WELCOME TO OUR KITCHEN: We're talking about chili sauces and condiments!

hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein and this is the Podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark. And

I'm Mark Skarbrue. And together with Bruce, we have written 36 now are writing the 37th cookbook, not counting the ones for celebrities. Shh, we can't talk about them. Confidentiality agreements won't mention anything about Dr. Phil or anything

Or Mike Moreno. Oh

God, no, we're not going to mention anything about any of those people or any other celebrity who we've written their cookbooks for. But we've written 36 now, 37 under our own names. And this is our podcast about. food and cooking. If you know this podcast, you know that what's coming up first is a one minute cooking tip, which is never one minute long, but it's always longer. We're going to talk about various spicy condiments in this podcast because of a listener suggestion on this.

Our one minute cooking tip. More about grilling outside. Move your food around the grill. Why? Because if you're like me and most people, your grill has hot spots, right? One spot is hotter than the other. And if you put out Four hamburgers in different spots. They're going to cook at different times and different rates get to know your grill. You should know by now where the hot spots are and how it works. Learn to work with your grill so that food cooks evenly.

Okay. And I'm going to add a caveat here. When Bruce says, get to know your grill, he's talking about gas grills, because really honestly, a charcoal grill is funky because the hot spots move around depending on how the charcoal bed is built. So it's harder with a charcoal grill. You have to pay closer attention to where the hot and cooler spots are. A gas grill is funky and you do have to get to learn. what its little quirks are. Um, like what's a quirk of your gas grill?

hottest spot of my grill is in the center towards the back and that is because I replaced all my gas burners this year and I didn't use the brand name and I got a generic name and so they're not quite as easy to use. Even as if I had spent the extra 30 and

a brandy. You never tell me this. I think we're going to have to have a marital discussion after

So the center back is hotter, which is actually not bad with us. Cause when we make burgers, I like mine on the well done side and Mark likes his rare. So mine go into the back

I don't like mine rare.

He likes his so a good vet could still save it.

Yeah, rare is an insult to me, but go on.

So that mine can go in the very back, and his go right in front of mine, and then they cook perfectly.

Yeah, exactly. And let me say, if you're going to eat red, rare, blue hamburgers as I do, uh, don't use red. standard supermarket meat under any

Know where it's coming

Yeah, we actually buy from an organic farm and know where our ground beef comes

from. I know the cows.

Yes, so, be careful of eating rare hamburger with meat. Okay. Before we get to that next listener suggested segment of this podcast, let me say that it would be great. If you sign up for our newsletter, it comes out twice a month. You can find that on our website, cooking person, mark or bruceandmark. com either way. You can find it there. I won't capture your email. I won't.

So, a listener wrote in, and she asked us what sriracha was, because we talk about it all the time here on Cooking with Bruce and Mark. We talk about lots of chili sauces, but we mentioned sriracha. And so, we're going to give you a little rundown on, yes, what sriracha is, and all the other lovely red, hot, burning things we put on our food on a regular

Okay, so while there were many hot sauces made by indigenous peoples, by enslaved peoples on plantations, and even by local homeowners across the United States, across North America, the first Big commercial success happened about 150 years ago, and that would be Tabasco sauce created about 150 years ago with much controversy by Edmund McElhinney, a Maryland born banker who moved to Louisiana,

carpetbagger.

carpetbagger. Indeed.

so this, look, we all know Tabasco sauce, right? I mean, I think it's ubiquitous, it's even in diners, it's always little bottles of it.

I don't think it's that well known, maybe outside the U. S. and Canada, but maybe. I don't know. But go on. Yes.

I love about it is the vinegary ness and the saltiness. Yeah. And it's not too salty. as vinegary as some East Asian chili sauces, nor is it as hot, which is kind of why I like it. It's got the perfect amount of spice for my palate. I like it on eggs. I love it in Bloody Mary's. I've actually Even put a few drops on each potato chip before I put them in

mouth. Okay, so what happened is that Edmund McElhinney, he, uh, tasted this sauce, a sauce similar to what we now call Tabasco sauce, at a, and here's where it gets controversial, Plantation dinner in Louisiana, given by Monsal white. Some person in the kitchen, undoubtedly a person of color was making this sauce. Later McElhaney claimed to have discovered the sauce and even.

Yeah, it is. And the original red Tabasco sauce is my first hot sauce of choice. But now when you go to the supermarket, there are other styles of Tabasco. There is a green jalapeno Tabasco. There is a chipotle brown Tabasco. So they have a variety. veered into other directions, and they have expanded the line away from that original red Tabasco.

