Hot Sauce!: Techniques for Making Signature Hot Sauces, with 32 Recipes to Get You Started; Includes 60 Recipes for Using Your Hot Sauces

210 Pages·2012·3.13 MB·English

by  Jennifer Trainer Thompson

Hot Sauce!
TECHNIQUES FOR MAKING SIGNATURE HOT
SAUCES
Jennifer Trainer Thompson
acknowledgments

A whole lot of shaking’s going on with a book like this. A hot-felt thanks to my
delightful recipe tester (and sometime developer) Jody Fijal, Storey creative
director Alethea Morrison, editor Sarah Guare, as well as my partner in heat: Joe
Thompson.

The mission of Storey Publishing is to serve our customers by
publishing practical information that encourages
personal independence in harmony with the environment.
Edited by Margaret Sutherland and Sarah Guare
Art direction and book design by Alethea Morrison
Text production by Liseann Karandisecky
Cover photography by © Tara Donne, except for author’s photo by Jennifer
Mardus
Interior photography by © Tara Donne, except as noted on page 188
Photo styling by Martha Bernabe
Food preparation by Jody Fijal
Color map, page 14, by © John Coulter Indexed by Christine R. Lindemer,
Boston Road Communications
The recipes Tomato Ketchup, page 124, and Shrimp and Sausage
Jambalaya, page 157, are reprinted with permission from Tabasco: An
Illustrated History by Shane K. Bernard and Paul C.P. McIlhenny.
© 2012 by Jennifer Trainer Thompson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written
permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief
passages or reproduce illustrations in a review with appropriate credits; nor may
any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or other — without written permission from the publisher.
The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our
knowledge. All recommendations are made without guarantee on the part of the
author or Storey Publishing. The author and publisher disclaim any liability in
connection with the use of this information.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
TK
We have the go-ahead from Jen to circ without it.
CONTENTS

PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
History
Types of Hot Sauces
Working with Chiles and Other Ingredients
Recipes for Making Hot Sauces
Recipes for Cooking with Hot Sauces
I Needa Bebida (Drinks)
Salsas, Dips & Sauces
Small Foods
Tacos & Morning Food
In a Stew
’Que
APPENDIX
Getting into the Hot Sauce Business, Just in Queso
RESOURCES
INDEX
PREFACE

