Welcome to 7 Pot Club, I’m Rob.
🎵 I grow hot peppers 🎵
Finally, we’re going to open these 3 jars
of superhot peppers that have been fermenting
in our cold closet for six months now. This
is our very first time fermenting peppers,
so I’m a little nervous. We really didn’t
mean to let them ferment this long, but we’ve
had a very busy winter. So here we are on
May Day, ready to open them up and see what’s
been happening in these jars. You know, that’s
kind of catchy. “What’s been happening
in this jar?” Maybe there’s a song there!
But before we open the jars, bottle our first
fermented hot sauces, and hear a new song,
we’ll travel back in time to last November
to see how we prepared our peppers for a winter’s
fermentation. Let’s get started.
Here’s everything we’ll be using to prepare
our fermentation. We’re going to make 3
small batches: one with Carolina Reapers,
one with a mix of 7 Pot White, 7 Pot Pink,
and 7 Pot Chaguanas Yellow, and one with assorted
7 Pot Chocolates. We started this fermentation
in November, so we used thawed peppers that
had been frozen at their peak of summer freshness.
Some people seem to think you can only use
fresh peppers for fermentation, but frozen
work just fine. We’ve got garlic, pint jars,
and salt to make our brine.
We’re going to try out these Easy Fermenter
lids that come with an oxygen extractor.
First, we’ll slice and add our garlic.
Then we cut the peppers in half and load them
into the jars.
Don’t you just love these colors?
We made a brine with a ratio of two tablespoons
of salt per quart of water, and poured it
into the jars.
Here’s one of our rookie mistakes. We filled
the jars too full and didn’t use weights
to keep the peppers completely submerged in
liquid.
Next, we screwed down the lids, and used the
extractor to get all the air out of the jars.
Now the jars are ready for their long winter’s
nap. Down they go, into our basement cold
closet. Time to play you my new song, then
we’ll fast forward six months and take a
look inside.
🎵 Something’s been happening in this
jar 🎵
🎵I hope it didn’t go too far
 What’s been happening in this jar 🎵
🎵I hope it’s something good 🎵
🎵 Fermentation it’s beneficial for people
of all nations 🎵
🎵 Microorganisms do their thing
Lactic acid adding extra zing 🎵
🎵 Preservation, plus the benefit of flavor
augmentation 🎵
🎵 Peppers, and brine then we sealed the
lid  🎵
🎵 Six months later, let’s see how it did 🎵
🎵 Something’s been happening in this
jar  🎵
🎵I hope it didn’t go too far
What’s been happening in this jar 🎵
🎵I hope it’s something good 🎵
🎵Something’s been happening in this
jar 🎵
🎵I hope it didn’t go too far
What’s been happening in this jar🎵
🎵I hope it’s something good 🎵
🎵 I hope it’s something good
I hope it’s something good 🎵
So what has been happening in these jars?
Finally time to open them and find out. We
don’t have room for an island in our tiny
kitchen, so we’re going to open them up right down
here in the basement where they’ve been
living for the past 6 months. I’m going
to open each jar, then use my camera phone
to show up close what it looks like inside.
There’s nothing really nasty and ugly I
can see from the outside, maybe some Kahm
yeast in this one. But we’re going to keep
our fingers crossed that these look good,
and they’re going to be good to bottle.
And no point in stalling, let’s open up
the Carolina Reapers. Let’s see what we
got going on. There’s some Kahm yeast there
inside of the lid. And there’s something
going on there. Little bit of yeast, maybe
that’s mold or yeast, but looks like it’s
only going to be on the first layer. You know
we’re going to throw anything out that’s
at the top, or that it looks like it has any
hint of anything nasty. And clean that yeast
around the edges before we pour out the contents.
But most importantly, let’s smell it. Oh,
that smell so delicious, spicy, fermentedy
(which is a word I just made up), and I can’t
wait to see what that tastes like.
OK, let’s keep going. So kind of nerve wracking
to do this for the first time. OK, that’s
got a little bit of mold there on the inside
of the lid, but inside the jar itself looks
pretty clean. Of course we’re going to throw
out that top layer. Wow. How tangy and rich
and wow, can’t wait to taste that.
Now, the chocolate. I’m getting a little
nervous about this. Let’s see inside of
the lid. Doesn’t look too bad, but inside
here… We’ll luckily that’s nice and
smooth, so that’s Kahm yeast as I understand
it. That’s not mold. Hopefully it doesn’t
go down too deep. And we can take out what
looks bad and we’ll still have a lot of
good peppers. So let’s get a whiff of this.
