Monday, April 11, 2011

Siddharth's Spicy Sauce

I love trying out different hot sauces. I think that hot sauce complements a lot of foods really well. It's tough to find exactly what you want in bottled sauces. The most common one, Tabasco, is not bad, but it's not the spiciest. Others are just too hot with no flavor. So, I decided to try and make my own. I wanted my sauce to have not just heat, but also layers of flavor. Here's what I came with:




Hot Sauce
10 Cloves Garlic
1 tbsp Olive Oil
3 Jalapenos
3 Serrano Peppers
3 Habanero Peppers
3 Chipotle Peppers
1.5 Cups White Vinegar
2 tbsp Salt

Chilies are beautiful in my mind. They vary in flavor and heat, and I customized my recipe to bring out the best qualities in the different types of peppers I used. The habanero is of course the one that packs the most heat in this recipe. It doesn't add much in the way of flavor though, so I also added jalapenos, which I think have an outstanding character beyond pure heat. The serranos are somewhere in the middle, and the canned chipotles add a great deal of smokiness. Garlic adds another layer of flavor. There's not much in the way of steps here. I just rough cut the peppers and added all of the ingredients above into my little bullet (a food processor would work too) and pureed:
The olive oil adds silkiness and helps the puree to be smooth. However, even after the blending, you are left with a chunky sauce. To remedy this, after pureeing, I sieved the mixture through a wire-mesh strainer.
At this point, the hot sauce is ready to eat! You can store it in the fridge pretty much indefinitely. To make a buffalo wing sauce, mix a cup of this hot sauce with 1 tbsp of butter on the stove top. The butter helps the hot sauce to adhere to meat.

2 comments:

  1. That does look very good. How was the taste?

    Mom

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  2. It tastes similar to some of the commercial hot sauces, but not quite as sour. Also, since I added salt to taste, it is more flavorful, and I don't using it as a dipping sauce for pretzels/chips on occasion in addition to the usual use on eggs and in buffalo sauces.

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