[When I wrote my cookbook, I had the pleasure of meeting and cooking with Tim Artz, the self-described “Sultan of Scratch” who grows and cooks almost everything that he eats. One of his signature specialties is hot sauce; and here, in this post, he describes his love for the stuff and offers up an original recipe. Take it away, Tim!]
I love hot and spicy foods. I crave bold and lively flavors. Not to say that I don’t care for mild, savory and nuanced flavor, but given a choice, I would opt for hot.
I never experienced any hot foods as a kid growing up. Maybe the hottest thing I ever had was some red pepper flakes sprinkled on a slice of pizza or some cherry peppers on a hoagie. I remember all of my first truly zesty bites: hot mustard on an egg roll in a Chinese restaurant, Indian curry when the first Indian restaurant opened in my home town in Pennsylvania, and the cayenne peppers my dad decided to start growing in his garden while I was a university student.
The cayenne peppers. Like most university students, I was on a tight budget. Sophomore year I ventured into off-campus housing. I had to cook for myself! I was used to my mom’s great (not spicy) cooking, and she would load me up with a cooler full of leftovers whenever I came home for a weekend visit. I would scavenge anything that was producing in abundance in my dad’s massive garden. (One semester, my roommate and I lived mainly on potatoes, but that’s a different story.) Many early Fall weekends, I would come back to school with a shopping bag full of red and green cayenne peppers. They would go on everything I made; on pizza, nachos, in eggs, on sandwiches, barbecue sauce, on wings. Pretty much, you name it and in went the peppers. My roommate would plead, “Please don’t use those peppers; they’re making my stomach burn!” I would laugh, and in went even more peppers. Making the food hotter, in my mind, not only made it better, but if it slowed my roommate down, then I could get a larger share! That lasted a while, but eventually backfired when he started to crave the heat as much as me.
After graduation, it was off to apartment life and a new home with my future wife. I eventually took over as the cook for our household. I created my own gardens full of many varieties of hot chiles; usually jalapeno, serrano, cayenne, habanero, and the famed Red Savina. (Today’s garden has to include the Bhut Jolokia and Trinidad Scorpion, too.)
I love to cook, and she did not. We made a deal, I would cook and she would clean. It’s not exactly a fair deal, so I do my share of clean up as well. She knew about my love of hot foods, and most of our meals were quite spicy. We ate a lot of stir fries, grilled meats and salsa. We still have a running joke where she pronounces the dish “inedible” due to the heat, but keeps eating. I kept a perpetual tub of sauce in the fridge, adding whatever crossed my mind to replenish it for years. The sauce went into pots of beans and got brushed onto broiled or grilled chicken and pork. The numbing of Szechwan peppercorns in that treasured bowl is seared into my memory.
I will admit to one truly inedible dish where I came home with a tub of Thai green curry paste, the label was unreadable. I just assumed that it would be good to mix with some coconut milk, heat it up and pour over some stir fried pork and eggplant. For good measure, because Thai green curry is supposed to be hot, I tossed in some green cayenne peppers. I used the entire tub of curry in a wok of food to feed two with some leftovers for tomorrow’s lunch. As soon as we took our first bite, it was clear that the Thai script on the tub of sauce indicated that only a very, very small amount was to be used.
So I learned over time to moderate the heat. Friends with delicate palates learned to sample with care; it was still too much for some. One guest commented that his ears were ringing from the heat, but he kept eating. Everything was not hot and spicy, but it was the major theme to my cooking. Our son was born, and while he was drinking milk and transitioning to solid food with pureed peas, squash and sweet potatoes, the adult meals were still leaning to piquant.
As our son began to eat regular food, and share our meals, it was clear that I would need to tone down the heat. I would give him some small tastes of mildly spicy foods trying to determine the threshold for various dishes. Once, just after he started to walk and talk, he was in the garden while I was pulling some weeds. I heard the familiar crunch of a fresh pepper being bitten. I looked over and there he was, sitting on the ground munching on a jalapeno. I was proud and alarmed at the same time. “How does that taste, buddy?” I cautiously inquired. “Good,” came his small voice through the lush, dense plants. “Wow, how is that possible?” I wondered. The answer came soon as he urgently asked for water. And after that, anything with more than half a turn of the pepper mill was deemed by him to be SPICY!