Now, Bruce says it's his hot sauce of choice, but it's not mine. Mine is sriracha. And we want to talk about sriracha since it's become such a thing, and this is what our listener asked for. Sriracha is a hot sauce made of chilies, vinegar, pickled garlic, sugar, and salt. It was first made in the 1940s by a Thai woman who was riffing off a Cantonese sauce made from garlic and chilies And Cantonese immigrants, of course, from China, had settled in Sriracha, Thailand.

There are, but the most common that people know in the U. S. is also called rooster sauce because it has a rooster on the bottle and it is made in California. And in fact, there was a whole lawsuit going on in the towns around this factory because people were complaining about the smell and the burning of the eyes and they were trying to get the plant shut down and moved. And it caused a shortage of this rooster sauce style sriracha.

some evidence to suggest that shortage may have been partly manufactured. And they're claiming again that we're entering into a sriracha shortage, of course, to get the price up, I think. But anyway, so it goes. You should know that the modern sriracha sauce is made mostly from jalapenos. In fact, sometimes almost exclusively, depending on the brand, of jalapenos. So the original chilis used. in the Thai Cantonese sauce are gone.

what kind of sriracha do you want? Thanks. My, I love sriracha, but the reason I like Tabasco better is because it's, Tabasco's not as sweet. Sriracha does, you said, does have some sugar in

It does.

And sometimes, depending upon the brand we get, it has a little too much garlic for me. But the last time Mark and I were in an Asian supermarket in Providence, Rhode Island, we found a sriracha there made from yellow peppers. And that's even sweeter than the one for

and it's also a little funky.

It is. I actually like that one a lot. That I've been putting on french fries.

I put sriracha on avocado toast like crazy. I put it on eggs. I have bought completely into this sriracha campaign because I really like hot food. But again, this is a weird thing that something has become so popular that it became generic. It's got branding problems. You know, you're so popular. Generic. Like when I grew up in the South, we called all carbonated. Beverages coke.

That's so weird. I, question.

kind of coke do you want? And we met dr. Pepper orange soda Strawberry soda 7up. What kind of coke you want Sprite? So

well, at least Sprite and Coke are made by the same company. Well,

I don't know that they were back then maybe But anyway, we we would

Rondo? How about Moxie? What about beverages by Hoffman's?

Oh, I don't know any of this. I just know Rhondo a grapefruit soda made by the Coca-Cola bottling

It can't be as good as Celery soda. Made by Dr.

Brown, celery

Sweet celery. Eww, the only person who ever knew like that was my father.

Oh, well, um, we shouldn't talk ill of

Park

I hope he's enjoying Sriracha wherever, no, I hope he's enjoying Selray Soda wherever he is right now. Jersey. Okay, great, um, I'm sure they sell it there at the cemetery. Uh, okay, so, that's the bit about Wait,

with concession stands. That's not theirs. A business idea.

Oh, God. And a gift store. Wish you were here. with postcards. Okay, so, um, anyway, sorry. Uh, let's go on. Other hot sauces include Chili Crisp, and this has become a huge one, and I think if you know Chili Crisp, you know the Lao Gan Ma Spicy Chili Crisp.

you know we have talked about Chili Crisp. We've been talking endlessly on Cooking with Bruce and Mark, we both, Mark and I, love Chili Crisp, we've made our own, we have recipes for Chili Crisp. Chili Crisp is another one that has become a, you know, a generic

name, right? Well, David Chang tried to trademark Chili Crunch. Yes,

he tried to brand it Chili Crunch because that was the name of his, but

What a jerk. What a total jerk. But

Chili Crisp, and then, and here's how you know it is a generic thing. Even Lao Gan Ma, they have their original traditional Chili crisp. They also have about 16 other styles of chili crisp that they make most of them. You cannot get in the US, which is sad because I would bet they really delicious.

If you don't know, la gan ma, it just means old grandmother. And It started because a woman, Tao Huabi, I don't know that I'm pronouncing her name correctly. She owned a shop, and she started making this condiment. And soon enough, bureaucrats and government officials started showing up at her shop just to buy the condiment to go on noodles or in stir fries. And this then became Lao Gan Ma, spicy chili grits.

It is, and some of them are oilier than others. I've bought bottles of chili crisps where When you first get it and it has a chance to settle, half of it is oil and then the solids are on the bottom. Some have more solids than oil. I like the ones that are a little more solid than oil, uh, because I make my own chili oil

because it's so versatile and, you know, what we need is something crispy. Fried garlic, shallots, ginger, whatever. We need something crispy in there. We need lots of chilies. Chili Crisp. And then It becomes the sky's the limit. And in fact, for the book that we've been working on, Bruce has made a chili crisp with nori, the dried seaweed sheets, nori and those wasabi peas that you get, right, that are snacks. And that's all ground together in the chili crisp.

