The Hot Sauce Cookbook (3 page)

Thai Chile (
prik ki nu
)

Tiny, skinny, pointed Thai peppers are the most common chile grown in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore; they are also popular in India. They are very hot and used in large quantities in the spicy cuisines of Southeast Asia. Thai chiles are also sold dried.

Habanero-Type Chiles

The habanero came to Mexico from the Caribbean and is named after Havana, Cuba. “Habanero” means “someone from Havana” (no tilde over the “n” please). The habanero is part of the
Capsicum chinense
species, which has a bewildering number of land forms and pod shapes, all known by different names. The Jamaican Scotch bonnet is a close cousin and so is the bullnose pepper of Trinidad and many others. Horticulturalists and the USDA often lump them all together under the term “habanero-type peppers” and, for the sake of simplicity, we will use that term in this book. The habanero-type pepper is known for its wonderful apricot-like flavor and aroma, but must be used in small quantities and handled with care due to its intense heat (see box on
safe handling instructions
).

DRIED CHILES

The dried chile peppers in this book are shown
here
, and listed below from mildest to hottest.

Ancho Chile

The dried form of the poblano chile, the ancho is very dark brown and wide (the word
ancho
means “wide” in Spanish). Anchos are the fleshiest of the dried chiles, and their pulp combines a little bitter flavor with a sweetness reminiscent of raisins. They are usually mild, although occasionally one will surprise you with its heat. Mulattos are closely related and a suitable substitute.

Guajillo Chile

Tapered with a smooth, shiny, reddish skin, the Mexican guajillo has a tart, medium-hot flavor. When soaked and puréed, it gives foods an orange color. Dried New Mexican long red chiles are also called guajillos in Mexican markets. Don’t make the mistake of substituting South American guajillos; the pulp from these is bright red when reconstituted, but the chiles have no heat.

Cascabel Chile

The “rattle chile” got its name because of the sound the loose seeds inside the dry mirasol chile make. The cascabel is typically round, but small bullet-shaped dried chiles are also common. The reconstituted chile is reddish in color, nutty in flavor, and medium-hot; it makes an excellent salsa.

Pasilla Chile

Long and skinny with a black, slightly wrinkled skin, the pasilla has a strong, slightly bitter but satisfying flavor and can range from medium-hot to hot. The name comes from the Spanish
pasa
, meaning “raisin,” a reference to the appearance of the skin. Some people use the term “pasilla” to refer to dried poblano chiles; however, in this book, “pasilla” refers to a dried chilaca pepper.

Aleppo Pepper

Named after the largest city in Syria, these medium-hot peppers are very popular in Mediterranean cooking. Dried Aleppo peppers come whole, in crushed flakes, or as a powder. Fruity, sweet, and oily, crushed Aleppo peppers are a favorite for pizza or pasta dishes.

Pequín
,
Chipotle
,
Pasilla
,
Aleppo
,
Chile de Árbol
,
Guajillo
,
Ancho
,
Cascabel

Chipotle Chile

This is the smoke-dried jalapeño. Small, wrinkled, and light brown, chipotles have an incredibly rich, smoky flavor and are usually very hot. Smoking jalapeños to preserve them has been common in Mexico since long before the Spanish arrived.

I prefer to use dry chipotles, but you can also buy them canned, and canned chipotles are acceptable in most recipes. Obviously, you can’t make chile powder from canned chipotles, but you can use them for purées. Canned chipotles are already soaked in some kind of sauce, usually a vinegary adobo. Just stem and seed them and purée them with some of the sauce from the can.

Chile de Árbol

Literally “tree chile,” the chile de árbol is a small, red, shiny chile about 3 inches long with a thin tapering body. It has a high heat level and is often chopped and simmered with other ingredients to make a hot table sauce. Fresh chiles de árbol look very similar to cayenne peppers.

THE AUSTIN CHRONICLE HOT SAUCE FESTIVAL

In the summer of 1990, the Travis County Farmers’ Market in Austin, Texas, sponsored a vegetable gardening competition. The “county agent,” as the agricultural extension service representative was known, was the usual judge for such events. But while the Travis County agent was ready to judge the flavors of peaches and watermelons, he wasn’t willing to munch on hot peppers.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Penn Brothers and other pepper growers made the Travis County Farmers’ Market famous for the amazing variety of chiles. Chefs bought most of the peppers the farm produced.
Jean Andrews and serious chile lovers in Austin gathered at the market on Saturday mornings to check out the peppers and buy pepper seedlings.

Peppers were such a big draw, that
Hill Rylander, who ran the farmers’ market at the time, wanted to include them in the competition. So he called me and asked me to be the chile judge. Rylander knew I would accept the invitation because I had been writing about chile peppers in the
Austin Chronicle
for some time. After the chile pepper judging event was over, I told Hill
Rylander that since few people actually ate raw peppers, it might make more sense to judge the peppers in a hot sauce. He loved the idea of a hot sauce competition and offered to host it the next year.

Such a contest wouldn’t have made any sense if hot sauce and chile peppers weren’t so ubiquitous in Austin, Texas, at the time. A bag of chips and a bottle of hot sauce seemed to be on every table in every home in the city. The chips and salsa phenomenon first blossomed in Tex-Mex restaurants in the 1970s. In the 1950s and 1960s, before
tortilla chips were common, Tex-Mex restaurant patrons ate their hot sauce with buttered saltines or Fritos corn chips.

Tortilla chips have been manufactured in Southern California since the 1940s. Doritos, the first national brand of tortilla chips, originated in Disneyland in Anaheim. Frito-Lay bought the brand and introduced it nationally in 1966. There were already lots of bottled salsas on the market at that time, including Pace Picante Sauce and the La Victoria line of sauces. But salsas weren’t really thought of as dips; they were used for huevos rancheros and other cooked dishes.

