The Hot Sauce Cookbook (10 page)

Of course, part of the success of Tabasco was an early focus on marketing. Edmund McIlhenny was an energetic promoter; he handed out flyers and gave away tiny bottles of Tabasco wherever he went. He hired drummers to take his product door to door. A New York grocery wholesaler,
E. C. Hazzard, made Tabasco sauce popular on the East Coast.

A sales office in London opened in 1872. In 1895, British troops carried Tabasco sauce with them on their invasion of Khartoum. Over several decades, Tabasco became one of the most recognizable brands in the English-speaking world.

In 1898, a former Tabasco employee named
B. F. Trappey opened a competing hot sauce company and began selling Trappey’s Tabasco sauce.
Ed Bulliard’s Evangeline Tabasco Sauce, Gebhardt’s Eagle Brand Tabasco Sauce, and several others were also marketed in the 1920s.

The Tabasco brand was trademarked by the McIlhenny family in 1906, but competitors argued that Tabasco was a kind of pepper, like cayenne, so the name couldn’t be legally limited. For several decades, the McIlhennys tried to assert their exclusive right to the name. Finally in 1929, a court ruled in favor of their claim and other companies were ordered to stop using “Tabasco.” The name was protected, but to this day competitors still sell fermented pepper sauces made in the same style under a variety of labels.

In 1918,
Jacob Frank of the Frank Spice and Tea Company in Cincinnati, Ohio, contracted a Louisiana farmer named
Adam Estilette to grow cayenne peppers to make a hot sauce according to a secret recipe he had purchased. Frank and Estilette became partners and worked on a new recipe that combined peppers, garlic, and spices. This blend was first marketed in 1920 as
Frank’s RedHot. In 1935,
Teressa Bellissimo of the Anchor Bar and Grill in Buffalo, New York, used Frank’s RedHot as the secret ingredient in the sauce she created for the first Buffalo chicken wings—its most famous use.

Today Frank’s RedHot is made from peppers aged in New Mexico. Frank’s extremely popular television commercials star a white-haired old lady named Ethel who tells Catholic priests, the Queen of England, and everyone else she meets that the secret of her recipes is Frank’s RedHot, to which she adds, “I put that (expletive) on everything.” The offending word is bleeped out. Frank’s RedHot is currently the number-one best-selling pepper sauce in America. In a 2010 story in
Businessweek
, it was ranked number twelve on the list of the nation’s most popular condiments, one rank ahead of Tabasco sauce and one behind Grey Poupon.

The third part of the American pepper sauce trinity is
Texas Pete, a cayenne pepper and vinegar sauce from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It is the most popular hot sauce in the Southeast and the third best-selling pepper sauce in the United States, after Frank’s RedHot and Tabasco. With more vinegar than most pepper sauces, Texas Pete is a favorite in Southeastern barbecue joints.

It was invented by the
Garner family. In 1929, at the age of sixteen, Thad Garner bought a barbecue stand called the Dixie Pig in Winston-Salem. With the restaurant came a hand-written recipe for barbecue sauce. When the rail yard of the Norfolk & Western Railroad expanded, the Dixie Pig lost its location. While Garner looked for a new building, the Dixie Pig’s old customers kept asking for the restaurant’s famous barbecue sauce, and so the Garner family started a barbecue sauce business in their farmhouse kitchen. In response to requests for a hotter barbecue sauce, the Garner family introduced Texas Pete. They reportedly chose the name because Texas was associated with chili and other hot and spicy foods in the popular imagination.

The current factory was built in 1942 on the site of the Garner homestead. Father Sam Garner and sons, Thad, Ralph, and Harold, incorporated as TW Garner Foods in 1946. The company now makes Texas Pete’s Hotter Hot Sauce and Texas Pete’s Garlic Hot Sauce. The complete product line also includes Texas Pete Honey Mustard Sauce, Texas Pete Hot Dog Chili Sauce, Texas Pete Buffalo Style Wing Sauce, and Texas Pete Seafood Cocktail Sauce.

The romantic image of growing and picking peppers and aging them in oak barrels has long been promoted by manufacturers, but today nearly all fermented pepper sauces are made from peppers grown in South and Central America. The mash is shipped to the United States in plastic barrels for finishing. Some producers, like
Tabasco, still use wooden barrels, but scientific studies have concluded that plastic barrels are actually superior for several reasons, including sanitation. In the countryside surrounding Lafayette, Louisiana, there are some thirty-five manufacturers of pepper sauce producing around a hundred different brands. Tabasco, Trappey’s, Cajun Chef, and Bruce Foods, the makers of Louisiana Hot Sauce are all located there.

Fermented pepper mash has been the standard base for Louisiana-style bottled pepper sauces for nearly 150 years. But fermented pepper sauces aren’t unique to Louisiana. Complex pepper sauces like the gochujang of Korea, Matouk’s of Trinidad, Pickapeppa from Jamaica, and the hot sweet sauces from Sri Racha, Thailand, are fermented, too. Once you learn how to make a fermented pepper mash, you’ll find you can make all kinds of tasty hot pepper sauces at home.

FERMENTED PEPPER SAUCES

Fermenting pepper mash and making homemade Tabasco-style pepper sauce at home seemed like a crazy idea when I started this book. After all, pepper sauce is pretty cheap. Nevertheless, I spent several months experimenting. There were the volcano bottles that spewed red lava all over the kitchen, to the consternation of my family. And there were habanero mashes that could have been used for tear gas.