The nori doesn't stay crispy, of course. It softens up. That's what gives it the seafood y, ocean fishiness. The wasabi peas stay crunchy even after they're finally ground. And it gives a nose spanking bit of wasabi hit to it. It is one of my favorite new chili crisps. Let's

talk about other things. Okay, salsa macha. There's a big one. It's originally a sauce from Veracruz, Mexico, but no longer such. It's a chili paste, right?

It is a chili paste, and the difference Or maybe

a sauce, it depends on how loose and oily you

Yeah, it tends to be fairly crunchy, like a chili crisp. There's a very different technique, though, and that's what I really find interesting about the two of them. The way you make any kinds of chili crisp are you take the ingredients that are going to go in it in a bowl, and you pour the super heated oil over it. Over and

let it infuse that way. Lots of sizzling and popping.

and when you make a traditional salsa matcha, what you do is fry your chili pieces in big chunks in oil, and then you fry all the other ingredients, usually some kind of nut, sometimes some dried fruit. You fry them, then You let it cool a bit, and you put all of that in a food processor. Now, I suppose originally it would have been a mortar and pestle, so we had to pound it by hand. But then we put all that cooled, fried ingredients and the oil in a food processor and pulsed it.

And again, salsa macha has become so widely, uh, categorized, I mean, such a big category of food, that in the recipes we've been working on, Bruce has been making salsa machas with pecans, with olives. almonds with hazelnuts.

I did one with Coconut and dried pineapple. I mean, that is so not authentic in any way, shape or form, but boy, is it delicious.

But it's a technique of how to make a salsa matcha. So let's move on to Harissa, which is a northwest african chili paste or sauce. Again, paste or sauce, depending on how loose it is. You probably know Arisa from little jars. You may have seen it in the supermarket. Sometimes it got oil floating on the top,

Most of the harissa that you can buy in the U. S. in jars, was made from dried chilies. There was a recipe that I found years ago that called for rose harissa, and it was a harissa that had dried rose petals in it, and I have tried to recreate something like it, and actually, I did, and it will be in that new book we talked about, and the technique here is, again, a little different from the others.

Yeah, and just like Sriracha, just like Chili Crisp, just like Salsa Macha, harissa has become a category rather than a thing. Now, some people will claim authenticity here, but we're actually talking about a category. For example, many Libyan chefs from Libya, Libyan chefs. Add caraway, cumin and lemon juice to her Risa, which, for example, many Palestinian or Jordanian or Tunisian chefs or Israeli chefs would freak out at the addition of caraway, cumin and lemon

but they might add sumac or they might add some other spice that's more common in that part of the world. Right.

So, moving on to another hot sauce that you may know is Peri Peri or Piri Piri, depending on how you actually deal with the original language. Piri sauce. And this is a sauce made from Portuguese immigrants in Mozambique, but it has now shot across all of the southern bits of the African continent. And, you know, um, it's a, it is its own category.

Well, there is a piri piri chili, isn't there? Yes. Yeah, and that's what this sauce was originally made from, which is why it's called Piri Piri sauce And the technique has become sort of the way the sauce has now formed its own category, but it is a fermented chili and there's always salt, there's always oil. It has to have some kind of acid. I like to use lemon juice. You could use vinegar if you want. Garlic is a must. Or not.

know, we had a

episode on authenticity, and so let's say garlic is optional.

Right? And there are so many variations now of peri peri. Some use orange juice, some include lemon peel. There's even variations with whiskey, basil, tarragon, and bay leaves. I mean, many different ways to make this incredibly fiery sauce. I think the one thing they all have in common is how It's unbelievably hot

there, and

you should know that a lot of the peri peri or peri peri bottled in North America and in the EU is actually made from bird's eye chilies, not the original chili that the Portuguese immigrants allegedly originally used to make the sauce in Mozambique.

And I have found a jarred peri peri that's a little darker in color. I don't remember the brand name. We finished it. I put it on hamburgers. I looked at the ingredient list and there were raisins in it. And I actually thought that was brilliant because in my opinion, the sweet, even fermenty flavor of raisins balanced the hot chilies and it was my favorite.

Okay. And one more category of hot sauce. There are many beyond what we're talking about. Korean versions. It's Chinese versions and many, many more. But one that we particularly like is shacha, which is a Middle Eastern sauce made from fermented chilies.

