When David Boswell, Executive Chef, Tippecanoe Lake CC
When David Boswell, Executive Chef of Tippecanoe Lake Country Club in Leesburg, Ind., first began fermenting hot sauce, it was a home-based, summer project.
“I started fermenting at my house with my wife and family, and it was a good way to get our kids to eat carrots and other types of vegetables,” he notes. “And then I took it to the workplace; I thought it would be fun to try it here [as], something [the members] haven’t had before.”
Club + Resort Chef (C+RC): Can you share more about the process of offering your fermented hot sauce at the club?
David Boswell (DB): Last year, I was just giving it away to the members who are ‘foodies,’ and it got quite a buzz, so they asked me to bring it back. So my my first batch, I thought it’d be fun to bottle it and put our logo on the bottles, and then the salt is actually a byproduct from the fermentation. I pass all the juice from off the skins of the chilies, then I dehydrate those skins, then combine it with salt and dehydrate it again, and it turns into this amazing flavored, fermented chili salt. So that’s the package deal we’re offering our our members this year.
The members are thrilled to have it. It’s not a typical hot sauce you would find on most shelves. I use no vinegar, just lactose fermentation technique and time—time and temperature. So it’s all natural product, no additives whatsoever, except salt and water.
C+RC: And do you use it on any dishes as well?
DB: I mix it into corn puree. So I had a dish on it was a scallop dish that I was doing (pictured below) with charred corn and corn milk puree. And I finished the corn milk puree on the pickup with butter and our house-fermented hot sauce. And I have another dish I’m using the chili salts on: charred shishito peppers with tofu mustard, finished with a sesame toasted nori dust. I finish that off with the fermented chili salt.
C+RC: Can you talk a little bit about the flavor and how that’s impacted by the fermentation?
DB: I find Fresno chillies to give the richest color and the best flavor profile. Fresno chilies have a slight floral flavor, as well as their their given chili flavor.
I long-ferment mine. A lot of people who do this ferment only for a week or two. So I start off by chopping up the Fresno chilies in a robot coupe, to not quite to a paste, but where it’s all pretty fine. And then I take a simple brine, which is two tablespoons of salt to one quart of water, and I poured over the chili mix, then I put it in Mason jars and let it ferment. This time around, it fermented for three months. After three months, I go by taste and aroma to see if it’s ready.
Then I separate the juice and the flesh through a chinoise and ferment the juice. It depends on the product; each one has a its own life. I fermented for another month, maybe a month and two weeks, then I finish it with a little bit more salt and kosher salt. It turned out amazing, probably my best batch, and the color was just phenomenal this time around.
C+RC: Have you made a lot of changes to the recipe over the time since you started?
DB: I’ve just experimented with different peppers. I started off in my own garden with Serranos, waiting until they turned red, Fresno chilies, jalapeños, waiting until they turn red. I tried that one, and then I did those three combinations, and added habanero and and Ghost Chili pepper to it, and that was phenomenal. It had a great flavor, but it it was hot beyond belief, so I don’t do that one anymore. I I stick with the Fresno chilies. The members really like that favorite profile, so I stick with that recipe.
C+RC: Do you have a culinary garden at your club?
DB: Not yet. We’re working on it—maybe next season.
C+RC: What advice would you give to a chef who wants to start trying to make their own fermented hot sauce?
DB: There are so many great fermentation books out there. So I would start with that because it’s not just hot sauce—you could ferment anything that grows outside. That was kind of eye-opening to me on my on my journey of fermentation.
But when it comes to hot sauce, specifically, what I found most people get nervous about is if they find a white substance on top. So I would say that they don’t need to be afraid of that. Fermentation has been around since ancient times, and usually the white substance on top is just natural yeast that’s dying during the fermentation process, so that could just be scraped off. But if the temperature gets a little bit too warm in your fermentation environment, it might grow little spots of white mold, and again, white molds not bad for you. If you have blue mold or black mold, then your your project’s over. But don’t get weirded out if there’s a little bit of [white] mold on there.
C+RC: What else have you tried fermenting at your club?
DB: I fermented cherries, peaches. We make our own kimchi in-house. We make our own sauerkraut, carrots. I love doing all these projects and keeping them in Mason jars. It adds a great atmosphere in our kitchen, and brightens things up, and hopefully inspires our younger cooks to get involved in fermentation. I’ve fermented turmeric, fennel and cauliflower. Brussels sprouts are great to ferment. I’m fermenting tomatoes as well.
C+RC: Do you make any other types of sauces?
DB: [I’m working on a] naturally fermented tomato sauce that we’re going to use for pasta, and it’s going to be served cold with like udon or soba noodles. Heating it destroys all the probiotics and natural enzymes and vitamins. So this is a great way to keep all that in your dish, serve it as a cold noodle-inspired dish. That’s another great thing I would say to people who want to ferment: It’s a it’s a great way to ingest probiotics, so it’s super healthy.
C+RC: Do you sell other foods or other packages like that to the membership?
DB: Just this year, I started our housemade, all-natural ice cream and sorbet program. We bought a countertop ice cream maker, and I started making ice cream for the restaurant. Currently, we’re selling strawberry ice cream with balsamic macerated strawberries, vanilla bean ice cream, milk chocolate ice cream, and then we have our sorbets: raspberry, Meyer lemon, lime and strawberry.
It became our top seller for desserts, so we decided to start packaging it in branded containers and making it available to take home.
C+RC: How much do you charge for something like that, or for the hot sauce package?
DB: For the hot sauce package, we’re charging $25, just to recoup. Fresno chilies are pretty expensive; they run close to $8 a pound. That’s total weight. We’re just trying to recoup; we’re not trying to make much revenue. And then we have to recoup what we spend on the bottles and the branding, so the package of hot sauce, which is 12-ounce bottle, and the fermented chili salt, is one package.
For the ice cream, [the price] depends on what we put in it; the balsamic strawberry ice cream, we sell for $12 a quart, but the vanilla bean we sell for $10 a quart.
We don’t have a pastry chef or a pastry program, so I’m trying to come up with ways that I can enhance our menus with our contained space in the kitchen. Our ice cream program has been received better than I could have ever thought.
The membership have responded in such a positive way to everything that I’ve put on the menu and tried to do here. I’m very lucky and grateful to be here.
