UPDATE 2: Good news, everyone! I’m not going to kill you with my hot sauce! Well, at least not with botulism; I can’t make any guarantees about the capsaicin. I popped open a jar this afternoon and tested it with my new pH meter: it ranged from 3.3 (when calibrated with the pH 4.0 solution) to 3.5 (when calibrated with the pH 7.0 solution) well below the safe water bath canning pH of 4.6. Now, I’m not sure why this is, given that all of my internet research indicated that it would be a very difficult proposition to boil off the water without boiling off the acetic acid: there were words like “controlled laboratory conditions” and “titration” and “lab-scale thermometer.” I used regular, grocery store white vinegar in the brine, and then let it boil merrily away on the stove for about 20 minutes with nary a glance. Maybe what happened was that, in the week I let the vegetables sit on the counter in the brine, they soaked up most of the vinegar, while exuding water, leaving the vegetables already quite acidic, while the brine was mostly water? I don’t really have an explanation. But what I will say is this: if you plan to make this for room-temp storage, I would invest in a pH meter (you’ll need some calibration & storage solutions, too) and confirm that your final product is safely acidic before tucking it away on the shelf. I just can’t be sure that the recipe as written will be reproducible, and safe, in your kitchen. If anyone does try this and tests it out with a pH meter, please do share the results. And thanks for following along with Kaela’s Krazy Kanning Kitchen.
UPDATE 1: A reader emailed me today (thanks, Lindsay!) to say that she noticed something in the Joy of Pickling that said “be careful not to boil the vinegar for too long, as acetic acid will evaporate before water does.” Originally, I had been thinking of acetic acid like citric acid: a crystalline solid that would not evaporate at the boiling point of water. Turns out that the boiling point of acetic acid is somewhat higher than water (244 degrees vs 212 degrees F for water) but that it is very soluble in water and the boiling point of vinegar is only just slightly higher than water; unless it is a very controlled boil, you may be boiling the acetic acid off into the air. I’m going to investigate this further, and try to get a pH assessment on my sriracha. But for now, if you’ve made this, or plan to, please stick it in the fridge. Herein lies the dangers of experimenting with canning recipes, especially without thoroughly thinking it through, and I do apologize from the bottom of my heart for sharing with you a potentially unsafe recipe: but I’m very grateful that Lindsay pointed out the issue. It’s up to all of us to keep ourselves safe, but it’s so nice to have a community that has your back. I’ll come back with another update if/when I figure out that this is safe for shelf storage (or not).
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My first attempt at making the beloved Rooster at home: it came out just a wee bit spicier than the traditional version. Ahem. It might have been that half-pound of red habañeros. Or the fact that I was too lazy to dig the gloves out from under the sink so I didn’t seed them. Any of them. Oops.
I did a bunch of research online before making my version: I checked out David Leite’s version, the Viet World Kitchen version, the fermented vs. fresh experiments at Serious Eats. I learned that I should snip the stem off of my chiles, but not remove the crown, to include a floral component to the sauce. I learned that fermenting gives the sauce a little extra tang (not that I would notice this in the teeth-meltingly hot version I ended up with). I learned that traditional sriracha sauce is made with red jalapeños, sadly difficult to find here in the Northeast this year: it’s been a very wet growing season and a rough one for chile peppers. In the end, I settled on Carter’s version at The Kitchenette: for last year’s October Can Jam, she adapted the popular Food 52 sriracha to a canning-safe recipe for shelf-stable storage (I knew choosing chile peppers for the Can Jam was going to come in handy!).
Based on Carter’s feedback that the flavor of her sauce was great, but the texture was a bit thin, due to the extra vinegar required for canning-safe acidity, I decided to boil down the vinegar brine prior to blending with the peppers. I reasoned that, by reducing the brine, I was boiling off water, but not acetic acid, thereby not negatively impacting the safety factor, but improving the texture of the final product. I wish I had reduced the brine even more, because my final product came out more like a thick sauce than a true paste: however, since said final product is apparently REALLY FREAKIN HOT, maybe it’s a good thing that it’s a bit thinner than traditional. Note to self: don’t make chile sauce with a head cold.
