My breakfast is invariably a mess of vegetables over brown rice or quinoa, topped with the spirited zing of fermented hot sauce. I’m pretty sure this hot sauce goes with everything. If my allergies would let me eat ice cream, I suspect it would enhance a hot fudge sundae too.
I make gallons of the stuff every year, starting in August and ending whenever the pepper harvest ends, usually early October. Each batch is different. (Here’s a general idea of the recipe.) I always use a variety of peppers from our gardens, along with carrot, garlic, maybe some onion, and whatever else I’m inspired to toss in. Some batches have a lot of heat, at least to my tongue. A single habanero in a half gallon jar is quite enough for me along with all the jalapenos, serrano, buena mulata, datil peppers and whatnot in there.
But this fall, after canning dozens of jars of salsa and more jars of zacusca, then freezing several large bags of peppers to use all winter, I realized we were close to the end of the pepper harvest. I only had one half gallon of hot sauce fermented. That wouldn’t last me more than a few months. My husband attempted to buy some from farm stands, but Amish farms and other local producers around here are more likely to grow sweet peppers. I called a few other places to see if I could get hot peppers in bulk. No luck. So in early October I put a plea out on our township’s Facebook page.
Although I’ve lived in this rural township for a long time, I still feel like an outsider. So it was truly heartening to get responses from people who were happy to offer peppers. Some said to just come and pick them from their gardens. Some said they’d be glad to trade for any produce we had. In total, we ended up with well more than a half bushel of beautiful mixed hot peppers.
I even had enough to make a big batch of homemade siracha as well (in response to the Great Siracha Shortage).
These are my giving away jars of sauce, from October.
And the fermented sauce I made? It’s SO good. Hot sauce made with these freely given peppers warms me more than any I’ve ever made. Kindness tastes restorative. It lingers on the tongue. I am SO grateful.
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Here’s a poem I wrote to the last dregs of last year’s hot sauce, published in The MacGuffin.
