Fermented Hatch Green Chile Sauce with Cacao and Garlic

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My favorite hot sauce to make every August is fermented hatch green chile sauce. I incorporate cacao and garlic for a unique and vibrant flavor. This hot sauce goes great on tacos, burgers, burritos, and enchiladas.

Fermented Hatch Chile Sauce

At the beginning of August, I love seeing the Hatch Chiles arrive at the store. Their seasonal arrival means it’s time to make one of my all-time favorite hot sauces.

This hot sauce is something I threw together one summer after buying a bunch of chiles at the farmer’s market. It turned out so good that I had to write the recipe down from memory to make every year. My favorite part of this recipe is the incorporated cacao powder. It adds a good bit of beneficial, bioavailable magnesium.

Fermented Hatch Green Chile Sauce with Cacao and Garlic

Here are all of the ingredients you need to make this recipe:

• 300 grams hatch chilies (hot, mild, or medium. whichever you prefer)
• 30 grams garlic
• 50 grams white onion
• 10 grams cacao powder
• 28 grams sea salt
• 400 grams water

Are Hatch Chiles Spicy?

Hatch chiles come in a range of spice levels. Usually, you can find four kinds— mild, medium, hot, and extra hot. I enjoy mixing different spice levels in fermentation to get the best flavors.

For this recipe, I used half hot and half mild.

How to Make Fermented Hatch Chile Sauce

Making hot sauce is easy! It may initially seem intimidating to ferment hot sauce, but you’ve got this. Just follow the steps and be patient. In about four weeks, you’ll have the best hot sauce ever!

If this is your first time learning to make hot sauce, I suggest sticking to the recipe strictly. If you are an experienced fermenter, you can experiment a little bit by changing up the pepper varieties. Since hot hatch chiles aren’t always available and in season, you can evenly substitute for another kind of pepper. If you want to use, say, Anaheim peppers instead of hatch chiles, just evenly sub the weight of peppers.

Hatch Green Chile Sauce Fermentation Timeline

24 – 48 hours: All contents in the jar should be submerged beneath the brine. At this time, there are still Gram-negative bacteria and possible pathogens present.

48 hours – 5 days: After 48 hours, you should start to see lots of bubbles being produced. This is when the ferment enters stage two of vegetable fermentation. Leuconostoc bacteria begin to thrive, and Gram-negative organisms die off.

5 – 10 days: The bubbles in the brine will decrease as the ferment leaves stage two and enters stage three. The ferment will become cloudy, the color will change, and a pleasant sour smell will develop. You should also recognize garlic and pepper smells. Lactobacillus species begin to thrive at this time.

10 – 21 days: Next, Lactobacillus make up most or all of the microbial population. They produce copious amounts of lactic acid, making the fermented chiles smell even more pleasantly sour. This is when the vegetable mixture becomes preserved.

21 – 28 days: This is when you want to smell and taste test. Wait for the peppers smell and taste as you like, and then blend and refrigerate when you find the smell and taste most pleasant! We like ours best when we blend up the hatch green chile sauce and refrigerate at about 25 days.

Hatch Green Chile Sauce Fermenting Instructions

During the first few days of fermentation, carbon dioxide and bubbles will be produced. Sometimes, mason jars will become very full of liquid, and this liquid can seep out. You will need to burp the jar.

• When burping the jar, remove the lid and tamper everything back down using a clean tamper or spoon. Make sure everything, including the weight, is still submerged below the brine. You can also rinse off the lid daily to keep things clean.

Always Trust your sense of smell: In the beginning, fermenting hatch chile can smell funky (but in a good way). When fermentation is finished, the chiles should smell pleasantly sour and have hints of garlic and onion.  Never eat anything that smells repulsive or yeasty. 

Never eat anything that has mold growing on it. By following directions, you should not encounter this problem. 

Note that most vine-growing vegetables that are wild fermented will have something called pellicle growth. This is completely normal for what I call “vine-growing” vegetables (anything that grows from a blossom) as long as it does not look furry, pink, blue, black, green, or magenta. 

A safe pellicle is normally opaque, off-white, and kind of crinkly. If you have surface growth like this, it’s a harmless mixed colony of wild yeasts. It’s not “mold.” You can skim it off the top and still eat your peppers. See the two pictures below as a reference for what a normal pellicle looks like.

How to Avoid a Pellicle

I used an approximate 3.5% total (w/w) salt concentration for this recipe. I usually avoid pellicle growth completely by increasing the salt concentration of the pepper fermentation.

Peppers can be fermented with up to 10% salt concentration. That’s way too salty, in my opinion. But I’ve tried many fermented peppers at 6% total salt concentration, and I’ve never had pellicle growth with a total salt concentration of 6%. The yeasts simply do not tolerate such high salt concentrations.

This, of course, is a much saltier pepper ferment. However, the hatch green chiles come out more sour, too, and this is perfect for hot sauce! I like to blend the higher-salt fermented peppers with apple cider vinegar for a perfect, full-flavored hot sauce.

Supplies You Need to Ferment

• 16 oz Wide Mouth Mason Jar
• Fermentation Weight to fit your mason jar
• Standard Metal Mason Jar Lid (this can rust in the presence of salt)
• OR Rust Free Plastic Lid
• Unrefined Sea Salt
• Scale
• Mixing Bowl 
• or you can use a Weck Jar (without the gasket; only use the clips to secure the lid)
• Blender (this is necessary for puréeing the fermented hatch chiles. If you don’t have a blender, a food processor works well too).
• Funnel
• Glass bottle or jar for the finished hatch green chile sauce

Blending Hatch Green Chile Sauce

After about four weeks, your hatch chiles will be done fermenting. To make the hot sauce, blend the contents of the fermentation jar in a blender until smooth. You won’t use all the brine for blending and can incorporate vinegar to balance the flavor.

You can also strain the pulp out of the blended sauce for a thinner hot sauce. However, I love to leave all the pulp in for a thick hot sauce.

More Fermentation Recipes to Try

• Fermented Pepperoncini Peppers Recipe
• Pepper Fermentation Recipe: Learn How to Ferment Any Type of Pepper
• Fermented Lemon Pepper Fries Fried in Duck Fat

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