Yeah. So to ferment chilies, you slice them, you toss them in salt and you set them aside. Now Mark's and my preferred method of doing any kind of fermenting like that at home is in the refrigerator. It takes longer. It's not going to ferment in four or five days. It may take two or three. Two weeks, but it will happen, and you end up with a little safer product to eat rather than fermenting at room

Don't write in. If you ferment at room temperature,

that's good for you. That's wonderful. I'm proud of you, but I like to do it in the refrigerator,

right? Exactly the same. We make kimchi in the fridge, too. And

it sours. Beautifully.

it just takes longer. It takes two weeks rather than four or five days. It takes longer to get to a sour point, but it will

doesn't stink up your

You know, somebody we had some people over for dinner. Uh, Koreans live in the United States. The last week or week before last, whatever. And they were telling us, Bruce was serving his homemade kimchi, and they were telling us that some Koreans have a special refrigerator just for kimchi because it stinks everything up so bad. That cracked me up.

Yeah, my friend Faye says she's been banned from making it in her kitchen. Her husband makes her put it in the garage. I'm like, okay, that'll attract the

Exactly. Anyway, shut that is a really great fermented funky sauce. Relatively new to us, but another of these many chili condiments, more and more coming online every day because more and more people are starting small food businesses in which they are riffing off these kind of condiments, creating them, creating their own special recipes for them, all extremely fascinating.

If you're invited to someone's house for dinner, consider bringing a jar or two of Tabasco, or Piri Piri, or a salsa matcha, or a chili, because you could make your own, or you could buy it. It's so different, and it's so much nicer than just a bottle of wine. And besides, my feeling about wine when you go to someone's house for dinner is Your hosts probably have already chosen wine to go with the food and then they're stuck with this decision. Do I have to serve what you brought?

going to stop you right here. You're talking about us. That's us. We choose wine. I don't know that everybody chooses the wine to go with their dinner.

Well, some of our friends do too.

Okay. I'm not saying that no one does. So, now you're in the middle of our marriage. So, I said something and Bruce took it to the absolute opposite other side. I didn't say no one picked the wines. I said many people don't probably

So it's nicer than bringing flowers, how's that?

And

Now we're gonna go into what you hate about flowers. Now we're

And now we're gonna go into our relationship. I hate flowers as a house gift. I absolutely hate them. It's one thing if you send flowers ahead in a vase, but I hate showing up at my door with flowers when you show up at my door with flowers. I'm sorry if you do. Ugh. I'm sorry.

Tinned, Smoked, mackerel, and chili sauce.

We are the tinned fish king.

I am the tinned fish king. And I also like to shop at World Market, one of those places, like home goods, that Mark can't stand going

into because

makes him crazy. I can't. But World Market And like Home Goods, always has a food section. And last week when I was in World Market, they had a whole shelf of Fish Wife tinned mackerel with chili sauce. And if you know anything about fish, you know that Fish Wife is really delicious and really excellent. And it was like, Half the price of where it's ever been before. So I just bought them all. I bought the whole shelf. So we have a lot of tin smoked mackerel with chili sauce in our pantry.

So what's making me happy and food is because something that may surprise you, but it is. And we recently had a dinner party and Bruce made goat birria and it was so delicious. So tell, tell them what you did to make goat birria.

Well, I rubbed the birria. the goat with a chili paste that I made from dried reconstituted, uh, chilies and garlic and oregano and ground up bay leaves. And

What, what, what's the cut of goat?

Oh, I used leg for this. And then on the way I made it, cause of course we're not going to be authentic and we've had episodes on authenticity. So my version of this is I. I put lime slices and orange slices at the bottom of a big roasting pan along with onion slices. And that gives me that sort of sour orange kind of thing that goes on. And I put the chili rubbed goat on top of that.

That crazy, crazy dish. And it was part of being creative. Bruce is being creative with food, and part of what we love when we cook is how to be incredibly open artfully /Okay, that's the podcast for this week. Thanks for joining us. We appreciate your time with us. We appreciate that you've chosen to listen to this podcast out of all the podcasts out.

I'm

laughing because there's a great Martin Short interview in which he plays his character, Jiminy Glick. If you don't know Jiminy Glick, you have to go look him up online. It is one of the funniest things. He's this incredibly overweight interviewer full of his own self importance, who hates every celebrity he interviews, and Sean Hayes asks Jiminy Glick, Martin Short, if he's ever done a podcast and Martin Short's like, no, I've never been that broke. So, um,

So

this is our unsupported podcast and thanks for being a part of it with us.

Every week we tell you what's making us happy in food, so tell us what's making you happy in food this week on our Facebook group, Cooking with Bruce and Mark. If it's really fun and exciting, we might make it and talk about it here on Cooking with Bruce and Mark.