Re: [CH] Chile-Heads Digest V7 #271

Cameron Begg (begg.4@osu.edu)
Wed, 08 Nov 2000 10:06:47 -0500 

Hi C-H's,

Tony (or Dick Moon?) asked:
>  Does anyone have a good recipe for Tabasco sauce.

Tara Deen sent a long reply which I think needs some clarification.

First, not to state the obvious, but you will have to use the fruit 
of Capsicum frutescens cv. 'Tabasco' to make the authentic sauce. 
They are fairly easy to grow.

>Original McIlheny method ->  Grind peppers. Add 1/2 cup kosher salt
>per gallon of ground peppers and allow to age 1 month in glass or
>crockery jars. Add white wine vinegar to taste and bottle. Age
>before using to blend the flavors together.

There is an important piece of information missing here. The salt has 
to be in the range of 15-18% of the weight of the pepper pods. At 
this concentration, only salt tolerant yeasts can survive and ferment 
the mash. A white or creamish white mass of curds will be formed, and 
these can be mixed into the mash from time to time to encourage 
fermentation. Use an airlock. I let the process run for a year. At 
this stage the sauce tastes like the best, hottest Tabasco sauce 
ever, BUT it is extremely salty. This is why the McIlhenny Co. cuts 
it with such a lot of vinegar to dilute the saltiness. Most of what 
you buy from them is vinegar and it doesn't taste like white wine 
vinegar to me. It tastes a lot like dilute acetic acid.

For my own use, I combine the home made Tabaso with other sauces not 
containing much salt or with fresh ground pepper pulp. It adds a 
distinctive flavor to them. Alternatively I leave all the salt out of 
a recipe and use my home made Tabasco instead.

>I think that I would add some toasted oak chips, the kind used by
>home winemakers to mimic barrel type aging in their wines. The
>effect takes about a week so this should work. You end up
>straining out the solids and the oak would not end up in the final
>sauce, just the flavor.

An off topic comment: Some US home and micro brewers have taken to 
adding oak chips to their beer to give it a "cask conditioned" taste. 
They might be interested to know that traditional beer makers in the 
UK consider any flavor from the cask to be an "off flavour". They go 
to considerable lengths to avoid this in problem casks by burning 
sulphur in them or leaving them to soak in various solutions. If 
these steps fail, the cask is scrapped or possibly dismantled and 
rebuilt with other staves if the problem is not too bad. Whether this 
applies to sauce casks I don't know.

I don't find a slight oak flavor objectionable in a robust dry red 
wine though, but a little is enough.
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                      Regards,               Cameron.