Fermented Hot Sauce Part 2 Blending and Bottling

[Music] here's our fermentation corner where I have all my hot sauces I still have it looks like one two three four jars of hot sauce fermenting here this one here is the go-to pepper sauce that we started and that's been about three weeks since we started it and you can see the little bubble is still floating I release the pressure by opening the jar to let that go down last night and this morning it's already floating so we know that the fermentation is still going on so I'm gonna leave it another a few more weeks before I bottle it up for you and I did want to show you one thing you might see in your hot sauce you can see if you can see that there's a little bit of a kind of a whitish film on the top that's called cam yeast and it's totally normal and it doesn't happen all the time some people will scrape it off but it's not harmful as long as the the stuff on the top doesn't look fuzzy or if it's black that's definitely a bad thing and that is mold and you may want to try scraping it off or if it comes back you might have to just toss the whole thing but I've never had that happen with any of my pepper ferments I think it happens more often when you do a blend or if you blend it before you ferment it so I always do the the chopping of the peppers but some people like to do a mash by blending it and then fermenting it and I don't like doing that because you have more risk of mold if you do that and you have to use a higher percent of salt when you do that so I've had good luck this method and that's what I would recommend for anyone starting out with fermented hot sauces so we'll check back in a couple weeks and see how we're doing we are back in the fermentation corner after two months of starting our fermentation here of the Korean go-to peppers and I've also got two other pepper ferments going and went in a quart jar and one and a half gallon jar but our Korean go chews are in this this pint jar here and we know that it's ready to bottle because this fermentation lid here this little guy here is not floating so it's been sitting on the bottom for about two weeks so we know that the fermentation has slowed down enough for us to be able to bottle so let's get some some bottles ready one of the most important things is that you have clean and sterile equipment so I'm going to be sterilizing first I'm gonna wash these with some soap and water this is just dish soap and some hot water and I'm just gonna shake that up if you have a bristle brush that will fit into these little hole little openings then you can use that but I don't have one so we're just going to shake it really good make sure it's clean so these bottles haven't been used before so they shouldn't be too dirty and then we'll just rinse that out and we also want to make sure that we wash the lid and the little insert okay that should be good now we want to sterilize this equipment one thing that you can do is boil these in water for ten minutes but I have an easier way I use this this surface sanitizer called stars' and so this is used for beer making and mead making is what I use it for but anyone that makes beer will probably have that on hand it makes things a lot easier you just put a little bit in with some water in a spray bottle and then just spray down anything that's going to touch your your sauce so we got the lids there and then also spray into the bottle and make sure you shake it around and make sure that it gets everywhere and then just let any excess come out and all you need to do is let it sit for I think it's two minutes and then it should be all sanitized and you do not want to rinse that out you'll see some bubbles in here which is totally normal that means it's working so just let that sit and also we're going to sanitize our blender jar so I'm using a Vitamix blender so I'm just going to spray all around in there and then let any excess drip out and as it sits more will will collect on the bottom so right before we use it I'll I'll pour the rest of that out and then we also want to do our blender jar lid next around pour it out alright we should be ready to get our sauce blended let's move on to the next step alright let's open her up and see what we have alright so we've got that cam yeast on the top you can see that so I am NOT gonna blend that in there so I'm gonna try and scrape some of that out so I'm just using a plastic this is a one tablespoon and I've already sprayed it with stars' and so it's nice and sanitized so I'm just gonna scrape out as much of that as I can and again it's not harmful you can blend it in if you want but it might give it a little bit of an off off flavor so I'm gonna try and remove that okay and then we have the the weight in there so I'm gonna try and get that out and I put on some gloves to protect my my fingers let's see how it smells smells good nice and gingery I can smell the ginger in there all right now some people like to remove the brine and just blend the peppers but I'm gonna blend all of it if there was a lot of brine in there I might drain some of it out but I think there's a good amount so I'm just gonna pour all of that into the blender all right and then where's our lid okay I'm gonna start out on a slow-speed and then work our way up [Applause] I'm gonna let this blend for about a minute on high-speed all right looks like it's blended pretty well now one thing I wanted to mention if you want a sauce that does not separate with somos sauce is if you don't add anything else to it it's gonna separate after some time I'll show you one here that that has separated you can see how much what looks like water on the top and then there's all the stuff on the bottom that's what what happens if you let it sit for a while and you don't add any emulsifier so if I shake it up it looks fine and it'll it'll taste fine but some people don't like that separation and I've only done this once before but you can add some some xanthan gum just just a small pinch of xanthan gum to the the blender while it's blending and that will take care of any separation issues so here's one this is a one that I bottled up just recently and this one I did add a pinch of the xanthan gum and I haven't noticed any kind of separation it's actually a lot thicker thicker of a sauce but some people do it some people don't I do it sometimes but I'm not gonna do it to this one this sauce I'm not gonna be giving away or selling or anything so now let's go on to the next step okay before we go any further I wanted to show you one other thing that I do I like to check the pH of the hot sauce to make sure that it's shelf stable we want to make sure that it's below they say four point five but I like mine to be around three point five at least so I'm using these kombucha test strips and that is the right pH