After months of growing 9 Tabasco plants, today was the day it was time to turn them into the hot chilli sauce I had planned, it's been a long process from start to finish and the plants have been very poor at ripening the fruit. Good job I did as many plants as I did, else I might have got next to none ripe chilli this year.

I decided to make this sauce today as there where slight signs of Kahm yeast appearing on the top of the ferment and all signs of bubbles had stopped. As there was a little Kahm yeast on top, I thought it a good idea to also cook this sauce a little, to both stop any future fermenting, and kill off any yeast that might spoil the taste while it sits on the shelf.
The seeds where planted on Jan 1st 2020, so from seed to sauce it's taken 11 months.
The very 1st harvest was on the 26th of August, but they where another type of chilli I grow called Medina that over wintered last year. Only 50g worth. Added these to my fermenting jar with 100g of water and 5g of sea salt to start the ferment.
Over the next weeks and months the fermenting jar was added to as the chillies ripened.
DATE | CHILLI | WATER | SALT |
26-08-20 | Medina 50g | 100g | 5g |
05-09-20 | Medina 30g | 30g | 1.5g |
13-09-20 | Tabasco 8g | none | none |
20-09-20 | Tabasco 2g | none | none |
23-09-20 | Medina 18g | none | none |
26-09-20 | Tabasco 13g | 16g | none |
04-10-20 | Tabasco 91g | 60g | 6.5g |
04-10-20 | Bell Pepper (sweet) 100g | none | none |
12-10-20 | Tabasco 109g | 100g | 5.1g |
22-10-20 | Tabasco 84g | 107g | 5g |
I used the Formula (Chilli + H2o x 0.025 = salt) to keep the brine at 2.5% as I added each addition to the fermenting jar.
So in total that was =505g Chilli + 413g water = 22.95 Salt (I put in 23.1g Salt in total)

So into a pan it all went, chillies and brine, this was then cooked on a gentle simmer for 15 mins to pasteurize everything. The smell coming of this pan is fantastic. I checked the pH as well post boil, and was happy to see 3.4 pH
After the simmer, the whole lot then went into the blender with 50% in weight of vinegar, so in this case it was just over 377g of distilled white malt vinegar, I started with 25% but the liquid was to thick for this type of sauce. Gave this another spin in the blender. Again checked the pH and with the vinegar added it had dropped to 2.8 pH.

Checked on the consistency of the liquid and it looked about right. Ran it through a sieve to remove the skins and seeds that the blender had not broken down, then bottled into clean 150ml woozy bottles.

Had a quick taste test. I wanted this sauce to show off the Tabasco chilli and it really does. I think it's slightly to salty, but not overly salty for my taste, but maybe next time I may reduce the brine content by about 50%. Real Tabasco sauce has 1.8g per 100ml, and only 19% chilli pepper,so my bottles have about 2.6g per 100ml so 0.8 of a gram to much, but a lot more chilli pepper.
It's great tasting "MOSTLY TABASCO" and quite on the spicy side, and not bad for a 1st go at a Tabasco sauce I think.
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