I had a fairly bountiful crop, but shortly before the peppers fully ripened, all three plants look like they went sick and dropped all their leaves. Powdery mildew was pretty bad on the nearby tomatoes and eggplants, so that's probably what happened. I did not want to risk losing the peppers, I picked them off a little early, 2.6kg. They didn't quite have the good calabrian flavor because of this, so I experimented with fermenting by doing four batches in my vac sealer:
1. fermented with a little less than 3% salt time TBD, target 12 weeks?
2. fermented with a little less than 3% salt, 7 weeks, blended with equal volume vinegar, strained through sieve
3. fermented with little less than 3% salt, 7 weeks, then blended with cilantro and vinegar-boiled (roasted pineapple, onion, garlic, green onion)
4. Mixed with eggplant, garlic, mushrooms, artichokes, dried tomato skins, carrots, peppers, oregano, 3% salt and fermented all for 7 weeks
#1 is TBD.. I'm thinking let it go a few more weeks, and then either repeat #2 or add some garlic to it, or maybe just try jarring it with oil. Thoughts?
#2 is delicious. It also makes an awesome buffalo sauce for wings. It would be totally amazing if it had a stronger calabrian chili flavor, had the peppers been properly ripe. I'm thinking about putting the left over mash into a jar with oil and doing the oil recipe just to see what it's like.
#3 is okay - I had meant to try using apple cider vinegar, but forgot and used just white distilled. It's missing something.
#4 was an attempt at duplicating the hot spread from Tuto Calabrian, but, I wanted to try fermented. It's not bad, a bit sour. The seeds really get in the way here, and, I think maybe cooking this may make things better, there's a raw flavor to it that's meh.
These things are pretty good fermented. I'm looking forward to trying again next season
PS: I have no idea what I'm doing, first time I've tried to make any sort of hot sauces and spreads!
