All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.
This is Highly Recommend, a column dedicated to what people in the food industry are obsessed with eating, drinking, and buying right now.
Lately, I’ve been getting my kicks from hot sauce. My fridge door overflows with bottles of vinegary Valentina, chunky sambal oelek, and Siete’s neon orange habanero hot sauce, and I love all my spicy children equally. But lately, I’ve been playing favorites with Green Widow. The aptly named green hot sauce from Hudson-area fermenters Poor Devil Pepper Co. is raw, herbaceous, and decidedly alive.
Green Widow is part of a renaissance of probiotic hot sauces hitting the refrigerated section—and yes, these unpasteurized sauces do have to stay in the fridge all the time. Just like Greek yogurt or kimchi, each bottle is packed with good-for-you bacteria that can’t survive on the shelf.
All of Poor Devil Pepper Co.’s hot sauces start with locally grown peppers and vegetables, which are blended down, mixed with salt, and sealed in an anaerobic environment. The microbes naturally found in vegetables kick-start the fermentation process, which continues for a few months until the mixture is ready to be blended, strained, and sold. (Poor Devil is currently working on dehydrating the leftover mash into zero-waste chile flakes, hopefully to be sold in 2021.)
As an editor at Healthyish, I obviously love eating hot sauce in the name of gut health, but the real benefits of fermentation come down to flavor. Raw hot sauce has a crisp, flavorful finish that lets the natural vegetal flavor and heat shine through. Mild, it’s not. Green Widow is fierier than any jalapeño-based hot sauce I’ve tried, with a lingering heat that plays off warm, earthy cumin and bright lime juice. “Fermentation shows the true power of a jalapeño,” says cofounder Jared Schwartz, who notes that using unseeded peppers and not cooking down the sauce adds to the final punch.
Over the past few months, I’ve added Green Widow to everything from breakfast sandwiches to fish tacos, and recently, I’ve taken to adding a few dashes to simple bowls of brothy beans. It adds a fresh vegetal flavor when my fridge doesn’t have any herbs to spare—a welcome bit of brightness when the sun sets at 4 p.m.