Not to be confused with PrisonHotSauce
Here's some recipes I'm developing. As much as I enjoy Indonesian sambals and saus pedas, sometimes I find myself missing more American-style sauces (sour and watery instead of thick and sweet)
(Named not because it contains Tabasco peppers but because it can serve a similar function as Tabasco sauce)
Start with a a large bag of thai birds eye chili peppers. Wash and destem, blend, and pour into a fermentation bottle. I used a water bottle. You want enough pepper mash to mostly fill the bottle. With a mix of 2:1 water:soy sauce as a brine, add brine until the pepper mash is covered. Leave an inch of head room. Lacto fermentation will soon begin.
Unscrew the lid to burp out gas 1-2x a day until fermentation has reasonably slowed. In colder climates, this may take 1-2 weeks. Have fun watching the color change from brown to red.
Pour the sauce back into the blender and pulse until very smooth. Strain back into fermentation vessel. Fill the empty space with vinegar, watered down as necessary. I like to pour the vinegar/water over the mash in the strainer to get out just that much more fermented pepper juice.
This hot sauce is now ready to consume. Be careful, as it is very spicy. It should be less sour than Tabasco but still reasonably complex.
ARCH NOTE: This sauce was too watery for me and I wanted something thicker, so I reduced the finished product (~600ml) on the stove for ~20 minutes with a spoon of cooking oil added to it, stirring well. About half of the water evaporated out. The sauce is thicker but the flavors are a tad less complex; I think next time, I'll try using less initial brine to make it thicker. "The pros" add flour, starch, sugar or xantham gum but I want to keep the vegetable flavors forward...
Name by akai
Weigh out a mix of peppers to garlic, 3:1. Record weight before blending; add enough water to facilitate smooth blending. Fill a bottle mostly full with blended mix. Add 3% salt by weight and cap. Store bottle in a cool, dark place. Burp daily throughout the fermentation.
At the same time, start to yeast ferment a bottle of mango juice, using an airlock to help co2 degas without oxidating the wine. After 1-2 weeks, both the hot sauce and mango wine should finish fermenting completely.
Blend together fermented mango juice with fermented pepper sauce; I used a 2:1 ratio of pepper sauce to mango wine. Boil at a low temp to thicken the sauce and kill off residual yeasts / evaporate alcohol. Add additional salt or vinegar to taste. The fermented mango juice should add fruity, sour, and bitter notes that compliment the sour and spicy notes of the fermented peppers.