But eventually, with the help of the community of fermentation fans, I came up with an easy home procedure. And now that my family has gotten accustomed to my homemade pepper sauces, they don’t want to use the vinegary commercial stuff anymore. And I have discovered uses for fermented chile paste (including kimchee-style sauerkraut and hot pickles) that I never imagined before I started.

Making pepper sauce at home gives you several advantages over the commercial producers. First of all, there’s the vinegar. Since you are going to keep your pepper sauce in the refrigerator rather than sell it to supermarkets, you can use a lot less vinegar than commercial bottlers. This results in a smoother flavor. And while commercial pepper sauce makers use cheap distilled white vinegar, you are free to use any kind you like.

McIlhenny used French wine vinegar for the earliest
Tabasco sauce. Rich, sweet vinegars made from sherry and sugar cane were used to make pepper sauces in the early days of the Caribbean sugar plantations (see
Pepper Sherry
and
Pepper Vinegar
). Rice wine vinegar is a favorite of chefs and Asian hot sauce makers. Seasoned rice wine vinegar, contains sugar, garlic, and other seasonings, produces an amazing Asian flavor.

Experiments with Fermented Pepper Mash

McIlhenny made the first Tabasco sauce by mashing peppers with a potato masher, salting them, and scraping off the mold as they fermented. He mixed the fermented peppers with French wine vinegar and pushed the solids through a series of sieves. Today the big manufacturers still make the mash first and then ferment it later. But as McIlhenny discovered, fermenting a mash is a messy (and moldy) business.

I tried putting my pepper mash in a fermentation crock with a weight on top of it, in a glass bowl with a zippered bag full of water on top, and in a 1-quart mason jar. I found that the weight that was intended to keep the mash under the brine in the fermentation crock sunk into the liquid and allowed the mash to mold. The mold isn’t dangerous, but it is a messy and annoying project to scrape it off.

Fermentation veterans who read my blog posts about the project recommended a different strategy. It is much easier to ferment the peppers first and then grind them up into a mash, they suggested. I already knew how to make kosher pickles and fermenting peppers turned out to be very similar. You just make a brine with pickling salt and keep the peppers submerged under the brine.

I also experimented with fermenting garlic, ginger, and other ingredients along with the peppers and grinding them all up together. While the flavors were intriguing, I discovered that pepper mash with other ingredients developed harsh “off” flavors after a few weeks. Pure pepper mash with a splash of vinegar, on the other hand, keeps for six months or more in the refrigerator. You can always add the garlic or other ingredients to small batches of the finished sauces.

With a big jar of pure fermented pepper mash in the fridge, you can add vinegar to make a batch of Louisiana pepper sauce one day and then add a mixture of vinegar with garlic and sugar to make a batch of Sriracha sauce the next day. Or you can use the fiery mash straight out of the container in a soup or stew.

FERMENTED PEPPER MASH

———
Makes about 3 cups
———

Red jalapeños are excellent for this recipe because they are very fleshy and yield a lot of pepper solids. Fresno peppers work great, too. If you can find enough cayenne or Tabasco peppers, you can ferment them to make an authentic Louisiana-style sauce. You’ll notice that I ferment these chiles with their seeds, then remove the seeds later in the process. To make the seed removal easier, make sure you don’t mash the peppers
too
much—you want to leave them in close-to-whole pieces. I find that inserting a cabbage core into the opening of my mason jar is the best way to keep the chiles submerged during fermentation.

2 pounds ripe red chiles

¼ cup pickling salt or fine kosher salt

1 cup spring water

2 tablespoons cane vinegar, sherry vinegar, or rice wine vinegar

Wash the chiles well, then place them outdoors (in the bright sun, if possible) for a day or two. The chiles will ripen in the sun. Bring the chiles inside when they are wrinkled and very soft.

Wearing food handler’s gloves, on a cutting board, pull the stems off the peppers and cut them in half lengthwise. Put the cleaned peppers in a stainless steel mixing bowl and crush them with a potato masher until they are well bruised, but still in large pieces. Sprinkle the peppers evenly with salt and crush some more, but again, make sure to leave the peppers fairly intact. Allow to sit uncovered in the bowl overnight, until liquid forms in the bottom of the bowl.

The next day, carefully transfer the peppers and the liquid to a clean 1-quart mason jar. The peppers should fill the jar with some peppers left over. (Set the extra peppers aside in a separate sealed container.) Pour the water into the mason jar to dissolve any remaining salt and to top off the jar with liquid. (If you don’t have spring water, bring your tap water to a boil and allow to
sit for a while before using.) Seal the jar loosely with the two-piece canning lid and set it on the counter on top of some paper towels.

After a day or two, the jar will begin to fizz and overflow a little, and the peppers will shrink. Add the reserved peppers to fill the jar. Then cut a chunk of cabbage core to fit the opening of the jar and wedge it into the jar so it holds the chiles under the liquid. Don’t worry if a little splashes out. Put the lid back on, but don’t screw it on too tightly. Allow the chiles to ferment for at least 1 week and up to 2 weeks, adding water as needed to keep the chiles submerged.

When the chiles have fermented, pour the chiles and brine into a steel bowl. Wearing food handlers’ gloves, swish each chile around in the brine until all the seeds fall off, then put the chile in a food processor or blender. When all the chiles have been seeded, pour the brine through a strainer to remove the seeds. Add the brine and the vinegar to the chiles and purée for several minutes into a very smooth liquid mash. Put the mash in a sealed container in the refrigerator. The fermentation will slow down, but don’t be alarmed if the mash continues to fizz a little.