Yeah, I assume you are right about that. Which really just makes me want to find a way around Epidemic Sound even more.

Thanks, I'll see if any of them are actually similar (to my ears) and have contact information available.

I have not been able to find contact information for them. But I also don't care if it is their songs or something in the same style, so other artists would be totally fine.

Not the original poster, but hopefully still helps: I chopped the peppers very roughly. Essentially, I made sure that the liquid could reach the insides easily. For small peppers, I just halved them. For the larger ones, I took out the seeds. But I didn't do it perfectly. Some people say the seeds will make the sauce bitter. I didn't have that problem.

I have used a wild mix of peppers. A friends sent some from his garden, we had some on our plants, so we just threw them all together. I only used yellow, orange, and red in the batch, because I didn't want puke-colored hot sauce but technically, the color doesn't matter. I've used cayenne, habanero, elephant, thai, lila luzy, and another one I don't remember the name of. For a milder sauce, you can also add some non-spicy bell peppers.

You should have at least 1/2 of them fresh but can add dried ones to bulk things up. You need some fresh ones to get the fermentation going, though. Definitely, no moldy ones!

It's a lactic acid fermentation. Don't overthink it. There is a shitton of salt in hot sauce that keeps most things in check. The fact that the fermentation happens under brine (i.e. not in air) takes care of the rest. Of course, do your own research, but hot sauce is rather easy. I just clean the jars under hot soapy water, then again to get rid of any and all remnants of soap, and then fill with tap water. But I'm in Europe, so there's no chlorine in the water where I live. You might need to use another kind of water or do some water treatment (chlorine evaporates if you leave the water open somewhere).

After the fermentation, we used a blender to mix it all together with some vinegar. The brine is great for chicken. We didn't filter the final sauce, so ours had some seeds in it. It was great on egg and toast or in cooking. You can filter again at the end to get a smoother, more liquid hot sauce.

I, too, switched to Kagi a while back. I was highly skeptical because duckduckgo etc. never worked for me. Instead of finding crap, I found nothing instead. I tried kagi's 100 free searches, and decided that it's worth it. The feature that allows you to block, lower, or raise the appearance of website makes things a lot better after using it for a while.

I don't blindly accept cookies, and at some point noticed just how many health-related pages link to the same lock-out page after denying cookies. So many pages with different fronts that are all the same on the backend of things. Now, none of them even show up in my search results. Slowly, I can actually find useful results, even when searching for something in a field like health which seems to get beaten in nonsense/useful ratio only by few topics.