Totopos, tostadas, and chile sauces have existed in Mesoamerica since pre-Colombian times. But using salsa as a dip for a basket of chips is uniquely Mexican-American. It is modeled on the American “chips and dip” cocktail-hour snack craze of the 1950s. The fad was so popular that two-bowl sets for serving potato chips with a dip were made in patterns to match existing dinnerware and glassware. In the 1970s, the potato chips were occasionally replaced with Doritos and the onion dip with Mexican salsa in Southern California. The combination was especially popular in Texas as the margarita replaced the martini as the cocktail of choice.

Cocktails were illegal in Texas restaurants until the 1970s. When the law was changed to allow cities and counties to vote on whether restaurants could serve cocktails, the margarita suddenly became ubiquitous in “wet” counties. Mexican-American restaurants started putting a bowl of hot sauce and a basket of tortilla chips on bar tops and tables to stimulate demand for the profitable cocktails. The combination would go on to become a national obsession.

When the Southwestern cuisine movement came along in the 1980s, food lovers started calling their hot sauce “salsa,” and chefs started taking it seriously. Exotic interior Mexican salsas made with all kinds of different chiles began to appear. Chile lovers started bringing souvenir bottles of pepper sauces home from all over the world.

Superhot Chiles and Hot Sauces

The relative heat of chile peppers was once judged by a measurement called the Scoville Organoleptic Heat Scale. Human subjects tasted diluted pepper solutions to detect heat. A bell pepper is zero on this scale, a jalapeño around 8,000 units, a cayenne around 50,000 and a habanero around 200,000. The number is determined by how much the solution has to be diluted before the heat is undetectable. Today chile pepper heat is tested by high-performance liquid chromatography, but we still use the Scoville terminology.

Police pepper spray tests between 1.5 and 2 million Scoville units. The Trinidad Moruga Scorpion pepper is currently the world’s hottest; it is roughly the same heat as pepper spray at around 2 million Scoville units. It deposed the Naga Viper chile and the Bhut Jolokia pepper, which are both closer to a mere million Scoville units. There are lots of other extremely hot chiles in the record books and making pepper sauces with these chiles is a popular commercial pursuit. Pulling out a bottle of Bhut Jolokia (also known as Ghost Pepper) sauce can quickly turn a cocktail party into a fire-eating contest.

Accepting a dare to eat some really hot sauce is not a very good idea. Several manufacturers sell novelty hot sauces that contain commercial capsaicin or other chemical compounds. These hot sauces aren’t intended to season food; they are sold as practical jokes. Some of them have been banned from hot and spicy food shows because they have made people sick.

The competition to make the world’s hottest hot sauce and grow the world’s hottest peppers has turned into something of a circus. While it’s interesting, it isn’t about making delicious spicy food. The heat level of regular supermarket habanero-type peppers at 200,000 Scoville units is plenty hot enough for my kitchen. If you want to cook with pepper spray, knock yourself out.

Caution: Handling Chile Peppers

It’s wise to wear rubber gloves when handling jalapeños, serranos, and especially habanero-type chiles. Get a little juice from the cut-up pepper on your face or in your eyes, and you can count on 10 minutes of sheer agony. If you don’t have rubber gloves, use a piece of plastic wrap to hold the pepper while you cut it. Clean the knife and the cutting board immediately with hot soapy water. If you get pepper juice on your hands, try soaking them for a few minutes in a mild bleach solution.

Intrigued by the culinary trend and Austin’s position in its forefront, I wrote an article in
Chile Pepper
magazine calling Austin “the hot sauce capital of the world.” Predictably, salsa lovers in other cities disagreed. The
San Antonio Current
, a weekly newspaper in the Alamo City challenged the
Austin Chronicle
to a contest—San Antonio hot sauces versus Austin hot sauces—judged blind by top chefs.

The first “Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Contest” as the event was originally known, was held at the Travis County Farmers’ Market in 1991. It was held outdoors on a Sunday afternoon in late August—the peak of the chile pepper growing season and the hottest part of the summer. The
Austin Chronicle
enlisted a few musicians to come and play and hired a caterer to supply some beer. There have been lots of changes in the intervening years—the San Antonio versus Austin format was scrapped, and the contest was opened to people from anywhere in the world.

TAKING HOT SAUCE SERIOUSLY

The
Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce
Festival was hardly the first hot and spicy food contest. In fact, it was started in the heyday of the chili cook-offs. These events were often characterized by flatulence jokes and a generally drunken and debauched atmosphere, so it seemed that the time was ripe for a serious culinary competition for hot and spicy food.

Over the years, the judging panels at the Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival have been staffed by a “who’s who” of chefs. The list includes Stephan Pyles, Bruce Auden, Alan Lazarus, David Garrido, Tyson Cole, Miguel Ravago, Chris Shepherd, and Randy Clemens to name a few. The judging criteria included appearance, aroma, balance of heat, flavor, and overall impression, with a heavy weighting toward flavor. Several winners have gone on to start successful salsa concerns.

Attendees line up to sample hot sauce to their heart’s content. When 10,000 people showed up at the Travis County Farmers’ Market in the fifth year of the festival, traffic came to a halt in north central Austin, and the event was forced to relocate. In its seventh year, the Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival moved to a clearing in the woods of Waterloo Park, where it flourished for fourteen years. In its twenty-second year, the festival moved to its current home of Fiesta Gardens, a beautiful park along the shores of Lady Bird Lake, on Austin’s East Side.