Another Chili Sauce ('Rooster' Style Sriracha Sauce), But This Time With Mold...Trust Me

THAT was a whole lot of slicing. The recipe didn't say anything about taking the seeds out, but I'm not into chilies for the pain; I'm in it for the flavour, so I stripped those seeds out, piece by piece. It took an age and I think a day later I still had chili pepper on my hands (as evidenced by my burning contact lens), but I'm SO excited about this chili sauce that I don't care.

I went back to my chili guy at the Mile End Market and bought another big bag. This time, I was going to do a fermented paste. No processing the cans afterward, just a bit of mold. Since my obsession with sourdough bread and my new-found love of making dosa, I'm a huge fan of 'things fermented'. So I went back to the VietWorldKitchen blog and made myself a Sriracha-style chili sauce (she gives two recipes - fresh and fermented - and I obviously went with the mold. It's kind of a stronger flavour, apparently, and I wanted something unique in my world of heat. That's the kind you see in Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese restaurants everywhere in North America. Often called "rooster sauce", it's the one in the big plastic bottle with the green top. Well, that's not really fair. There are all different kinds with slight variations in heat, sweetness, saltiness, and most importantly, preservatives, and THAT'S why the author of VietWorldKitchen made her own. I'm just following in her well respected, preservative-reduced footsteps.

Oh, she writes a lot about the different chilies to use, but I say use whatever you can find (long red types preferably) and then adjust sweetness, sourness, and salt as you go.

The instructions are great, unless you're me. If you're me you forget not to add the vinegar to the blender mixture in step one. This seriously impedes the fermenting process. So I had to wash everything out of my chilies and dump it back in the blender. Thank goodness I hadn't turned the blender on when I noticed how stupid I was being. Kind of hard to get the liquid out a puréed thing, but it's easy to rinse sliced chili peppers. Unfortunately, on the second try I think I forgot to add more salt. I remembered the sugar (since I did a white sugar/molasses combo instead of brown sugar or traditional palm sugar) but by the time I realized I may have forgotten the salt, it was two days later and I wasn't even sure. Oh well. It fermented, anyway, so I figure that's a good sign. I stuck it in the oven with the light on and it actually overflowed on day 3 of 4. How does that happen? It says leave it at 'room temperature" but Montreal got cold all of a sudden and nothing in my kitchen was ripening (see the dates in the chili sauce pictures. Still as hard as ever. They went a bit moldy too! THAT was not supposed to happen...only the chili sauce was supposed to get moldy).

So then I forgot to add the vinegar when I boiled the paste after scraping off the mold! Seriously, what's wrong with me? So I boiled it again. Fortunately, I figured I'd already added too much water to blend it in the first place (not in the recipe), so boiling off a bit of the extra was fine. Basically I was working really hard to mess this up.

 

Then I forgot to add more water to purée and had a heck of a time trying to get the sauce through the sieve.  

Finally, it was done. I still haven't tested it for salt. I had some of the leftover pulp with my dinner as a kind of hot sauce since it seemed like such a waste to just throw out all that beautiful chili flesh. I think my heart pounded for about 3 hours from the heat effects, and my stomach burned, but my soul rejoiced.

It keeps for a month in the fridge, so I best get on that.