range so I'm gonna just stick a strip in there and then check the the back to see what it is you know it looks like it's probably the color looks closest to the 3.0 so these are in increments of 0.5 which is not super accurate so yeah it looks like 3.0 on this scale I also have a another pH meter that I I like to use I haven't used it actually for hot sauce before so I think I'll give it a try this is what I use for my meat making and these are only like you can get these for $20 on Amazon I already sterilized this with the stars' and so it it's nice and clean so I'm just gonna stick this in and you have to leave it in for about 30 seconds or so so it's showing four point two right now but it's still going down that's at 4.1 4.0 as long as we're under 4.5 we should be okay looks like it stopped at 4.0 it's not as low as I thought it would be but it should be fine to do schoo with the test strips that would probably be the easiest way to test the pH just make sure you get the right range because there's a lot of different test strips out there and if the range isn't correct then it's not going to work for for this some people there's a lot of different ways you can do it some people like to cook this before they bottle and one reason they do that is to make sure that all of the fermentation is done some people don't ferment all the way so it may still be fermenting and cooking it will kill the fermentation but it also kills any probiotics that are in the hot sauce so I tend not not to cook it most of the time if you're gonna be selling it I would probably recommend that you definitely cook it just to be safe so let's get our bottles and you'll see that there's still some liquid that kind of rested on the bottom so I'm just gonna pour that out into the sink and we're gonna use a funnel you definitely want to use a funnel or you'll make a mess for sure so I've already sprayed my funnel with the stars' and to sterilize it and we'll just stuff it make sure you get one that fits into your bottle and we're just gonna start pouring and you want to make sure that you pour very slowly because this can overflow pretty easily another reason I don't like to cook it is because the amount of your hot sauce will be reduced because of the cooking and I only made one pint of this hot sauce so I don't want to lose any more than I have to and if you don't cook it to be safe you may want to keep it in the refrigerator and that will slow down any fermentation that is still going on oh I forgot to empty the excess stars' and a few drops in there this is barely gonna make it's not even gonna make three full bottles I'm definitely gonna keep this sauce for myself it should be good one there's this still a little bit stuck to the side of the jar so I want to get every last bit of that out so I'm going to go grab a small spatula so since this last bottle isn't completely full nope I'm already making a mess I'm gonna keep this last bottle in the fridge and I'll be using this one first another thing if your pH ends up being too high like say it was four point four point eight or five or something like that what you can do to lower it is add some vinegar and there's a lot of people that do add vinegar to their their hot sauces and that will lower the pH so after you add it you can check the pH again and make sure that it's low enough and if you don't want to worry about pH that's fine too I didn't test my pH on my first three bottles just make sure I would keep it in the fridge if you don't check your pH just to be safe alright so I think we're done bottling now we need to just clean off the the tops of the bottles and I'm gonna just take a paper towel and spray it a couple times with stars' an or you can just use water if you don't have starsin or actually you could use vinegar spray it with some vinegar that would work and just clean off the tops of of the bottles okay and then we grab our plate of lids and first I'm gonna shake off any excess star sand and put on the inner cover I think they call it entrance reducer maybe or I don't remember what they're technically called so this is the one that's gonna go in the fridge and these one the ones that are fool I'm just gonna leave them out and you want to kind of stir or just kind of spin them around a little bit cuz there are some air bubbles that are sitting in here and as they rest you may notice that there will be more air towards the top and it'll look like there's less sauce in there than what you poured originally so what I can do is once everything settles I'll take this this half bottle and then just fill that up the rest of the way after they sit for a couple days and that's all we do you can see the bottle I don't know if you can see that little air bubbles coming to the top so this one has a lot of a lot of air bubbles here on the top so one thing that when you cook it those air bubbles tend to tend to go away but we're just gonna let them sit here I also have some shrink bands that I'll put around these but I'm gonna wait until all the air goes to the top before I add those on and that's all there is to bottling hot sauce hope you enjoyed it thanks for watching and we'll talk to you again soon and we're back so I thought you might want to see me try the hot sauce now that it's ready so I can let you know what I think so we've got a spoon here and the hot sauce so I'm just gonna put a few dabs of the hot sauce on the spoon here and give it a try it definitely tastes a lot like kimchi so if you like kimchi you would definitely like this hot sauce it's got a little bit of heat not super spicy at all so when you add it to something it's gonna be hardly spicy at all but it's really good I think it would go great on eggs or any kind of vegetable probably maybe some Pak Choi I get the garlic and the ginger in there and yeah I really like it we'll definitely make some more next year a bigger batch thanks for watching and we will talk to you again soon be sure to LIKE and subscribe if you enjoyed this video

Channel: Gapeys Grub

Views: 36,765

Rating: 4.8720446 out of 5

Keywords: fermentation, fermented peppers, peppers, hotsauce, how to, fermented hot sauce, bottling, star san, sanitizing, sanitizer, vitamix, blender, kimchi, gochu, korean peppers, korean hot sauce

Id: raUWAadd8w0

Length: 18min 18sec (1098 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 19 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/ThunderCuntNinja]

I bought star san but idk where to start with it, the label has scary directions and she was spraying on her bare hands without no worries.

I wanna know how much to dilute it

[u/MoistDischarge]

Hopefully this can help other beginners like myself!

[u/[deleted]]

Username checks out!

[u/Whispersail]

Hope to watch.

[u/Globalksp]

This is a classic tutorial. Keep passing it around.