Survey Says... | Bathroom Makeover | Recipe: Smoky Fermented Hot Sauce

Issue No. 49

Jul 23, 2020

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Hello friends. Like some of my favorite dessert recipes, I’m keeping this short and sweet. We made a survey about the newsletter, and we really hope you’ll take 3-5 minutes to fill it out. Your feedback will guide as we reflect on the work we’ve done in the past year and think about how the future of Sunshine + Microbes will look.

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In other news, I baked my first loaves of bread in the new kitchen, used power tools unsupervised, and impulse bought a very weird couch at a thrift store. Feeling very good about my recent move back home.

love,

Jackie

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Reduce, Reuse, Replace
Your bathroom deserves an upgrade

Now that my job is no longer paying my water bill (and also because of The Planet), I’m tricking out my bathroom with some water-saving features that even an appliance amateur like me can install. Everything I learned about plumbing gadgets I learned from Michael James Meier, so props to the mayor of Stuart (which, if you’re not in the know, was voted “best tasting drinking water” in 2019 by the Rural Water Association. Coincidence? I think not.).

If you want to be a conservation queen like me, head to the hardware store and pick up these water closet widgets:

Low Flow Shower Head
Your shower head can have it all. Great water pressure and multiple fancy spray settings, all without dumping gallons and gallons of water down the drain every minute. Just check the GPM (gallons per minute) on the packaging. The old shower heads in my house sent out 2 gallons of water per minute. My new ones gush just 1.3 GPMs. Not too shabby. If I take three 5 minute showers a week (which is more than enough for me. It’s science, baby!), I’ll save 546 gallons of water per year! All you need to do to install a new shower head is unscrew the old one with your bare hands and screw the new one on finger-tight!

Adjustable Toilet Flapper
This controls how much water the toilet uses per flush. It’s very simple to install and adjust in most standard toilets. YouTube is filled with tutorial videos that will walk you through the installation for whatever brand of flapper you purchase.

Sink Aerator
The bathroom sink doesn’t need to be a waterfall. Aerators screw right onto the tap and reduce the flow from 30-75 percent, depending on what you buy. Be sure to measure the diameter of the tap so you don’t have to make multiple trips to Home Depot like this gal.

Bidet
My love for bidets is well-trodden territory. But spraying your bum with water is also a water-saving hack. Manufacturing toilet paper requires a ton of water in the process, 37 gallons for a single roll according to Scientific American. So crazy, I know.
-jackie

Fresh Links

🛒Why cult-classic 'Supermarket Sweep' is the anti-food show worth watching right now | SF Chronicle

I have fond memories of lazing around on the couch after school watching people shop for food. I couldn’t get enough of the game show “Supermarket Sweep” (and its less memorable sister show “Shop ‘til You Drop”). And now — 90s nostalgia ahoy! — “Supermarket Sweep” is on Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Soleil Ho, another 90s kid and the San Francisco Chronicle’s food writer, describes all the things that made watching contestants dash around a fake grocery store so sublime. From the show’s appreciation of stay-at-home moms to its lack of pretension to the way it turned steering a grocery cart down the aisles into high drama, “Supermarket Sweep” is the best way to enjoy shopping during the pandemic. From the couch.

🌭Scientists Have Finally Calculated How Many Hot Dogs a Person Can Eat at Once | NY Times

Much to Jackie’s chagrin, U.S. sports leagues return today. With the lack of televised ball-tossing, the media had to find some competitions for waxing poetic. So why not a report on how many franks a person can down in one brief sitting? Inspired by the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest that takes place every July 4, a scientist attempted to calculate the “maximum number of hot dogs that a human could theoretically consume in 10 minutes.” According to science the answer is 83. Joey Chestnut, this year’s champ, consumed 75 hot dogs plus buns.

The article has plenty of fun facts about binging. The biggest limitation is how far the human stomach stretches. Animals don’t have this issue. For example, humans can eat only 7.5 hot dogs a minute compared to bears, which can do eight. A gray wolf eats the “equivalent of about 11 hot dogs per minute.” And a Burmese python “can consume up to 75 percent of its body weight in a single meal.” But who truly knows the limits of what humans can eat? Elite competitors in the Nathan’s contest have improved their hot dog ingesting capacity by 700 percent over the last 40 years. Yay sports!

