a bit and the oil separates and runs through them. I filled a woozy and it solidified on the top, but became a lot more fluid after a few good shakes. The woman who made the sauce mentions she likes thicker products but my god this stuff is like spicy pizza sauce. The yield was insane since I added so much extra liquid to dilute the ACV, like 60 oz of a sauce that frankly I'm not crazy about. The ACV is absolutely dominant on the nose and is a huge turn off. It tastes fine on chicken but everything else I've tried it on is just weird. I also feel dumb for buying a huge bunch of parsley and only using a small pinch

Ideas:
• Fermented ingredients. This is the first raw sauce I've made besides those wing sauces
• Replace a lot of the acv with white vinegar. Not 100% maybe but enough to stop making me gag
• Cut down a bit on the solid ingredients. The recipe calls for 1.5c red bell and 1 cup of onions. I couldn't be bothered to measure so I guessed and maybe over shot? This thing would still be stupid thick regardless
• Add some more water
• Keep a close eye on this. I've never used oil in a sauce and don't know how it keeps
• Throw in everything raw, no cooking anything
• Use packaged pepper instead of the mill cause 3 mins of grinding sucks
• Trying to add your own spin on things and making tweaks to something already established leaves more room for error than improvement. I should have stuck closer to the original recipe 

I'll check on this in a week or two but I don't think there will be a batch two. Ideal if you're feeding a lot of people and not just yourself. Most of this will probably be given away instead of sold

Jalapeno Tequila Lime b1

Fresh Ingredients:
• Green Bell Peppers 110g
• Yellow Onions 310g
• Garlic 26g
• Cilantro (half bunch) 20g
• Limes 1 medium

Fermented Ingredients (12 weeks):
• Jalapenos 165g
• Garlic 18g
• Brine 215g

Blend With:
• Tequila 1.5oz
• Water .5 cups
• White Vinegar 1.5 cups
• Salt 1.5 tsp
• Xanthan Gum- 1/8 tsp

Slice up the onion and green bell pepper and sautee lightly until starting to char, after which add the garlic until that starts to brown also. Juice the lime and add everything into the vitamix. Blended on high for 10 minutes, and then simmered for 20 minutes to kill the bugs and burn out the alcohol. Let it cool and add back to the blender with the xanthan gum, blend on low sixty seconds. Bottle, refrigerate.

Notes:
So more realistically this is batch four or five but this is the first entry here. It's identical to the Serrano Tequila Lime except the pepper bill isn't as diverse. I miss the heat from stl but the simplicity of the jalapenos is something to be appreciated. It might also be helped by the three month ferment instead of the 4 or 5 week turn around I've been doing on these lately. This jar was also made before I started throwing onions into the mix so those were all raw for this batch. Yield's between 30-35 oz

Ideas:
• Try sitting on these jars a bit longer
• I still want to flex on the lime more, I'm reticent but maybe double that up
• The viscosity is a bit more runny than I like, I think because I had a different liquid to solid ratio. Maybe add more bells or even some fresh jalapenos to thicken it up, or 1/4tsp xanthan
• Keep the seeds on during the ferment and I can still get the flavor down with more heat. That might cancel out using gutted serranos
• Instead of mixing in with serranos pick up some anahiem or pablanos to help ground the flavor a bit. Hatch season is very soon so that will be nice also. Arguably my most popular sauce so it's fun to mix it up 
• Something else I've been on the fence about is throwing in some tomatillos also. A few concerns- one at what point does this stop being a sauce and becomes a salsa
• But more importantly, it require playing with the ratios of the acids. Tomatillo means added acidity which would mean I'd have to pull back on the vinegar and then try to balance out the consistency with extra brine and water. Or just say fuck it and go full ulcer I guess

Maui Zaui

Fermented Ingredients (28 days):
• Habaneros 130g
• Yellow Onions 130g
• Carrots 75g
• Garlic 70g
• Brine 200g

Fresh Ingredients:
• Yellow Onions 204g
• Red Bell pepper 150g
• Garlic 20g
• Morita peppers (hydrated) 33g
• Pineapple 210g

Blend:
• Water 1 Cup
• White Vinegar 1 Cup
• Apple Cider Vinegar .25 Cups
• Salt 1 tsp
• Xanthan 1/8 tsp

Saute everything, onions, bell peppers, garlic, and then morita. Caramelize the pineapple after. Add the left over oil to the blend. After the blend everything was simmered to a light boil for 20 minutes with all the concentrated gunk skimmed off the top (and then devoured on tacos.) Thrown back into the vitamix with the xanthan and bottled

A few things to say about this. It's an update of the 5/20 'smokey habanero' recipe with a few changes that I think really elevate everything. Quick ferment but the jar had completely settled. The biggest change from before was to use more morita peppers, and while these weren't fermented I doubled two pods to four. I more than doubled the fermented onions (unintentional) and cut the habs back 40g (also unintentional.) I was on the fence about adding ghost peppers but wanted to keep the sauce a bit more mellow so I decided against it. I miss the punch but can appreciate how gentle the habaneros finish. There was less brine on this blend so I made a fresh blend on the fly throwing a tsp of salt into a cup of water

Initial thoughts:
• The sauce came out a little too thick causing me to add more water. Proportions were similar so I'm curious why it was so soupy
• I think it has more of the smoke I'm looking for? Time will tell here
• Flavors have really developed in just 24h. Curious where it will be in a week
• Reminds me a lot of the round table pizza Maui Zaui. Onion, garlic, pineapple. all day
• Hawaiian pizza in a bottle
• The kick will appeal to civilians but this could cut so harder