Hawke Sauces

In 2021, my father-in-law, Hector López Planchart, passed away.

To honor his love of all things living and natural, and in an homage to his terreno in Venezuela where he would escape the stresses of the city, sipping cold beer in a hammock under a mango tree, I converted some of the grass in our backyard to a small garden area, complete with a pergola under the maple tree to hang a hammock. Maple trees are not mango trees, but they share enough similarities to make it work (alphabetical, hue-related, and shade-producing properties come to mind.) I planted several small crops, including a few jalapeño plants.

By October, the cold New England winter had started to set in, and I realized that we had a whole lot of now-red jalapeños that were about to rot if I didn’t find a way to use them. I looked up a recipe for Sriracha sauce and tried to make it, but, being a fan of smoked foods, I put about 80% of the jalapeños on the smoker, over local maple wood that I gathered at the park after a big storm. I compiled the other ingredients (salt, sugar, and garlic only), mixed them together in my kitchen, and put them in a glass jar covered with cloth.

I fermented the sauce for about two weeks, stirring daily, watching the mass rise and eventually fall from the proliferation of lactic acid bacteria (the good kind) and the production of carbon dioxide. The smell transformed from an olfactory pepper bomb to something much more complex, and the small tastes I snuck revealed that magic was happening in that jar.

By the time the sauce was ready, I was hooked. I took it to a gathering with friends, and it disappeared.

Over the course of the next two years, the Hawke Sauce would see two main evolutions:

• One, a series of recipes testing different varieties of chiles in different proportions, the additions of other spices, varying fermentation times and methods, and so on. As of this writing (July 11, 2023), we have produced 32 batches of sauce, all with different recipes.
• Two, a shift from creating the bulk of the sauces with peppers purchased from grocery stores to a full-scale backyard production of organic peppers. This has allowed us to grow the peppers we like the most, and has allowed us to ensure that what goes into the sauce is 100% natural and organic. No pesticides, no GMO anything – just seeds, dirt, sunlight, and lots of water. Our favorite variety of pepper happens to be one whose name we don’t know but that we call Ají Viejito, because we grow it from the seeds that my wife brought back from her father’s garden after he passed.

We hope you enjoy Hawke Sauce as much as we do. We put it on almost everything and haven’t yet found many savory dishes that don’t benefit from its unique combination of spice, smoke, tang, and sweetness.