How to make fermented hot sauce with cantaloupe

Fermented hot sauce that rocks your socks off! It’s sweet and spicy and it’s awesome on everything! Well, just about everything!

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There is nothing that I don’t like spicy. My sandwich, tea, yogurt, chocolate, casseroles, you name it and I’ll probably put spicy something in or on it. 

If you too love spicy food, you’ll love this recipe. It’s got a bit of a twist to the usual hot sauce ingredient lineup, because we’ll be adding cantaloupe. Or you can use peaches or mangos. This makes a super delicious hot sauce with a sweet, tangy, and spicy flavor that goes with so many dishes, like eggs, fish, meat, on a sandwich, as a dip and more. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can also smoke the peppers first for an extra special flavor twist.

Jump to the Fermented Hot Sauce Recipe

Making a sweet and spicy fermented hot sauce

This recipe came about when I was drowning in a melon glut at my homestead this year, something that was very unexpected, because it was my first year gardening in the southern half of the country. Where I had struggled to produce just a handful of tiny, barely ripe, bland tasting melons in the past, here in southern Missouri, my plants grew like they were on steroids and had multiple huge melons that fully ripened all throughout the summer. 

After eating lots of cantaloupe and honeydew every day and working my way through watermelons that weighed 25 pounds, I’m not sure how I’ll survive the winter without them. I’m addicted now! But I preserved lots of them too for the days after my melons are done with. I froze several bags full, canned some melon butter, and I fermented some. This hotsauce is my favorite.

Equipment:

A large bowl – For mixing ingredients.

Quart size mason jar or flip top jar – My absolute favorite here is the flip-top Fido jar by Bormioli rocco, I wished that I had more of them. It’s easy to use and you don’t need a fermentation top. The flip-top vents gasses as needed without allowing oxygen in. My other favorite is an easy to find quart or half gallon mason jar. These are my most used vessels for fermenting foods.

Fermentation weight – A glass fermentation weight is so convenient to use and fairly inexpensive. I strongly suggest that you invest in some if you ferment regularly. But you can use other things to keep the ingredients submerged in the brine. The objective is to keep any oxygen from touching them. For that purpose, you can use a scrubbed and boiled rock, a baggie filled with salt brine or marbles or a small jelly jar. If you have any food grade plastic lids that fit into the opening of your fermentation jar, you can use that as well, upside down.

Fermentation Lid or 2-piece canning jar lid – My favorite is a fermentation top or airlock. It makes things real simple when fermenting in a mason jar. You don’t have to babysit the ferment as you do with a cloth cover or a non-sealing lid. If you use a sealing lid of any kind, be sure to burp your jar once a day to let some of the gasses escape that build up inside, just by quickly loosening and tightening the lid. If you’re using a flip-top jar, then of course you don’t need this piece of equipment.

Scale (optional) – I like to weigh my ingredients and add 2% of the weight in salt. You could use 2.5% or 1.5% as well, but I use 2% as a rule because I have the best outcome with it every time. If you have no scale, then just add 2-3 tablespoons of salt per quart jar to your ingredients. That’s usually a good amount for any quart size fermentation. If you don’t own one, here is a inexpensive scale with great reviews. The one I own is not available anymore, but it looks exactly the same as this amazon brand and I find it sufficient for most kitchen applications.

Canning funnel (optional, but helpful) – A wide mouth funnel is very helpful to get your vegetables into your jar and I like the stainless steel ones. But you can use any of the easy to find plastic canning funnels.

Blender – Once fermented, I like to use an immersion Blender for this recipe and blend it right in my canning jar after dividing out half of it. But you can also put it in a regular blender or Vitamix.

Tamper – Optional. I love my pickle packer for all sorts of ferments. It helps pack the ingredients down into the jar and coaxes more brine out of them. It’s a great way to get all the ingredients submerged in the brine before topping with a weight.

Ingredients:

Hot peppers – Here you can use what you have in your garden or what you can find in the store. Use as many as you want to get the heat you desire. I find that habanero peppers go really good with the melon because of their fruitiness. But you can just use serranos, jalapenos or thai peppers too. Use red ripe ones if you have them for a deeper color and sweeter flavor.

I used serranos, jalapenos and cayennes, red and green, which gives me a really hot heat, but not overwhelmingly hot. I like it very hot, but I still want to be able to taste what I eat and not put my taste buds in a coma. You can also add a few sweet peppers for more of the pepper flavor and less heat. Use about a cup of chopped up peppers. A friend of mine smokes his peppers before adding them to a hot sauce. It adds a lot of depth to his sauces. I highly recommend doing so if you own a smoker.

Cantaloupe – You’ll need about half a cantaloupe for a quart size fermentation, or two and a half cups chopped small. If your cantaloupe is small, you might need a whole one*.

Onion – I use a medium onion per quart. This should yield about a cup of chopped onion.

Garlic – If you’re a garlic lover, add about 3-4 garlic cloves. Adjust to your taste. You can just smash the cloves and add them to the jar whole or chopped.

