Fermented Hot Sauce Powder Recipe
For a while, foraged ingredients were all the rage. And for good reason — there are so many intense and unique flavors hidden in the world around us, just waiting for some brave cook to incorporate them into a dish.
Personally, I’m obsessed with foraging for ingredients and am always on the hunt for wild herbs in the Bay Area. But my favorite foraged ingredients are the ones I discover in my own kitchen. In this recipe, we’ll review how we can utilize food waste to produce an incredible ingredient. To me, it’s all foraging.
This is a recipe for fermented hot sauce powder. Fermented habanero, cape gooseberry, garlic, koji, and bell pepper hot sauce powder to be exact. And, since paprika is traditionally made with dried bell peppers too, I suppose we could also call this a recipe for fermented paprika. It adds a wicked punch of spice, complex acidity, and vibrant color that’s perfect for so many dishes, but I love to put it on oysters.
My favorite part about this recipe is that it is made with ingredients that you’d otherwise throw away. To illustrate, we’re going to follow this recipe with the waste leftover from making my double fermented hot sauce recipe. But you could apply this technique to countless types of kitchen waste such as the strained ingredients from nut milks, soups, and even dashi.
What you need
First and foremost, you need waste. And not the kind that is literally trash. Something tasty that you’ve recently strained, blended, or wicked of moisture to the point where it isn’t usable for a dish.
Here, for example, are the strained solids from when I made my double fermented hot sauce recipe. After blending the hot sauce ingredients, I used a nut milk bag to strain the liquid. What remained in the nut milk bag was a paste made from the fermented ingredients in the recipe.
We’re going to turn that paste into a hot sauce powder by using the following equipment:
1. Excalibur dehydrator
We’re going to use this to fully dehydrate the paste. I threw away many dehydrators before I finally decided to buy this Excalibur. There’s a reason why restaurants use them. They are reliable, easy to clean, and far sturdier than the ones you can find.
2. Silicone sheets for the dehydrator
Especially for ingredients that have higher hydration (you could even do this recipe for a completely liquid broth!), you need a non-stick, solid sheet to ensure that the food waste does not drip through the dehydrator’s plastic grid shelves.
3. Spice grinder
You’ll also need something to grind the dehydrated ingredients into a powder. Don’t use your coffee grinder — trust me, you’ll taste the coffee in the spice (or your taste the spice in your next coffee!). This is the one I own.
Now that we have all we need, let’s get to the recipe.
HOW TO MAKE IT
The hot sauce paste after drying but before blending.
Just follow these steps. You should use a higher temperature (at least 140f) if your ingredients include meat.
Spread the blended paste from your hot sauce, soup, or other strained food onto a silicone mat in a thin layer.
Set the dehydrator to 130f.
Run the dehydrator until the paste is completely dry. For this recipe, it took about 12 hours.
Grind the dried paste with the spice grinder.
Store in an airtight container until ready to use.
WHAT TO DO WITH IT
Mussels steamed in white wine with celery leaves, lemon thyme, acid trip tomatoes, and fermented hot sauce powder.
I love hot sauce powder (especially the fermented kind) because it allows you to add hot sauce-like spice and unique acidity to dishes that don’t need any more liquid. The dehydration also dulls the heat a bit while adding an earthy flavor that the hot sauce alone doesn’t have.
My favorite use for this hot sauce powder in particular is for shellfish — especially raw oysters or steamed mussels. I use a small strainer to dust the shellfish from above, giving it a boost of vibrant orange color.
Another idea is to combine your powdered hot sauce recipe with hot sauce of the same variety, providing the hot sauce with additional body and different expressions of the same ingredients.
