The massive preparation of peppers for fermented salsa continues. Below is what the fresh, hot-sweet Manzano pepper looks like, as compared to the an Habañero pepper: three times as large, thicker walls, more bell pepper than hot pepper. But tasty and fiery sweet, nonetheless.
In this batch are roughly equal weights of Manzano, Habañero, and Serrano peppers: 5 pounds of them total, with 5% salt by weight of the water in the brine (weight measure is more accurate in big batch fermentation like this). They’re shown below, ready to be prepped for fermentation, along with a fist of garlic. This time, in order to preserve the brightness of the color, we’re not fermenting the lime juice along with the peppers, but adding it to the finishing sauce prior to reducing that sauce on the stove (and we’re cooking outside – on the camp stove – we learned our lesson, choking for hours on pepper oils and fumes the last time).
Five pounds of peppers was a bit much for our current fermentation crock – it was nearly impossible to get the stones in, to weight down the peppers, there was that little room left. On the other hand, D. wasn’t about to pull them out and chop them more finely, as he was already courting disaster with this particular pair of pepper-saturated gloves.
Next up is the two week wait before we uncrock the ingredients, followed by cooking them down to reduce the juices, adding lime and possibly some cornstarch or agar, depending on how juicy the fermentation process leaves the peppers. Until then, we’ll make do with our imported Encona “West Indian” sauce (made in Hertfordshire, England!) which … isn’t nearly as good as ours. Truly, folks: fermented salsa beats anything we’ve found so far, and we’re really into salsa. You don’t even need an official fermentation crock; if you’ve got a couple of Mason jars, you’ll want to give this a try! The bacteria does all the heavy lifting and as its been reported for years – there’s really something to the whole fermented foods thing.
-D & T
SO pretty!