You know, it's funny when you look back through the life of a design you start to notice patterns. For us, a design usually starts heavy, visually speaking, then is transformed through multiple rebuilds where we drop unnecessary parts and refine shapes. The piece emerging at the end of this process resembles the first iteration but in a filtered, more clearly defined way. This same process happened with our homemade hot sauce. From the beginning we had just two criteria: The ingredients have to be available all year and they have to come from either our own garden when in season or our local hispanic super market, Super Mercado La Jalisco. We were looking for a sauce we could recreate anytime and not worry about needing to can enough during the on season to make it through the off season. In addition, we really appreciate the produce, meat and local hispanic community of Super Mercado La Jalisco. Some of our first recipes used multiple combinations and ingredients such as carrots, tomatillos, jalapeños, serranos, onions, sugar, garlic, tomatoes and more. They all turned out great but each batch was either missing something or just needed a little less. In the end we found simple was better. In fact that might go for life as well, maybe life really is like hot sauce!
Jalapeños, young onions, garlic, rice vinegar, salt and smoke, that's it. We have made this sauce by broiling all the ingredients in the oven to get the char, as we've shown here, but if you can and have the time, smoking is far preferred. We'll put a piece of meat on our Big Green Egg and when it's done we'll pile in the hot sauce ingredients and let them smoke until the Egg cools down.
Here are a few tips and variations when making this hot sauce:
- Serrano Chili's, or a combination of Serrano and Jalapeños, work as well and add their own flavor.
- If your roasting in the oven you might want to open a window or door, the roasting peppers can be a bit strong.
- You can control the heat by scraping out some, all or none of the seeds after they've been smoked our roasted. We choose to skip that step and leave them all in, we like it hot.
- We use rice wine vinegar but we've also used coconut vinegar. Any vinegar with acidic level below 4-5% will do,
- We've given an amount for salt but adjust it to your liking. Additional salt can be added after.
ME Speak Hot Sauce:
- 400g Jalapeño Peppers or approx. 12 medium size
- 200g Young Onions or approx. 3-4
- 30g Peeled whole garlic cloves or approx. 3/4 of a head
- 240g Rice wine vinegar or approx. 1 cup
- 12g Kosher salt or approx. 1T
1. Smoke or roast the peppers, onions and garlic cloves together. The garlic will be ready first so pull it out when it's nice and brown. You're looking for a vary dark black char on the peppers and onions, almost to the point where you think they've gone too far…don't worry they'll be perfect.
2.This is when you could remove seeds if you want to adjust the heat. Hold the stem and slice the pepper down the length and use the blade of the knife to scrap out the seeds. The flesh will be soft so be careful to only take the seeds.
3.Put the peppers, onions, garlic in a blender or food processor and blend to combine. Add the vinegar until the sauce reaches the consistency you like. Add the salt to taste.
This recipe creates a beautiful well balanced smokey sauce that is versatile for anything from tacos, burgers, pizza, eggs or anything you like heat on. Enjoy!