Perhaps no other food in history has inspired such a cult following —
fanaticism, really. Hot sauce is good for you. It’s hot. It’s funny. It’s obscene.
It’s flavorful. It’s addictive. Can you imagine people speaking of mustard with
such passion? Creating olive oil labels with such hilarity? Driving miles out of
their way on a road trip for, say, pickles?
My own personal trail of flame started like many: a chance encounter with an
unmarked bottle. Four months out of college, I hitched a ride as crew on a
Hinckley Bermuda 40 heading south for the winter from Mount Desert Island,
Maine, to the British Virgin Islands. (For armchair sailors, that’s like being
asked to drive a vintage Ferrari the length of the Amalfi Coast.) And I got paid
for it. We sailed our way down the rocky New England coast, rocketed on an 11-
knot breeze past Asbury Park, snaked down the Intracoastal Waterway, and then
headed to sea from West Palm Beach. Two days out, our mast stay broke, and
we were forced to land on San Salvador (not the Central American capital of El
Salvador, but rather the tiny Bahamian island that Columbus landed on in 1492).
Tropical, isolated, and with no discernable tourism industry, San Salvador had
one pay phone (which was out of service; this was before cell phones) and
several dirt-floor bars along the beach that served food. After taking our first
shower in days, we headed for the bar, which had Bob Marley and every Rolling
Stones song known to man on its outsized jukebox. It was heaven. We ordered a
round of rum punches and fritters, and when they arrived with no tartar sauce, I
doused my food liberally with the only condiment on the table: an innocuous-
looking yellow sauce in a ketchup bottle. Having been at sea, I was hungry for
fried food and wolfed down the first few bites. And it was then and there that I
discovered Scotch bonnet peppers.
At first my mouth felt hot, then the heat started billowing, then I thought it
would tear the roof off the top of my mouth. My friends, who had sailed these
seas before, howled with laughter as tears streamed down my cheeks and beads
of sweat collected on my brow. But after the scorching heat came the taste of the
hot pepper sauce — loads of fruity, curried, tropical flavor that danced and sang
its way through my food. I was in awe (that is, when I could speak again). Once
I got past the pain, it tasted rather good.
Soon I was shaking hot sauce on almost all foods, from pizza to rice and
beans. I did several more boat deliveries and quickly learned the beauty of hot
sauce on a boat: With limited galley space, hot sauce is an efficient all-around
condiment and substitute for a shelf of spices, and it dresses up everything from
chowder to chow mein. I was startled to discover that hot sauce adds flavor, not
just heat (although that’s good, too). I was hooked.
A tenth-generation Yankee, I felt a long way from my childhood, where the
only hot sauce in the house was a sketchy-looking old bottle of Tabasco sauce
that was relegated to the liquor cabinet, brought out judiciously on special
occasions for Bloody Marys.
We sailed to various islands in the British Virgin Islands, and I noticed that
most bars, restaurants, and roadside stands had their own brand of “hot pepper
sauce,” as it’s called there, reflecting the individual predilections of their makers
as much as the colonizing influences that shaped the culinary heritage of the
West Indies.
After a few more deliveries, I packed a dozen sauces (several of which
exploded in my suitcase) as gifts for friends, flew north, and settled into life on
the island of Manhattan, where I got a job as a lowly editor’s assistant at Simon
& Schuster. I continued to douse hot sauce on just about everything (one’s first
New York City apartment is comparable in size to a galley kitchen — if you’re
lucky), and went to work on my brilliant career, not thinking about them further.
It wasn’t until seven years later, when I began working with a friend on a
book about cooking on boats, that hot sauces came back into focus in my life.
The Yachting Cookbook rekindled my love affair with hot pepper sauces, as did
the fact that I’d begun to spend time on the Spanish island of Vieques and had
come to know the makers of Isla Vieques Condiment Company, who bottled
their wonderful sauces in discarded rum flasks.
In 1991, I approached three New York publishers to write a book about hot
sauces. They all told me that no one would buy it (too obscure, too spicy, too
weird . . . what’s hot sauce?) and to concentrate instead on salsa. Salsa, of
course, was trucking past ketchup as America’s #1 condiment, but since three
culinary icons were already writing salsa books, that didn’t interest me.
By then I was deep into hot sauce. On trips to New Mexico, Louisiana, and
the Caribbean, my husband, Joe, and I collected and compared brands: not only
the traditional southern sauces but also obscure and regional concoctions whose
names — 911, Inner Beauty, Bessie’s Soul Sauce — suggest the obsession,
humor, and nirvana that hot sauces induce. By then, I had amassed a large
collection of sauces and found that when guests came for dinner, I couldn’t get
them out of my pantry; they’d just stand and stare at the labels of the bottles on
my shelves, laughing. There was Last Rights, featuring a deceased chile pepper
in a coffin; Capital Punishment (“legal in all 50 states”), which illustrated the
same chile in an electric chair; Inner Beauty; Hellfire & Damnation; and my all-
time favorite: I Am on Fire Ready to Die.
In my travels, I discovered that hot sauces have a passionate following. It’s
not as though you sample one and say, “Oh, that’s nice, now I think I’ll return to
bland food.” I met a couple who takes only hot sauce vacations, from Avery
Island to the Yucatán. I found a guy who papered his basement walls with hot
sauce labels. My Federal Express carrier introduced me to a bar in the
Adirondacks that serves a blistering hot sauce called Armageddon, which is so
popular that even in the winter, when the place is accessible only by
snowmobile, the bar is packed. One small California publisher was intrigued,
and Hot Licks, the first book on hot sauces, was born.
Interestingly, the flourishing of hot sauces is in some ways a precursor to the
locavore movement. Often they are unique local products. They are easy to
bottle and funky. They are simple to make, bearing the individual characteristics
of chiles and spices, not to mention the whims of their makers. Prepared in small
batches, hot sauces often feature ingredients from the maker’s garden, farm, or
island, or they reflect regional influences. Many have no preservatives. At the
end of the fall harvest, people can their tomatoes and bottle their chiles. They
connect us to our food source, both where we live and where we visit. They help
us support both our local economy and that of the people we meet in our travels.
A lot’s been shaking in the past 20 years. Hot sauces have gone from an
obscure, eccentric cult item to a recognized spicy food category, part of a $5
billion condiment market. Chileheads have come out of the closet. Hot sauce
makers have come, and gone, and come again. The Internet has changed the way
people buy, sell, and collect sauces. The hot sauce market is a bit like Silicon
Valley after the dot-com bubble burst: It’s still there, as interesting as ever, but
different. The first hot sauce shop, which opened in Boston in 1988, closed, and
more than a decade afterward its founder — having tasted thousands of sauces
— started bottling her own Gypsy Juice sauce in 2011.
“I made it in deli containers for two years,” explained Lisa Lamme, who had
at least 15 minutes of fame in 2000 when she insured her palate for $1 million,
“but I just couldn’t keep up with demand.”
The world of hot sauce has segued from hardcore chileheads and people
“really into” hot sauce to a broader food audience, the result of America’s
changing demographics, an overall trend toward eating well, and the fact that
more Americans are embracing spicy foods. “In the beginning, we saw gungho
people who were having fun with hot sauces they’d never seen before,”
reminisced Chip Hearn, founder of Peppers, which was one of the first and
largest hot sauce shops, with more than 3,000 products. “It was us finding them
and them finding us. Now sauces have become mainstream and a way to pair
foods. Instead of calling and asking what’s hot, they’re calling and saying ‘What
sauce should I eat with this or that?’ We still sell a lot of the basic vinegary
sauces — they are good with oysters — but people want to know what else they
can do with sauces.”
Many people are shaking and cooking with hot sauces, making their own
sauces, trading and bottling sauces. It’s a big landscape, more fascinating than
ever.
Come and see.
INTRODUCTION

