We shared a lot of tips about fermenting hot sauce yesterday and we left one teaser with a promise that we’d cover it today: refermenting.

I’ll admit that the name is a little deceiving.  It may imply that we stopped fermenting and then restarted (which is true in some occasions).  Refermentation is a made=up term to describe the process of beginning a fermentation inside something that has already been fermented.

In other words, we ferment our hot peppers, puree them and then continue to ferment – often after adding new ingredients to the hot pepper and brine puree.  While we’ve done some of this in the past, let’s examine the contents of the 3 jars above and share what we did with each, why we did it and what we hope to achieve:

• The jar in the front is a chocolate pepper hot sauce.  It’s very, very hot.  It was made with whey, salt, chocolate peppers and water.  We blended it after a week and then added garlic to it (a lot of garlic).  It’s had the airlock on for another two weeks and I plan to leave it age for a quite a while.  Without the airlock this concoction was growing mold daily.
• The jar in the back is the hot sauce from yesterday.  We had a lot of hot sauce that tasted similar so we added 10 dried Morita peppers (they are smoky like Chipolte) to add another layer of flavor and allow us to diversify the flavours of our hot sauces.
• The one at the back had nothing added to it; just the airlock.  It’s a small jar of our 2012 hot sauce that we’re experimenting with.  It’s been covered for many weeks and I’m hoping to age it for 9 months to a year to see what happens and to see if I can store less hot sauce in my fridge using this method.

Sometimes we do this to make variations on our sauce, to add flavor or just to store.  Have you tried anything like this?  Any tips or results to share?  I’d love to hear!