Adapted from Homemade Sriracha by Carter at The Kitchenette, who adapted this Food 52 recipe and Singapore Chili Sauce in The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, J. Kingry and L. Devine
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Homemade Sriracha
INGREDIENTS
- 2 and 1/2 cups white vinegar
- 1/2 lb habañero peppers, stemmed & halved (seeded if desired for less-than-tooth-meltingly-hot sauce); wear gloves to handle hot peppers!
- 1/2 lb red bell peppers, stemmed, seeded, and roughly chopped
- 1/4 cup smashed, peeled garlic cloves (about 1 head)
- 1/4 cup raw sugar (organic turbinado)
- 1 scant tbsp Kosher flake salt (use 2 tsp if using a fine-grained salt)
METHODS
- Day 1. Combine vinegar, sugar and salt in a large bowl. Stir to dissolve. Add peppers & garlic and push under liquid. Cover and allow to sit overnight (or for several nights; mine sat for about a week).
- Day 2 (or 7). Prepare canner, jars and lids.
- Strain liquid from pepper-garlic mixture into a medium saucepan. Bring brine to a full boil over high heat; boil, uncovered, until liquid is reduced to 1/4 the original volume, or to a final volume of about 1/2 – 1 cup, about 15 minutes. Add the vegetables, return to a boil, then lower heat and simmer, partially covered, for 5 minutes.
- Transfer mixture to a food processor and blend until smooth, or leave slightly chunky, per your preference. Return to the saucepan, bring sauce to a simmer, then fill hot jars to 1/2-inch headspace, wipe rims, affix lids and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.
Yields 5, 4-oz jars.
OPTIONS
- Traditionally, sriracha is made with red jalapeño peppers, and as such, would be much more mild than this sauce turned out. Choose a combination of peppers that you like, leave seeds in, or remove, depending on your heat preference, and remember that the heat will mellow on the shelf.
- Even with the reduction of the vinegar brine, this came out more like a hot sauce than a true sriracha paste: next time I might reduce even more, or simply stick with a fresh sriracha like Winnie’s, and leave it chunky.
STORE
See UPDATES above: please store refrigerated if you cannot confirm that your sauce is safely acidic. If tested, and canned, in a cool dark spot for up to 1 year. For best results, allow the sauce to blend and mellow on the shelf for a few weeks before using.
SEASON
Late summer into Fall.
localkitchenblog.com 
You crack me up!! Love this and the adaptation for canning….I never include habanero seeds in anything that I make! Then again…I do have 200 pairs of disposable gloves on hand at all times in a convenient dispenser on the counter! This one is a keeper for me (minus seeds!) Great post.
Nice one. I made a ton of sambal oelek a while back using ring of fire cayenne-type peppers, also unseeded. Wicked hot, but wicked good too after I added all the other stuff to calm it down a bit.
You have a recipe for sambel oelek? That is one of my favorites!
Mmm hot chilli sauce, this looks like it would be deicious too, will have to try.
Cheers
Marcus
I”m with Wendy, I love that this is adapted for canning. I’ve seen other recipes for the rooster sauce and I’ve wanted to make but haven’t had the time and I also didn’t want to put a whole batch of jars in the fridge. Thanks for sharing and I will definitely be making this soon especially since I have a flat of red jalapenos in my walk in!
Oooooooo. Brilliant idea with boiling down the brine! I wonder if it would make it more “paste”-like if we boiled down the peppers, post-blending? Jeez, all I want is an all-natural perfect replica of a commercially-produced condiment made from a secret Vietnamese recipe. IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK???
HA! I did cook it a bit after blending, but I didn’t want it to get that cooked-chile taste; they really do change in flavor when you cook them for a while. I imagine if we could find powdered acetic acid, we could make it as chunky as we wanted, then just add enough acetic acid to make it safe for canning.