Some people love hot sauces for the heat, and the heat is indeed the source of
the magic, but once you cross that threshold, you discover a world of flavor,
strongly influenced by the choice of chiles and other ingredients. Though I love
the riveted attention demanded by the fire of a good sauce, the more subtle
strength of this adaptable condiment lies in the range of flavors that come out
under, over, with, and after the heat.
Hot sauces are also incredibly good for you: They speed up your metabolism,
which burns more calories, aids digestion, and helps prevent blood clots. Some
are salt-free, offering a way to eliminate salt in dishes without sacrificing flavor.
Chiles are a good source of potassium, as well as being dense in vitamins A, B,
C, and E; flavonoids; and iron, magnesium, niacin, riboflavin, and thiamin.
Green chiles have twice the vitamin C found in the equivalent weight of oranges,
and red chiles are a better source than carrots of vitamin A, which is essential to
protecting skin and strengthening eyesight. Indeed, Spanish sailors took chiles
on voyages in the sixteenth century to ward off scurvy, and they ate two roasted
peppers for dessert each day in the hope of improving their vision.
In pre-Columbian times, Native Americans used chiles to help with childbirth,
coughs, ear infections, and sore throats. Chiles were so precious in Peru that
pods were exchanged as currency; as late as the 1950s, you could still buy items
in the plaza of Cusco with chile pods.
In addition to health benefits, hot sauces also enliven food. Especially popular
south of the equator, hot pepper sauces and chiles go well with corn, beans, rice,
and vegetables, and they relieve the monotony of a starchy diet. Increasingly,
people in the United States are open to these new flavors, embracing ethnic
influences. Culinary regionalism is breaking down (you see this especially with
hot sauces) as people move here and there, taking their spices with them and
incorporating them into the local cuisine.
Hot sauces also feel good. Like sex and running marathons, chiles can induce
a radiant sense of well-being. The source of this physiological reaction is the
capsaicin, a chemical produced at the stem end of the chile’s placenta. As
capsaicin travels from the chile’s inner sanctum to your own, it triggers a series
of chemical events: First the chemical excites the pain-detecting nerves in your
mouth, nose, and throat; thus awakened, they dispatch a pain messenger to the