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If you don’t like spicy food, you are missing out on a whole other level of food. Not every meal has to be spicy. I’m not a fan of putting the same hot sauce on everything. But there is so much flavour in all these hot peppers. Sometimes food needs to be spicy.
This week I want to talk about:
HOT SAUCE
Hot sauce is awesome.
Everyone needs a good hot sauce or ten in their arsenal. Cooking with hot sauce is a great way to add flavour to your cooking. I’m going to share with you a bunch of hot sauces that I really love right now.
Chipotle Tabasco
A remarkable thing about chili peppers is that you can get such a vast amount of different flavours from the same pepper depending on how you treat it. A chipotle pepper is the same fruit as a jalapeno pepper. Peppers are technically a fruit. So hot sauce is a fruit sauce.
What is a chipotle?
A ripe jalapeno that was smoke dried.
Typically, at the grocery store, you are buying an “unripe” green jalapeno. The life of a jalapeno pepper is green – green – green then BAM! They turn bright red and are now considered ripe. Keep those bright red jalapenos on the vine as long as you can. The red colour gets deeper and the pepper loses moisture. That is the right time to pick them to turn them into chipotles. They do this by smoke drying them, usually with pecan wood, for several days. This technique goes all the way back to even before the Aztecs.
Now some chipotle hot sauces try to get there the easy way by using chipotle flavors and add the smokiness with liquid smoke. Chipotle Tabasco goes through the proper process to make the chipotles.
This spice is not a burn your face off hot but more of a flavor packed Karate chop, from a kid. It’s the hot sauce my five year old uses when he wants to use a hot sauce.
It’s one of my secret ingredients for a pasta sauce. Just adds another layer of complexity. And now that you know one of my secrets, it's only fair if you tell me one of your secrets.
Bangkok Meat Balls Food Co. Ltd. Hot Chili Oil
This one is made in Canada. And it is really good. Other chili crisp things that
I have used in the past have trained me to always apply liberally. Every time you get surprised at how spicy it is. And tasty.
Is it a hot sauce? – what are you the fucking hot sauce police? This is awesome. The best of this style. So much good taste, and a heat that satisfies. I don’t know what they do different, but it is the best. Did I mention that I love it?
El Yucateco Red
This might be my favourite always on the table hot sauce. It goes with almost everything. They have other great sauces. Black and green are close runners up. But the red is my table hot sauce. If I could only pick one to go on the trip, this is the one I would pick.
The heat level on this sauce is really nice. A great habanero taste. It's hard to eat Mexican food without it.
Matute La Amarilla
it in the grocery store recently. The yellow colour and the mention of roasted Aji Amarillo & Scotch Bonnet caught my eye. It is a great sauce with a nice heat. I first tried it in chili and it was very delicious.
I love hot sauces so I will probably write about them again, because I could recommend more. I haven’t even dived into the hotter ones.
It’s difficult because they need to have the flavor to be brought out. I love hot and will eat very spicy, but I also want it to taste good. Like yeah! This is fucking hot! But it also tastes like motor oil poured over some super hot peppers that may or may have not been dropped onto some doggy doodoo? No thank you.
Love, Dave
PS - Here is some extra hot sauce ai work. I used either the prompt "hot sauce but alive, happy and having fun" or "hot sauce party." Last one is a bit creepy.
