Making your own hot sauce can become addicting. I have been making fermented hot sauces, (think Louisiana style), with fermented red ripe Fresno and red ripe Jalapeño peppers. Those are just the fermented peppers with some of the brine and vinegar added while blending then strained.
An even more delicious variant has been smoking a pound of red ripe peppers for two hours and leaving a pound raw. Chunk them up and drop them in a 2 quart jar. Add four cloves of lightly smashed garlic and a quart of brine made with water and 3% canning salt by weight of the water and peppers combined. I fill the jar completely, add a glass weight to hold the peppers down, put on a silicone fermenting lid, (Pickle Pipe brand), wrap it up with a dark towel and place it on the kitchen counter for three weeks. They strain the peppers but save the brine. Put in a food processor add some of the brine and puree them add vinegar and cumin to taste but it will be at least a cup of apple cider vinegar. Now run it through a blender until real smooth and use enough of the brine to make it pretty thin. Strain through a sieve pushing the mixture with a rubber spatula to get all the juice through the sieve. Bottle the hot sauce. You won’t believe the hot smoky flavor!