Mmmmm. Nice and rich. I think we’re good
here, you know. I’m very nervous because
we’ve never done this before, and we don’t
want to get sick or anything. But I think
we’re doing good. We’re going to take
this up to the kitchen now, and hopefully
in a little bit we’re going to end up with
some bottles of hot sauce. See you upstairs.
Our 25 year old blender went belly up the
other day, so this will be the first use of
our new Ninja blender.
First task, get all that yucky stuff out of
the jars, and wipe the rims clean. We were
especially careful with the chocolates because
the Kahm yeast extended a little deeper into
the jar. Then we dumped the peppers into a
colander and drained off the brine before
blending.
Then we loaded up a Nutri Ninja cup and took
the reapers for a spin.
We added apple cider vinegar to thin them
out to sauce consistency. And here’s where I
think we made an error in judgement. Being
first time fermenters, we were afraid the
brine was harboring something nasty, when
in fact it probably was just fine. Adding
back some of the brine instead of using all
vinegar probably would have improved the taste
of all three sauces, reducing the acidity
and adding richness to the flavor. Still,
it tasted pretty good (and hot).
This stuff smells deadly and delicious. That’s
too much on an empty stomach. OK, here we
go.
Wow. That’s amazing. I might add a little
bit of salt, and maybe a tiny bit of sugar
or sweetener to this. Other than that, it’s
amazing. You don’t know when you first take
a bite how hot it is, and then it just hits
you. This is like reaper heaven.
We made the adjustments by adding some salt
and also some blue agave sweetener. Then we
did a final blend. We checked the PH level.
3.48 is pretty acidic. Now, time to bottle
the sauce.
The intense superhots were the cause of a
lot of coughing and watery eyes, and the dust
masks we were wearing were not up to the task.
Cat was wearing 3 of them, but it wasn’t
helping. Thankfully, I remember we had purchased
these respirator masks for just this purpose.
They work much better, but fit them properly
or they’ll fog up your glasses.
We followed the same process with the other
two batches of peppers. We used white wine
vinegar for the yellow.
We used balsamic vinegar
for the chocolate.
Here’s the finished product, bottled and labeled. Must be time for a tasting.
It feels really good to be filming for the
first time outdoors this season. It’s about
70º outside this afternoon. Although highs
will drop back down into the 50s next week,
it really feels like things have turned a
corner and that spring is finally here. You
know, it’s often humbling to try your hand
at something new and find out that you really
weren’t as prepared as you should or could
have been. I know that people spend years
perfecting their fermentation techniques,
and as newbies, we definitely have a lot to
learn.
Let me list some of the things I think we
could have done better. Experienced fermenters,
feel free to provide your constructive feedback
in the comments. As I stated earlier, we should
have used weights to keep the peppers submerged.
We also probably filled the jars too full
of peppers, because we lost some liquid through
the air holes as the contents expanded during
fermentation. Next, we probably let them ferment
too long, which used up all the sugars and
gave our ferment a sharper taste than I would
prefer. In the future, I would stop the fermentation
earlier and/or add some sweeter peppers to
the mix. Finally, it probably would have been
better to save the brine and add some or all
of it back into the sauce to improve the flavor.
We were just a little scared that something
nasty was lurking in there.
After all those disclaimers and self recriminations,
let’s give the sauces a final taste. I’ve
prepared some toast points as a good neutral
base to try them with.
Hey, check out these labels that Cat made for the sauces. Finally Fermented.
OK. Finally Fermented Chocolate.
Finally Fermented Yellow.
And finally, Finally Fermented Red.
Whoops. Well maybe I’m not going to eat quite that much. Let's see. Oh well.
Well really, I like these all.
They’re really good. Um, the red is definitely my
favorite. The fermentation did something great
to the taste of the reapers. Um, got that
nice fermented flavor, and the heat just hits
you. do I look hit? I feel hit.
The yellow is a little astringent to me. I
suppose we could try and balance it with some more
sweetener. but it’s quite doable as it is,
and I just think I’ve learned a few things
that I could do a better job with this next
time. The chocolate is a little mellower,
but here again it could be just a tad bit
sweeter, and I think not fermenting it as
long, and adding the brine back in either
one could perhaps help that a little bit.
So there you go. Finally Fermented sauces.
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For 7 Pot Club, I’m Rob.
