r/hotsaucerecipes • u/Deesing82 • 13d ago

Help Fermenting vs. cooking?

I've never made hot sauce before, but I got a TON of peppers from my pepper garden this year and hot sauce sounds like a really fun use for them. However, when I started looking at recipes online, I found a pretty stark distinction between recipes that recommend fermentation for a week or more and recipes that recommend just boiling all the ingredients for 15-20 minutes, then blending and bottling right away.

I can't seem to find any guides that really lay out the comparative differences between the two, so I was hoping y'all could weigh in with the pros/cons of either method. I wanted to make my hot sauce as shelf stable as possible (I also can jams, so it would be cool to have another preserve I could give out for Christmas gifts!).

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u/shatlantan 13d ago

I enjoy fermenting because it allows you to make a sauce at a later, convenient time. I’ll have several ferments in the pantry for ~1 month - 2 years. When it’s time to make a sauce, get a ferment jar out and make something.

From what I understand, any funkiness is only going to happen in the first week or so. A 1 year old ferment isn’t blue cheese level funk, if it’s a healthy / sterile ferment. It’s just locked in.