Probably a really dumb question from a novice canner here, but could you use powdered citric acid instead of vinegar? That’s what I use to acidify my tomatoes to make them safe for BWB canning, maybe that would work here?
Not dumb at all: for strictly pH purposes. you could replace all of the vinegar with citirc acid in order to provide a canning-safe acidity level. However, traditional sriracha does not have any citrus flavor and the vinegar flavor is definitely present; which is why I suggest acetic acid if you can find it.
Ah, that makes sense! Thanks!
This looks seriously delicious. I had never heard of it before so thanks! This is exactly the reason why I spend so much time reading other blogs.
I think my crazy Cajun cousin would love the one you made extra hot. Peppers are looking pretty sad here in the mid-Atlantic but I will mark this one to make next summer for friends who love this stuff. I will aim for the milder for myself.
yum, yum, yum. ouch. yum. “teeth meltingly hot” sounds serious and if Kaela says it is hot, I’m afraid =) Looks fantastic~ I’m still working on my fermented version from last year- blindingly hot as well.
Somehow I’m missing this – BUT – where are you working in the smashed garlic? In with the peppers as they go into the brine to ferment for a week? Or after you reduce the brine in the end?
Starting this tonight!
Thanks for catching that, Greg: just realized that I never specified when to add the garlic. It’s corrected above, but you add them into the overnight vinegar soak with the peppers.
Let us know how it turns out!
Well – I’ll let you know – I setup a double batch of it last night. Tonight going to setup some serrano’s and thai chili’s i have laying around too.
my kitchen smells of garlic!
have to try this with the last of our peppers! Thanks for posting!
Love it! I imagine with all those habaneros!
Ooh, I”d never heard of Siracha – it’s not that common in the UK as far as I’m aware. Sounds great though, spicy, but great! Thanks for the interesting post.
I think I’m going to make this with the rest of my hot peppers, too. I’ll pop it into the fridge to be safe. It looks great, Kaela.
Gorgeous! I am almost out of my batch of fresh chile sauce so maybe I’ll try your version next. Ps I picked up a bunch of apples today and plan to make your apple bourbon butter tomorrow 😉
Awesome, looks like a great recipe to try!
On the bit about the vegetables soaking up the brine: Vinegar is soluble in water. So the vinegar dissolved in the water and changed the ph of the whole solution, to make it more acidic. Through osmosis, the veges absorbed the acidic solution and viola! Acidic vegetables.
You do have quite a lot of vinegar in the product. It may be that even with the amount reduced, the acidity was fine. I have recently realized that I should be careful about boiling vinegar for canning, too.
THANK YOU!!! I just made this — using half red bell peppers and half red jalapenos, because those are the only red chiles I could find around here, peppers seeded & then brined for two days. It tastes delicious! Milder than store-bought, which is good for me, but tasty, with enough spice to notice. I actually like it better than the store-bought!!
Plus, I used my fancy-schmancy Ph tester and it came out to 3.17 (and mine ended up having to boil for 25 minutes or so to get the right level of reduction to the brine, so that’s even with a longer boil time) which is *plenty* acidic so I canned it & feel pretty confident about storing it on the shelf.
I am looking forward to trying this again next summer/fall when red chiles are more easily found and will brine the chiles longer, to see what that does. Will probably still test the Ph, to be extra-safe and because I’m nerdy that way.
You’re welcome! So glad you like it. I just gave some away for Christmas… 🙂
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At what point do you test the ph level of the sauce? Before the canning process or after, or both? Thanks 🙂
Hi Jordan,
You should test the sauce before you can it. Since temperature affects pH you should test the sauce once it has cooled completely to room temperature. My best advice is to make a batch, cool overnight, then pull a few samples from the well-stirred batch and test each of those. If safely acidic, you can go ahead and can for room temp storage. If not, you can either add more acid and re-test, or stick it in the fridge.