Rusty,

Hey, right on ! Never thought about home made hot sauce,
but now that you mention it the commercial hot sauce makers
DO ferment the peppers.

Here goes one man's taste again (as with best tasting tomatoes
being for my taste the more acidic the better); but my favorite
commercial Louisiana red hot sauce is always the cheapest
brand on the shelf. And this has nothing to do with price. It
has to do with the fact that the cheaper ones TASTE better.
The difference, I suspect, is that the more expensive brands
(no criticism if that is what others prefer) are distilled or
something. Whatever it is, all that is left is the HOT, and not
much of the FLAVOR; so I go for the cheaper brands
every time. And that doesn't save money, actually, because
where I would use six drops of Tabasco on a plate of Cajun
red beans and rice, I'll use at least a teaspoon of Evangeline
brand or Red Devil brand and enjoy the flavor without being
miserable.

Everybody knows at least one dude who brags about how he
likes his peppers the hotter the better. Often that's the same
guy who wears no jacket on a freezing day and tells you
he's not cold, while his arms get like chicken skin and turn
blue.

Some peppers that look almost exactly like cayenne's are not
hot at all. If planted close to their look-alike cayenne cousins,
however, bees will play a joke on you -- cross pollinating
them. Never say a mild pepper on a cayenne bush, but now
and then a hot pepper will turn up on a mild pepper bush.

Anyhow, you're in luck. David is kin to every Cajun (Acadian,
for those who don't know it) ever born, if not by blood, then
by marriage somewhere out among the cousins and all. Show
him a Verett, a Langlois, a Landrieu, a Thibodaux, a Boudreau,
Lebeau or LeBlanc... stir... let talk for five minutes... and they're
likely to end up discovering a cousin or something in common.
David's wife is kin to prior Louisiana beauty queen Ali Landry,
(David and I want to believe), and has talked with Ali by email
a few times comparing details on some same name relative or
another. No direct hit, so far, but here's to persistence.)

David does at least half the cooking for his wife and kids, just
as I do for my wife and me, and he is always game for trying
a new recipe. One of David's specialties is fermenting grapes
and muscadines. The same equipment would work for a
batch of red hot sauce. Aerobic is best for vinegars and non-aerobic
for the other stuff. Also, we have a mutual friend who has a PhD
in biology and is a world class authority on vinology (grapes
wild and domesticated, grape taxonomy, climate preferences of
certain varieties, grape diseases, etc. from every continent)... in
addition to being a C---A--; so between the three of us we can
probably get word out among several hundred people on what
we're looking for, pretty quickly.

Some Cajun's will laugh at you if you ask for measurements,
though. When I make a pot of seafood gumbo, I never do it the
exact same way twice and -- if I didn't use a tasting dish I could
never get it right. (You use a small ladle, pour a taste in the dish
and taste out of the dish. Then you know by instinct, after a while,
just how much of something to add to fine tune it.)

I'll send David a message right now, and ask him to start the ball
rolling.

problem: Some of the best cooks don't measure
anything and laugh if you ask them to specify. When I cook
gumbo I could NEVER get it right without a tasting bowl. (No
I don't stick the spoon back in the pot after sipping from it.)

It's no trouble at all... so, if you don't hear back from me on it
in a few days, don't hesitate to remind, okay?


g



"Rusty Mase" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 10 Apr 2005 03:18:51 GMT, "g" wrote:
And, speaking of names, come to think of it, three of the favorite
fish in Louisiana a white perch, sacolet (sack'-oh-lay) and
crappie (crop'-ee). They're all the same fish, actually!

Well, while you are running around in Cajun Country, see if you can
find some gardener making a fermented pepper hot sauce. My Dad was
half Cajun and he used to mention jars of pepper sauce that people
kept around to dip some out of for cooking. He just canned his
peppers and never made a sauce from them.

There are several sources of these recipes on the internet and I am
going to experiment with at least one recipe this summer. I have a
stand of peppers I think are "Macho" peppers from Southern Mexico that
are close to pequin peppers. If I screen these to keep out the
Mockingbirds I can harvest several pounds of these small peppers. The
recipe may be just mashing the peppers and adding natural vinegar and
salt.

Rusty Mase
Austin, Texas