Salt – My favorites are Redmond’s Real Salt, Himalayan pink salt , or Celtic sea salt. Because all of these contain essential trace minerals that we need, which I prefer as a more healthy choice. Avoid common table salt or any other salt with additives. Read the label! Even kosher salt and sea salt can contain anti-caking agents as I found out.

*Homstead Tip: save a few of the cantaloupe seeds for next year and put the rinds and the rest of the cavity into a separate jar with sugar and water to make vinegar.

I did not add any optionals with my hot sauce, but feel free to experiment:

Optional: Fresh Cilantro or Papalo – Use a small bunch of the greens. I had a really bad cilantro year for several reasons, but my papalo thrived this year. Luckily! Almost all my salsas have papalo added instead of cilantro this year. I love that herb, but its very strong, and you might find that you’ll use less than you would with cilantro. You can just stuff it whole into the bottom of the jar to keep it from floating.

Optional: Coriander seed – This gives a bright note to your hot sauce and adds a bit more character. Crush before adding.

Optional: Lime juice – A bit of lime juice is great for flavoring. When I have fresh lime, I like to peel and chop my lime and just put a few bits into the sauce like that. Any extras can be frozen to add to a salsa or salad later.

Steps for making Fermented Hot Sauce:

01. Prep your scale – If you have a scale and you prefer to be technical, set your bowl on it and tare it on the grams setting. Then add your ingredients. (I usually weigh the bowl and write down the weight, in case the scale turns off on me in the middle of things. Then I can just subtract the bowl’s weight from the total in the end). Now place all your ingredients into the bowl as you chop them up.

02. Chop the melon into small pieces. You’ll want them small, so you can draw enough juices out of it to make a brine. More surface area will yield juices more easily. 

03. Chop the onion. You’ll want to chop it fairly fine.

04. Thinly slice or chop the hot peppers. I don’t wear gloves for this, but some people prefer to do so, so you won’t rub the oils into your eyes or skin elsewhere later. 

05. Roughly chop or smash the garlic. Add the garlic to your bowl.

06. Crush the Coriander seed if you’re using it and add it.

07. Add the salt. If you are using a scale, read the weight in grams with all the ingredients in the bowl. Be sure to omit the weight of the bowl! Now you’ll want to find out the ratio of the salt to add. We’ll be using 2% of the combined weight in salt. Here is how you figure that: take the weight of your ingredients x .02. The result gives you the amount of salt to add. For example, if your weight shows 1200 grams of ingredients, compute 1200 x .02, which will tell you to use 24 grams of salt. That is the amount you’ll need for a 2% ratio.

Without a scale, just add 2-3 tablespoons of salt per one quart recipe, you can adjust to taste, but use no less than 2 tablespoons.

08. Mix everything. Mix well and let it rest for a few minutes to draw out the juices. 

09. Put your ingredients into your jar. If you’re using herbs, just put them whole in the bottom of the jar first. Then add the hot sauce ingredients. A wide mouth funnel is a huge help here. Then press down with your fist, a spoon, or a pickle packer, to get the juices to rise above the ingredients. If you need more to fill your jar properly, you can just chop a few more ingredients to fill it. When you press down on it, you should end up about an inch and a half below the rim with juice. As you can see here, I didn’t follow my own advice and left just an inch, which resulted in juice bubbling over later.

10. Place a fermentation weight on top. The purpose of this is to keep your ingredients submerged below the surface of the brine, to keep oxygen away from them. Oxygen would turn the pieces to mush and add a funky taste or worse, grow mold.

11. Seal up your jar. If you have a flip-top jar , just close it up now. Or put your standard 2-piece lid on the canning jar, or better a  fermentation top or airlock. Now let it sit for about three weeks to ferment at room temperature. The cooler it is, the longer it will take. Don’t try to ferment below 65 degrees. Best is about 72-80 degrees. Warmer temperatures can cause fermentation to happen too rapidly and result in an inferior product or spoilage. Cool temperatures will stall fermentation to the point where bad bacteria might thrive before the good ones have a chance to create the lactic acid needed to kill the bad guys. 

12. Observe and wait. Keep a casual eye on it, but don’t intervene, except when you use a sealed lid, you’ll want to quickly twist the lid open once a day to burp it. Just barely twist it, you’ll hear the hiss of the gas excaping, then immediately tighten it again. Don’t take the lid off the jar unless you have an issue to deal with.

13. After 3 weeks, smell and taste the brine. If it’s nice and tangy, it’s good to proceed. If it’s not tangy enough, let it go a little longer. You can keep it going for months on the counter if your room temperature is not too high. Once you like the taste, it’s time to smash up your sauce. If there is a lot of juice and you like the sauce thick and spreadable, pour off a little juice and drink it as a tonic or use in a smoothie or salad dressing. It’s full of good probiotics and flu-fighting properties, so don’t toss it. To blend the sauce, I like to use an immersion Blender, right in my canning jar after dividing half of it out into another. But you can also pour it into a blender or Vitamix and give it a whirl. 

