Barrel Aging Hot Sauce

I've been meaning to write a post about barrel aging hot sauce for a while now. I guess I'm just not much of a blogger.

A friend gifted me a half-gallon wooden barrel for Christmas, knowing that I liked to ferment my peppers before making hot sauce. Since that's how Tabasco is made, I was very excited.

I purchased approximately 50 habaneros, which was most of the ones that my small-town grocery had in stock. I fermented them with filtered water and salt in the barrel for two months.

It fermented just fine, and the peppers had a good taste, but I was overall disappointed with the resulting sauce. The ratio of liquids to solids was far too much in favor of the liquids to be what I really wanted. In hindsight, I should have drained off some of it or (even better) fermented even more peppers. Fifty was not nearly enough for the size of that barrel. I'd estimate that 200 should have been the minimum.

In the end, the hot sauce was far too thin and separated too easily. I added a small amount of xanthan gum, which significantly improved the consistency and prevented separation. But there just wasn't enough of the pepper in the sauce to be what I really wanted. It's fine, but it was definitely a miss. In the future, I'll drain off all the liquid, then blend the peppers, then add the liquid back in until it's the consistency I want.

The other big disappointment is that the barrel didn't end up giving much of an interesting character to the sauce. The heat and flavor of the habaneros themselves blew any of that away.

But there's a silver lining. The barrel absorbed the delicious habanero flavor, so I filled it up with my favorite Tequila and gave it a couple of weeks. The result was the most delicious Tequila I've ever tasted. It's also so hot it's almost undrinkable, but it makes for a good (very slow) sipper or a zippy addition to a margarita.

It was all worth it for the Tequila.