Sriracha
The sauce named after the Thai town of Si Racha is at its best made at home as a fermented sauce, and that is what separates it from ordinary chilli sauces. Six days of fermentation turn the raw heat of the chillies into something sour and deep that vinegar alone cannot give. The vinegar goes in only at the end: it rounds out the acidity and helps the sauce keep.
Your own work in that: 15 min.
- Preparation 20 min
- Fermentation 8640 min
- Cooking 25 min
- Sieving 15 min
Step by step
0 / 7 doneRemove the stems, keep the seeds
Cut off the stems only, keeping the seeds and membranes — most of the capsaicin sits there. For a milder sauce, seed half the chillies. Work in gloves: 700 g of chilli is a quantity that makes itself felt.
Ingredients: 700 g red chillies · 10 cloves garlic · 60 g brown sugar · 25 g salt
Blend with garlic, sugar and salt
Blend everything into a coarse mash, not a smooth purée. The salt comes to about 3% of the mash weight (3.5% of the chillies alone): enough to suppress unwanted bacteria, not so much as to stop the lactic acid bacteria doing their work.
Ingredients: 700 g red chillies · 10 cloves garlic · 60 g brown sugar · 25 g salt
A coarse mash — a smooth purée ferments less well.Jar it with a loose lid
Transfer to a jar, filling it no more than three-quarters, and screw the lid on loosely or cover with muslin. Fermentation produces carbon dioxide — a tightly sealed jar can blow its lid off.
Ingredients: 700 g red chillies · 10 cloves garlic · 60 g brown sugar · 25 g salt
Ferment six days, stirring daily
Keep at room temperature for 6 days, stirring once a day with a clean spoon. From the second day bubbles appear and the smell shifts from sharp to sour. That is the sign it is working properly.
Ingredients: 700 g red chillies · 10 cloves garlic · 60 g brown sugar · 25 g salt
Bubbles and a sour smell — fermentation is working.Boil with the vinegar
Tip the mash into a pan, add the vinegar and cook 20 minutes over low heat. Boiling stops the fermentation and stabilises the sauce — without it the flavour would keep shifting in the bottle for weeks.
Ingredients: 150 ml white vinegar · 20 g sugar · 1 tsp salt
Blend and push through a sieve
Blend smooth, then push it through a fine sieve, pressing with a ladle. Skins and seeds stay behind; without this step the sauce is gritty and will not pour from a bottle.
Ingredients: 150 ml white vinegar · 20 g sugar · 1 tsp salt
Through a sieve — skins and seeds stay behind.Balance and bottle
Reduce the sauce if it is thin and season with sugar and salt to balance — sriracha should be hot, sour and faintly sweet at once. Pour into a sterilised bottle. In the fridge it keeps up to six months.
Ingredients: 150 ml white vinegar · 20 g sugar · 1 tsp salt
Before you start
Which chillies
The best-known, American sriracha is made from red jalapeños; fresnos or long, medium-hot red chillies work well too. A mix of varieties gives a more interesting flavour; avoid tiny chillies like bird's eye, which are mostly skin with little flesh, and fiercely hot.
When a white film appears
A thin white layer on the surface is usually kahm yeast — harmless, just spoon it off. A fuzzy, coloured growth is mould and the whole batch must go. Daily stirring with a clean spoon makes both less likely.
The unfermented version
You can skip the six days and cook the mash straight with the vinegar — you get a good chilli sauce, but without that sour depth. The difference is obvious side by side, and it is what justifies the wait.