😷Why This Restaurant Critic Isn’t Dining Out Right Now | NY Eater

Ryan Sutton got hit by covid-19 when the disease first began ravaging the states in March. He lost 10 pounds in a week during one of “the most traumatic medical experiences I’ve ever endured.” Now he has antibodies and restaurants in New York City are opening back up again, but he’s sticking to takeout.

He fears for the safety of restaurant workers and says the local health regulations are not enough to protect them. His words — that it’s not worth getting a margarita if you might send an uninsured waiter to the ICU — are sobering:

Whenever I do feel the urge to go out for a sit-down meal or drink, I think about how COVID-19 cases are increasing in the U.S. more than almost anywhere else in the world, with new infections now double what they were earlier in June. I think about how Texas and Florida are shutting down their bars, how California is shutting down Los Angeles dining rooms, and how revelers in Hell’s Kitchen and the West Village stand as closely together as at a mosh pit while drinking. I think about how scores of restaurant workers have died, and how those that have recovered are going back to work without knowing whether they’ll fall ill again.

Smoky Fermented Hot Sauce

Scrambled eggs, takeout pizza, fried rice, mac and cheese, roasted veg … are all improved with hot sauce. I don’t mean the stuff that makes your face sweat and your heart race and your brain fog over. Those are not culinary experiences I crave.

I want something with a balance of salty, sour, and umami flavors, and a kick of heat, just enough to wake up the palate a bit. I like to add chipotle peppers for some smokiness. This process takes a couple weeks, but it’s mostly hands off. And once it’s ready, you’ll have a shelf stable product to keep in the pantry forever. Although I doubt it will last very long, with all the meals you’ll be slathering it on.

Ingredients

A handful of hot peppers of choice, stems removed (I like red jalapeños)
2 ripe bell peppers (not the green ones) or a handful of sweet peppers, stems removed
3-4 chipotle peppers (dried or the canned ones in adobo sauce)
1 carrot
1 onion

4-6 garlic cloves, peeled
salt
fruit vinegar (like this)
cooking oil of choice
kitchen scale

step-by-step

Preheat oven to 450°F and lightly oil a baking pan. Remove skin and quarter onion. Cook onion in oven until charred — about 15 minutes.

Prep veggies by chopping into pieces that will fit in the blender. Be sure to use fresh veggies. Anything past its prime may encourage mold and yeast growth during fermentation.

Blend onion, garlic, carrot, and peppers until smooth. Taste for heat level. Not hot enough? Add more hot peppers. Too hot? Add another carrot or bell pepper.
Calculate salt. Find a jar that is about double the volume of the veggie purée (the jar should have plenty of headspace for weighing down the contents ). Place empty jar on scale, power on and tare so the scale reads 0 grams. Pour purée into jar and measure weight in grams. Multiply the weight by .02 (2 percent). This is the salt quantity for the hot sauce. (For example, if the purée weighs 300 grams, use 6 grams of salt.) Sprinkle salt on top of purée.
Weigh down contents of jar: Pepper purées can be very active during fermentation. Usually solids will separate from the liquid and rise to the top. They also have a tendency to grow kahm yeast in hot climates. The easiest and cleanest thing to do is to weigh down the contents with a Ziploc bag filled with water.

Open Ziploc bag, and make sure there are no leaks. put your fist inside, and press down onto the surface of the purée. Fold the outer edges of the bag over the sides of the jar. Fill bag with water. Ideally the weight of the water will be close to the weight of the purée, but eyeballing it is fine. Now place a rubber band around the top of the jar, which will keep the Ziploc bag in place.
Ferment: Allow jar to ferment at room temperature for 10-14 days (or longer!). Since this can be an active ferment, I recommend placing a kitchen towel underneath the jar to capture any spills. Also, the activity may push the water in the bag up and over the edge of the jar. Be sure to check often and add more water if necessary, so the purée is fully weighed down.
After fermentation, carefully remove the Ziploc bag. Blend fermented purée with an equal amount of fruit vinegar. This makes it shelf stable, plus the flavor is more complex with the acidity. Store in a tightly sealed bottle with very little headspace (the oxygen could potentially encourage mold growth). It will keep at room temperature indefinitely. If anxious about mold, the container can also be stored in the fridge. I have stored jars of hot sauce for well over a year in the pantry, and I’ve never experienced any mold growth.

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DOG FACT: Canno t be beat at chomp

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