A Hot Sauce Miracle
When it comes to food, there are places where some people just won’t go. I’m not talking about allergies or ethical choices. The word often used in the service industry is “aversions.” This is what people just sort of write off when they’re skimming a menu. I suppose almost everyone draws the line somewhere. My list of aversions, for better or worse, is very small. I generally stay away from sundried tomatoes, raisins, and artichokes. But even these foods can find a happy place for me if used a certain way. Oh yeah…I don’t like sour beer either.
Other folks have depressingly large lists.
“I don’t like fish.”
“I don’t like anything that tastes like curry.”
“Custards…gross.”
As someone who loves food but also tries to respect people’s preferences, I fall back on this idea: “You like what you like…that’s your palate…don’t let anyone tell you your tastes are somehow ‘wrong’.” That’s what I say, and I believe it.
But if I’m honest, there’s an internal struggle…
There are times when I secretly think, “Really?! You just categorically don’t like anything with beans?!” You can insert many of these aversions into that secret thought but, as a trained cook, I can’t shake the idea that, when people drop these little testimonials, they just haven’t had the right piece of fish, or a perfectly cooked pork chop, or a magnificent bowl of chowder. I feel like if I could just get them to my dinner table, I might be able to at least force an excited exception to whatever sweeping dismissal they’ve been carrying around for so many years. Clearly, I have some psychological issues to deal with here, not the least of which is my arrogance as a cook. But deep down, I feel like I just want everyone to celebrate as many foods as possible and it literally pains me to hear people make these sweeping dismissals. I see it as a burden and perhaps I can help them shed it.
One of the most painful food dismissals I hear all the time is of “spicy food.” Whether it’s Buffalo wings, Mexican salsa, a hot Indian curry, true Jamaican jerk, or any of a hundred delights from Southeast Asia, the culprit is almost always the same…the chili pepper. There are dozens of different chili peppers out there and I won’t attempt (nor am I qualified) to give a comprehensive lesson here. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, there’s endless, easily accessible material on the web. Maybe a few key takeaways:
The family of compounds that causes the heat in chilis is called capsaicinoids, which appear in different varieties and amounts depending on the chili.
The Scoville Test is universally accepted as the scale on which the heat of chili peppers is scored. For some perspective, jalapeños might come in at around 3,000 Scoville Heat Units (SHU), while a habanero can be 100 times hotter, and a ghost pepper can be almost 1,000 times hotter still.
Chili-heads continue to selectively breed and crossbreed chilis in an effort to create varieties that set a new bar for heat. Ed Currie is probably the most famous of these sadists, having developed the infamous Carolina Reaper and Pepper X.
Tapatio contestants from Jiangxi, eating hot chili pepper. (source: commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chilli_contestants_from_Jiangxi.png)
But what often gets lost in all this chatter about SHUs is the unique flavor found in different chili peppers. When you get away from bizarre events like chili hot baths or chili-eating contests where people are practically hospitalized, you can refocus on the immense contribution chili peppers have to cuisine across the globe. They are ubiquitous in cooking that falls outside the “Continental” traditions.
I really love spicy food. I love the flavors, I love the heat and the endorphins, I love everything about it. With that said, it’s important to note that I really don’t go after foods with these super high SHU scores. I’m not a heat freak. While I love real Jamaican jerk, I approach Scotch Bonnet peppers with extreme caution and doubt I’ll ever personally cook with them. The same goes for habaneros. I’ve eaten foods where a delicate touch of habanero was spicy, flavorful, and divine. But I’ve tried to eat other dishes with habanero that had me gasping and tapping out after a few bites. I don’t even think about more lethal capsacid bombs like ghost peppers or the scorpion butch. When I buy hot sauces, I look for super-hot peppers that are balanced with super-sweet ingredients like mango, pineapple, or coconut. With these sauces, you don’t actually taste the flavor of the sweet fruit, but that sweetness allows the flavor of the chili to come out from behind the insane heat. You can endure the heat just enough to get access to those amazing flavors.
Getting to my point…
I recently turned 50, and of course this was during a pandemic…so no big party for me. But my wife and our closer circle of local friends arranged to have people do a “drive-by birthday.” They all came to the house, parked in the street, and did about an hour of socially-distanced celebration. In honor of my appreciation of spicy food, kimchee martinis were served, which tasted as crazy as it sounds. One friend gave me a little gift bag and it had this in it…
While I was truly excited to try a new sriracha, I’ll be honest and say I didn’t read the label very closely. A couple of days later, I cracked it open and added a generous drizzle to some rice I was eating.
Sidebar…one of the fascinating things about chilis is the different specific ways your body reacts when they enter your mouth. Some chilis really go after the lips, or the tongue, or just cover your whole mouth. Wasabi and horseradish (not chilis but hot) shoot up your sinuses into the nose. When you eat serious chili peppers, like those habaneros I’ve been talking about, this strange sensation occurs in your throat almost instantly. There’s this weird “expanding” feeling…a slight pressure pushing outwards.
As soon as I tasted my rice, I felt that pressure in the throat. “Uh-oh.”
I paused…waiting to get blasted by some serious chili pepper insanity. The heat level rose…hotter…hotter…I braced for impact!
And then, right when I was sure I’d be overwhelmed, the heat settled for a second and then fell away. That first taste was seriously hot, but somehow it backed down like a wave retreating back into the ocean. What it left behind was the true glorious flavor of a chili I had never tasted. I grabbed the bottle to see what the heck was going on and saw the answer. A chili I would never voluntarily eat was at the core of this hot sauce miracle…the ghost pepper. I don’t know how Kitchen Garden Farm does it, I don’t know if it’s the recipe, the processing, or if they’ve toned down their peppers through selective cultivation. Whatever it is, the end result is magnificent and this ghost pepper sriracha is like no hot sauce I’ve ever experienced. If you like hot sauce, you’ll do yourself a favor by ordering this on-line as soon as possible.
https://kitchengardenfarm.com
As a small postscript, I went to the farm’s website and ordered a bunch of items to be delivered to the house. You should do the same. The habanero sriracha was very tasty, but surprisingly lacking in heat. The jar of smoked paprika is insanely good. One item that was incredibly delicious was the pickled veggie mix they call Giardiniera. This was delicious as a snack on its own, but I was mourning the fact that it wasn’t the summertime grill season. Serving this mix of pickled veggies in a bowl as a side dish for char-grilled red meat with a big, fruity red wine is going to be a trio made in heaven.
Enjoy!
