Prickly Pear Fermented Hot Sauce Experiment

Added: 2026-05-08

[00:00:00]Hey guys, on a windy day late last fall, I finally had my very first ripe prickly pear fruit of the 2025 season. I've been anxiously watching this thing all season waiting for it to ripen so that I could try my hand at turning it into a hot sauce. I got my trusty barbecue tongs out to harvest it cuz these things do have some spikes and then it was off to the kitchen to decide what to put with this. So, I looked around in the garden as well as the fridge and found a few things that I thought would go well with the prickly pear and make a nice sauce.

[00:00:28]Starting with these poblano peppers. I know these are really small for poblanos. Like I mentioned, it was late in the season so these did not get very big. This is probably the equivalent of like two regular sized poblano peppers.

[00:00:40]These white fatalis on the other hand look great. I have four of them here and that should really bring the heat to this sauce. Got some garlic for a little flavor. This is seven cloves of garlic, but all small. Yellow onion and some cilantro to top it off. This will be a fermented sauce so I got some salt and my vacuum sealer because we're going to vacuum seal ferment this sauce. So, to start with the ferment, the first step was to give everything a rough chop and add it to the vacuum bag. And while I chop all this is as good of time as any to tell you that this recipe was not a knockout hit. More on that later, but I thought this was still worth sharing just to show you my vacuum seal fermentation process and maybe give you a few ideas. Our final ingredient to give the rough chop to was the prickly pear fruit itself. And as mentioned, this thing did have some spikes. I researched a few ways to get them off and what I settled on was just scraping the spikes off with a knife under running water so that they didn't fly everywhere in my kitchen. But, let me know if any of you guys have a good hack for removing all those pesky little spines. With them off, I was able to chop the top and bottom off this fruit and then go ahead and slice down the side before peeling all of the skin off.

[00:01:46]The skin was pretty tough, but beneath it the color of this fruit was amazing and it seems really juicy. Upon trying a little piece, it was really sweet and flavorful as well. Like all of our other ingredients, I then proceeded with a rough chop on this guy before adding it to our vacuum seal bag.

[00:02:03]With it being the final ingredient, once it was in there, I just gave everything a good mix before it was time to add the salt to our ferment.

[00:02:10]With most of my hot sauce ferments, I like to add 3 to 5% salt by weight to the ingredients. So, for this example, our ingredients weigh 338 g. 3% of that is just over 10 g. I went ahead and rounded up to 11 g of salt that I'm going to measure out here and then add to the bag before giving it a good mix.

[00:02:32]That's the last step before vacuum sealing this one. The bacteria that will do the fermenting are already living on the surfaces of these fruits and vegetables. So, we want to provide them a nice anaerobic environment where they'll thrive. Sometimes I do this by submerging the ingredients in brine, but the vacuum sealer is another great way to provide the anaerobic environment. It just sucks out all of the oxygen and you can see how dense this thing is once I've run it through. But, then it's just a waiting game. I put this one up in a cabinet and after only 2 days, here are some shots of it. It's really, really cool this bright fuchsia color that came from the prickly pears. I was hoping this would convey in the final sauce.

[00:03:09]But, you guys will see that in a little bit. That salt has really pulled a lot of moisture out of our ingredients. You can see all this juice. It's looking like a great environment for fermentation and we'll check on it in a few days. One week after sealing this thing, we have a very active ferment going on. All of those little bubbles coming up are bubbles of carbon dioxide caused by the microorganisms. They're producing this carbon dioxide bubbles as well as lactic acid. Lactic acid is what's going to preserve this sauce for us. And one full month after sealing this thing, you can see just how much carbon dioxide was produced by that bacteria. This thing is definitely no longer vacuum sealed and our ingredients look way different. They're all much softer and the color of that prickly pear fruit has really spread throughout this. Sure, it all has a very fermenty flavor now. I for sure smelled that when I opened it up and I checked the pH of it as well. The pH was around 3 and 1/2, which is perfect for preservation. So, that bacteria really did its job and all that's left on our end is to blend this thing up into a sauce.

[00:04:12]And that's really all the steps necessary for creating your own vacuum seal fermented hot sauce. This is really my process for trying new recipes.

[00:04:20]Sometimes they work out great, other times not. This one, I had some disappointments with. My first disappointment with this one was just the color of it. It had that awesome prickly pear color during the ferment, but once I blended it, it lost a lot of that and was more just brown. And then there was the bigger issue, the flavor of it. It tasted really basic. Had great heat with those white fatalis in this small volume of sauce. This stuff was really hot, but other than that, it just tasted kind of fermenty and earthy. I really didn't get any prickly pear flavor or sweetness. So, I decided to add a half cup of apple cider vinegar to it before blending it again. And this did sweeten it up some and make it better, but this sauce was still just nothing to write home about. So, I don't know what I would do if I tried it again. Maybe add some more prickly pear fruit. Maybe I let it ferment too long and the bacteria ate all of the sugar through this sauce. But, I really just wanted to show you guys my process and tell you it's okay to experiment. Not every one works out. Normally on my page, I experiment with the sauces several times before sharing a final final recipe. And I'm not going to give up on this either. That same cactus already has a lot of blooms this spring.

[00:05:29]So, I'm hoping for even more prickly pear fruit this year that I can add into a similar sauce. Take what I've learned and make something great. So, thank you guys for watching this one. I really hope you enjoyed it. Maybe it gave you some ideas and I'll see you on the next one.