SRIRACHA SAUCE HOME MADE

FERMENTATION...
This is an outstanding easy recipe for a fresh vibrant sriracha hot chilli sauce that may have you leaving that famous rooster bottle in the store, I know it is for my family!  We grow most of our food and I had not grown any Serrano chilli plants but I had grown plenty of red jalapeños so I used these, next spring I will grow Serrano chillies and will up date on the difference of flavour when I have made a batch using home grown sriracha chillies.

But for now this sriracha is soooo good I can't believe I will be able to improve on its mouthwatering gorgeousness.  

FERMENTING  eeeek ! 

This was a slightly scary word to me...I have kept a sour dough starter alive for a year and have made kimchi a couple of times but was always a little scared of what if I had fermented bad bacteria!  Well we're all still alive!  So I thought come on just give it a go!  I brought myself a kilner fermenting jar with a charcole filter lid and made sure I sterlized the jar and cleaned the kitchen with vinegar so that would give me the best chance of a clean ferment.

Prep time 5 minutes / Fermenting time 7 days / Cooking time 10 minutes

Ingredients 

(Makes approx 300ml)

 700g red jalapeños 

1 tbsp Himalayan sea salt

3-4 tbsp light brown sugar

4 large cloves chopped garlic

125 ml apple cider vinegar 

The Fermenting 

Place all the ingredients except the white wine vinegar into your food processor and blitz, blitz and then blitz some more until you have as smooth a mixture as possible, around three minutes.

Decant into your kilner jar scraping every bit out from the food processor, pop on the lid and just leave on the side somewhere safe where the jar won't get knocked over and out of direct sunlight for 7 days, after 3-5 days you will see the exciting start of the ferment, there will be some movement like cracks in a wall, this is good.  

After day 5 gentle shake the jar to mix all the fermenting chillies back to a smooth consistency and again on day 6.  Day 7 over a saucepan strain the mixture through a sieve and using the back of a spoon push through as much of the mixture that will go through, you want really dry pulp left in the sieve.  Add the vinegar and bring to a rolling simmer, reduce the sriracha sauce down to the thickness you require, I like the sauce to coat the back of a spoon well this way it sticks to food better so you get more of a bang of flavour with each mouthful.

Take off the heat and decant into a ball mason jar, leave to cool then pop on a lid and store in the fridge for up to 6 months, IT WON'T LAST THAT LONG!  Enjoy.