I had this whole plan, see? I'd been searching without success for the thick-skinned, thick-walled, fleshy espelette peppers like the ones I found four years ago from Viridian Farms—which is unfortunately no longer in existence—and used to such great effect to make some kick-ass, fruity, smoky harissa. In the intervening years I'd tried espelette peppers from various area farms, but the fruit, while it had the requisite thick skin, was uniformly thin-fleshed. When roasted, the flesh stuck to the skins like glue, making peeling arduous and not worth it in terms of resulting volume.
This year I was determined to try again to find those perfect peppers and purchased peppers from two more farms. Again, sad trombones.
With the first couple of pounds I managed to make a very small batch of harissa, but the next two pounds were just not going to be worth the work. Not wanting to waste their fruity, biting heat, I was casting about for good uses. Most suggestions were to dry and grind them to a powder, but then I ran across farmer and author Josh Volk's Instagram photo of chopped peppers that he'd fermented in a 3.5 percent salt mixture.
Bubbling away.
Aha!
A little back-and-forth with Josh led me to chop the two pounds of peppers in the food processor, add the salt, pack them in a Mason jar, set the jar in a dish in the basement, then put a zip-lock bag of water inside the jar like a pickling weight, which allows it to breathe (and overflow if necessary). Putting a lid on isn't necessary, but if you do, make sure it isn't screwed on tight—it needs to breathe!
After four days I saw bubbles and a little puddle underneath the jar, which indicated that fermentation was, indeed, occurring, so I left it for a few more days. Recipes say you can allow it to ferment for as long as a month, but being the impatient person I am, I gave it a week before bringing it upstairs to whiz in the blender, adding water to thin it to a sauce-like consistency.
The result? Well, we used it as a hot sauce on pork tacos along with some of Hank Shaw's sour corn that I'd made earlier and we thought it was great. But the real test came when I gave some to my neighbor Ivy Manning, a hot sauce aficionado as well as author of countless authoritative cookbooks, for her expert opinion. Her reaction? "Can you just pour some out on the counter so I can roll in it?"
'Nuff said.
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2 comments:
"set the jar in a dish in the basement, topped with a zip-lock bag of water to allow it to breathe (and overflow if necessary" - is the zip lock inside the jar like a pickling weight? Or over the jar in some way?
Good question, Anon! The zip-lock bag sits inside the jar (like a pickling weight). The pickling weights I've tried (small dishes, or those glass weights available online) can sometimes allow smaller bits of whatever you're pickling—think kernels of Hank Shaw's sour corn or, in this case, bits of chopped pepper—to escape, which can promote mold to develop. (If you see some mold, the best references I've read say to simply skim it off and continue pickling.) I'll rewrite the instructions to make that more clear.
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