Hot Sauce

Fermented

One of the things I like to do is cook. When I was trading, it was a good creative release for me. I’d get home, go down into our basement and lift weights on the machine I bought. My wife would handle the kids.

I am making some Chicago pizza dough right now as I write this because the pizza in Las Vegas basically sucks. We put in an Alfa oven when we redid the house.

When I was in the basement lifting, there were cooking shows on television and most of them were about great chefs in New Orleans. I’d try to cook a bunch of the stuff they cooked or just riff on different recipes.

My grandmother was a great cook and my mother was a great cook. I think my father married my mom for her looks but he stayed around for the food.

When we redid our house in Vegas, I wanted two dishwashers and some very good appliances. Now, I think my wife likes the two-dishwasher kitchen more than I do.

We don’t go out to eat a lot. We cook at home, which generally means I cook at home. My wife takes care of the necessary things in the house, and I do the shopping/cooking. Recently, I saw an Andrew Zimmern tweet about chicken with Meyer lemons and we made it at home. It was spectacular. My wife makes a mean lemon curd. We have Meyer lemon trees in our courtyard so we have to figure out what to do with them.

I have made gravlax at home and will again. We make most of our own beef and chicken stock in an Instant Pot. We used to make our own bacon and my friend Gordie had extra pork belly so we are curing some lardon in the refrigerator. They are great in soups, salads and stews.

I make Vin D’Orange just about every year. This is this year’s batch. We make our own Limoncello too.

When I do eat out, I try to order things I cannot possibly make at home, or at least do as well as a pro chef. That’s why it ticks me off to no end when I go out and order steak and the ones I make at home are significantly better. I brought back a suitcase stacked full of dry-aged prime beef and Iowa pork from my butcher in Chicago after Christmas.

I have my go-to’s like any home cook. Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, and over the past number of years it has been Serious Eats. Serious Eats has a fermented hot sauce recipe that is to die for. I used dried peppers. My kids love this one particular margarita and we ordered a bunch of different varieties of dried peppers to make the trimming you put around the rim of the glass. I didn’t know what to do with them, so I made this fermented hot sauce.

My friend Bryan Johnson doesn’t discuss fermented foods in his “Don’t Die” regimen. He does supplements, a specific vegan diet, and a lot of very intrusive medical therapy along with a strict workout regimen. They have been around for eons and scientists are discovering that fermented foods are good for your gut bacteria. Having healthy gut bacteria turns out to be very good for your health. I am not disciplined enough, nor do I want to make the sacrifices Bryan has made but I am interested in good gut bacteria.

We ferment sauerkraut at home, along with the aforementioned Meyer lemons and so I tried this hot sauce. It is amazing. It’s got some tang, and some smoke because of the kinds of peppers I used. Not too hot. Might ferment some homemade ketchup next.

Give it a try. It’s simple and it’s not expensive to make. If you fail at it, the worst you do is toss it out.