What was I going to do? I had a garden with 300 peppers plants, a freezer with gallons of frozen peppers, canning jars full of pickled hot peppers, and jar upon jar of powdered dried hot peppers. Hot sauce was the answer. Hot sauces allow me to preserve the character of the hot dishes I love, they allow others to adjust the heat to their liking, and now anything can be made hot on demand. We have meals that feature pools of different sauces around the edge of the plate, allowing us to mix flavors to our preference.
I eventually settled into maybe half a dozen recipes that I worked to refine. We each have our favorites, and know which dish we prefer with each sauce. We eat a lot of hot sauce every day. And it makes a great gift, too. Friends are thrilled to get a basket of hot sauces, handmade with ingredients from our own gardens. A nice bottle and label adds a final touch to the presentation. I hope that you enjoy the recipe and that it brings a bite to Sauce Week!
Recipe: Trinidad Harvest Hot Sauce
Summary: “This sauce evolved from an attempt to reproduce a local hot sauce I had alongside conch fritters in Coral Bay, St. John, USVI. Sweet, with a pumpkin flavor, plenty of heat, and a cumin-laced curry spice.”
Ingredients
- 2T Coriander seed
- 2T Cumin seed
- 1T Black pepper
- 1-1/2T Fenugreek seed
- 1 T Cardamom seed (removed from pods)
- 1/2t Whole cloves
- 4t Turmeric
- 2t Thai bird chile powder
- 1-1/2t Saigon cinnamon
- 1/2t powdered ginger
- 3 small Butternut squash (about 4 lbs total)
- 4 large yellow onions
- 4c water
- 2 c Apple cider vinegar
- 2T salt
- 1c Honey
- 1c Brown sugar
Instructions
- Start by making some fresh curry powder. Toast 2T coriander seed, 2 T cumin seed, 1 T black peppercorns, 1-1/2 T Fenugreek (methi) seed, 1 T decorticated (love that word) cardamom, and ½ t whole cloves in a dry cast iron skillet over medium-low heat. When the spices give off a pleasing toasted aroma, allow them to cool a bit and then pulverize to fine power in a spice mill.
- Add 4 t turmeric (to get the best turmeric aroma, I buy fresh turmeric at an Asian grocery, peel by scraping with a spoon, and then dry in a food dehydrator before pulverizing in a spice mill), 2 red pepper powder (I use Thai bird made from chiles from my garden), 1-1/2 t Saigon cinnamon, and ½ t powdered ginger to the powdered toasted spices.
- Peel, halve, remove seeds, and dice 3 small butternut squash into one inch cubes. Add to 6-8 quart stock pot. Dice four large yellow onions and add to the stock pot. Add 3 cups water, bring to a boil and reduce to a simmer. Add the curry powder to the pot.
- Cut two quarts of habanero and Scotch bonnet chiles in half and remove seeds and stems. I usually freeze them to make them easier to manage; the seed cores pop out quickly. I used peach habaneros and yellow Scotch bonnets from my garden. Add the cleaned peppers to the simmering pot. Simmer about an hour.
- Add 2 cups of apple cider vinegar, 2 T salt, 1 cup honey (I used a nice spring blossom honey from our apiary), and one cup of brown sugar. Continue to simmer, stirring every few minutes, for another 30-60 minutes. Taste to make sure the flavors are balanced. Add more vinegar, salt, or honey to get the flavor balance to your liking. If you have to go back for a lot of tastes, you may need some milk to recalibrate your taste buds.
- Blend with a stick blender until you get a smooth puree with no chunks. Sterilize twelve 12 ounce woozy bottles in boiling water (many sources of these types of hot sauce bottles on the Internet). Fill the hot bottles with the heated hot sauce using a turkey baster, being careful to keep the drips down the side of the bottle to a minimum. Carefully wipe the bottle tops clean with a moist cloth. Give the caps a dunk in the hot sanitizing water and close the bottles. I finish the bottles with a custom label and a shrink band.
- This sauce is great with fried foods: fried squash, fried chicken, catfish, etc. It can also make an excellent wing sauce by heating up the sauce with some butter and then tossing cooked wings in a bit of the sauce
- to coat. It’s good on rice, in a stir fry, on noodles, on eggs. You can use it as a barbecue sauce, or add some into soup or a pot of beans. Enjoy!
The hot peppers are missing from the ingredient list!
I used about 2 quarts of whole habaneros and Scotch bonnets. I froze
them, cut the tops off, cut in half, and then pop out the seeds. Goes
fast when they are frozen.