That’s it. You’ve got hot sauce. I like to fill it into smaller jars at this point because I use only small amounts at a time and don’t like to deal with a whole big quart jar each time I need just a spoonful. This sauce will keep in the refrigerator or a root cellar for a year or more. I’ve had some fermentations go for over 2 years in my root cellar and they are pretty tangy, but perfectly fine to eat.

Common Questions Answered

How long will this hotsauce keep?

If you keep the hotsauce at a temperature below 55 degrees Farenheit, it will keep for at least a year, I’ve had fermented foods keep over 2 years just fine, even going over 55 degrees sometimes in my rootcellar. It will keep fermenting even at cold temperatures, but very slowly and it won’t turn bad unless you use a dirty spoon in it or if you don’t keep a tight sealed lid on it to keep undesirable things out. You can also vacuum seal the jar if you like.

Do I have to refrigerate this fermented hot sauce?

No, but it won’t keep as long at room temperature. If you have a cellar, you can keep it in a root cellar for a very long time too. If you don’t, it is best to keep it in the refrigerator if you want it to last for a year or two. But if you forget and leave it on the table for few days, it’s fine. You’ll wake up the bacteria and they will get more active again, which might make your sauce more tangy.

What is the best temperature for fermenting?

Around 72-80 degrees is a good temperature for fermenting. Too low, and it might not get going fast enough and the lactic acid will not form to keep the undesirable bacteria from multiplying. If it’s too hot, it could over ferment quickly and can turn mushy. So try to keep it around the ideal temperature until it’s ready to go into cold storage.

How do I know if my hotsauce turned bad?

If you see a bit of mold growing on the top or around the rim, you can just clean the rim or skim it off. It is just surface mold. However, if the whole surface is covered with hairy mold, I would toss it. Likely the fermentation is still good underneath, but the mold will taint the flavor. It makes a great compost accelerator though, so it’s not a complete waste.

If your ingredients smell bad, or if they turned mushy and slimy, then it is time to toss it too. Something went wrong and it can happen. You’ll know if it’s bad, so if the ingredients aren’t mushy and it looks good and smells good, don’t be afraid to eat it.

What I can do with the melon rinds and cavities?

You can compost them, or feed them to the pigs, they love both. The chickens will love the cavities but not the rinds. My billy goat loves the cavities with the seeds. You can compost them or side dress plants in the garden bed for nutrients. My favorite thing to do is to toss them all into a jar and add a little sugar and water and make vinegar. This will be great for salad dressing, or for rinsing your hair, or any other application that calls for vinegar.

In summary

I hope you get to try my fermented hot sauce recipe. It’s full of vitamins, immune supporting properties, and probiotics and you can even use it as a medicinal food during cold and flu season.

Use it on crackers with a creamy cheese, top your steak or fish with it, top an omelette or scrambled eggs with it. Try it with some pulled pork or splatter a bit over a salad for some zing! You can dip vegetables or fruit in it too.

Here is my favorite way to eat this sweet and spicy fermented hot sauce: I love a piece of Kamut and Einkorn Sourdough Bread topped with goat cheese and a thin layer of hot sauce. Then I thickly sprinkle it with chopped basil and hopefully I’ll find a garden-fresh tomato outside to eat with it. Yum!

What ever way you want to serve it or eat it, it will make a great spicy and sweet treat. Let us know in the comments below if you make this fermented hot sauce and your favorite way to use it. 

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Other fermented recipes you might like:

Fermented Salsa – Delicious zesty salsa. Preserve fresh produce at the height of the season to enjoy during the garden down times. It’ll bring back memories of summer and tastes of fresh vegetables, while brimming with all the stored vitamins, nutrients and probiotics!

Fermented Salsa Verde – Try this bright and fresh tasting green salsa. It’s so good on your grilled meats, with baked potatoes, as a dip or condiment, as part of a salad dressing, and with any Mexican dishes!

Fermented Garlic – Lacto-fermented garlic paste is kind of a special food. It’s the ultimate convenience food and health supplement. But besides that, it gets better as it ages. Just like a fine wine.

Fermented Cucumber Pickles – How to ferment your excess of cucumbers to enjoy all year long and with the added benefit of improving your gut health. 

Fermented Cherry Tomatoes – This is a tasty way to quickly preserve an abundance of cherry tomatoes for a tasty snack during the cold season. Give your immune system a boost when it needs it!

Fermented Vegetables – How to ferment your summer’s bounty to enjoy it all year long. They are full of probiotics and are great for your gut health. Learn the basic skill of fermenting any kinds of vegetables and get the science behind it too.

Fermented Basil Paste – Keep a jar of this in your refrigerator all year, to season your italian dishes. Preserve not only the herb, but also its vitamins and minerals, the aroma and pungent basil flavor. It’s one of my favorite ways to preserve basil

Make your own Ginger Beer with wild fermentation. The traditional way to make this fizzy, tasty soft drink that will knock your socks off with flavor and boost your health too. 

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Wide mouth funnel
Immersion Blender
Blender
Vitamix
Scale
Fermentation tops
Airlocks
Redmond’s Real Salt
Himalayan pink salt
Celtic sea salt
Bormioli Fido Jar
Glass weights
Ceramic weights
Acacia wood tamper
Lime juice