Hey guys, this is Ander speaking, producer of Potluck Food Talks. And before we start the show, we wanted to dedicate this episode to Peter Eichstetter, the king of chili and hot sauce. All right, enjoy the show. Hi everyone, welcome to Potluck Food Talks. Today we're going to talk about odd stuff. Are we talking about me or are we talking about what are we talking about? Chili man, picante, you know, this kind of food. What are your thoughts on picante?
I'm terrible with spicy things, as in like, I'm not terrible in the fact that I can't eat it. I'm like, I have the urge to put chili on everything I eat, which is okay. But in some cases, you know, not okay at all. I feel like sometimes you need to leave things as they are, but like I love spicy food in general. Yeah, for instance, when I take people out to eat here in San Sebastian, it's quite common because it is common everywhere else to ask for some hot sauce.
You don't want to put hot sauce on your cocochas and salsa verde, you know, like there are some things you want to leave them as they are. They mock you, you know, they put a stamp in your passport, you can never return. Exactly. What about you? You like hot stuff too, no? You're like a hot sauce guy. I'm a super hot sauce crazy person. Like I grew up in a house where my dad had like 20 different plants of capsicum and he would like do their own cross pollinations of their own chilies.
And we had like a fridge at home, which was a fridge with food for everybody. And there was a second fridge just with hot sauces for my dad. That's amazing. That sounds awesome. But there is a point where my body doesn't tolerate it. Like, well, I do tolerate it. It's not that it's too spicy for me. I just get hiccups and I see it coming. I said, oh, I'm going to get hiccups. And then three seconds later it's like, just like that.
I think it's really nice that your body has like a naturally built-in airbag, you know, against hurting yourself too much with chili because I don't have that. And, you know, especially when you start eating really spicy, these get a little bit high, you know, you get a little bit like, you know, get a little bit of a blood rush going. And then sometimes I feel like I can't stop, you know. Something that I feel that is crazy is that this is something relatively new.
This comes from since the discovery of America, because there wasn't any chili in Asia, Africa, or Europe before that, which is quite crazy because there is a lot of chili in Africa and in Asia eaten for sure. That's crazy, you know, because if you think like, you know, I mean, for me, if I think about like spicy food, one of the main cultures that I think of is Thailand, you know, Thai food without chili is unthinkable.
And it has some of the spiciest food, you know, that I've ever encountered, you know, some of the most delicious food also. But if you think, you know, if you're trying to imagine Thai food without chili, it's like, it's really, really hard. A cool experience that I had in Bolivia and the Altiplanos, you know, this region, that it's a very ancient region. It used to be sea actually, like millions of years ago. So the biodiversity you find there is, it's quite uncommon.
And from that region comes the oldest known type of pepper. And it's just like a tiny ball, completely round. And it's a chili. If you cut it, you perfectly identify that it's a pepper. It's a chili. The seeds are exactly the same, but it's perfectly round, super small, and it's super aromatic. It's delicious. It's called Ulupika. And it's crazy to think that this is the grand grandfather of all the peppers and chilies around the world, you know, and that there are so many variations.
And as you say, Asia, imagine Korea without kimchi, you know, or these cultures like Italy without pepperoni or Spain without pimiento. Absolutely, you know, like Szechuan cuisine, all those sorts of things. This is completely like, completely different thing. I think it's really interesting.
I think like what a lot of people don't think of is, like you say, the aroma of chili, because when, you know, when we think of chili or we think of a spice, I think people really neglect the aromatic qualities that chili has, you know. For me, for example, I was really blown away when I first moved to London and I was living in a very sort of Caribbean neighborhood. There was a lot of Scotch bonnet chilies at the markets.
And that's a chili that's notorious and very, very spicy, but it has a super, super beautiful aroma. It's very similar to habanero chili. And I found it so delicious, you know. But obviously you have to tolerate the spice to be able to taste the flavor also. But I completely fell in love with those types of chilies.
There was one thing that Lars Williams did, you know, the owner of Empirical Spirits, who was one of the main Noma guys for a long time, to assume, of course, no. I heard that at one point he made a distillate from habanero chilies, where he somehow eliminated all the spicy elements and just distilled the pure flavor. I tried that. I had a cocktail made out of that. While in New York, there is this place called Atlas, which is related to Enrique Olvera, is one of his restaurants in New York.
Yeah. And Jana Wolfson is the director of drinks. She's a super talented mixologist. And there was this cocktail called, no, I think the cocktail was called Invisible Lines. And the distillate, you're saying it's called Fuck Trump and his fucking stupid wall. Yeah, exactly. Was it habanero or jalapeno? Maybe I'm talking about a different one.
He did one, like initially, where he just distilled the pure, like I don't know whether he distilled it or what the process was, but he like basically made an essence without the spiciness. But then he did, yeah, he did a spirit in his company, Empirical, also. And I think that's so interesting because, you know, you just concentrate on the flavor of the product. I actually always thought about how to do that.
I remember when I was in culinary school, I wrote to some food scientists asking about how could I exactly the same idea, taking the aroma out of habanero without the spiciness, because I also think that habanero is one of the chilies with the nicest aroma. I mean, I love habanero sauces. For sure. Yeah. I had this experience like this was actually like a year and a half ago. You know, I live on top of this gourmet shop here in San Sebastian.
So I was going there and then I see they were saying habaneros for five years, the kilogram. And I was like, okay, this has to be a mistake. I'm taking everything. I took everything they had and the next day I took again everything they had. So at some point I had like three kilos of habaneros at home and I was like, okay, what do I do with this? So I cleaned them all, even using gloves and everything. My hands were like itching for a week.
And then I use like this standard procedure for fermentations, which is 2% of salt. So I just added 2% of salt to one batch and some common sense aromatics, you know, like some bay leaf or garlic, black pepper, you know, like this kind of stuff. That one I left for a few months and then I did another one. I raised up the salt level and I added anchovy paste. Man, that's the best. It's the best sauce I've ever made. I always give it like small batches as presents to friends.
And they always say like, man, this is so good. And that one I left like for one year aging with the anchovies and everything at room temperature. It's like a habanero garum. It's amazing. Also another thing that I see a lot is people taking a lot of time taking out the seeds and everything because I understand that the seeds add some bitterness.
But for instance, in this case, in both, I blitz everything with seeds and then the beans and the white parts inside everything because that adds spiciness to the sauce. And that bitterness once it's aged, like, I mean, it's perfectly tolerable. And you save a lot of work and you also save a lot of food waste, you know? Yeah, for sure. And for sure. And you save your fingers also because peeling out those seeds, you know, like you said, it's like a super dangerous.
I remember when I spent some time cooking like very traditional northern Thai food. And there it was sort of like it was the number one warning was kind of like, man, hey, make sure that when you handle the chilies, because the chili that is like predominant in Thai food are the bird's eye, the scuds. Yeah. Bird's eye chilies. And they call them scuds. I had that at home. Yeah. Yeah. That's a nasty one. They get fierce. They're burning hot, you know?
And especially when you do a lot of mortar and pestle work, you know, especially when you're doing like sometimes salads, papaya salads and those sorts of things. But like even when you're making like Namjib dressings, Namjib, they're sort of like citrus fruit dressings, you know, garlic, chili pounded up with salt and then your abs, lime juice, and like a little bit of sugar and you kind of mix it. It's like, or mandarin juice or whatever. Super nice.
But you know, you're mortar and pestling away. And more often than not, you just get this like little sort of sniper shots that kind of like goes right into your eye and you're out for the next two days. You can forget the eyes. How 50% of your eyesight is gone, you know, like. Man, I've seen it all. My dad making sauce at home all the time.
I mean, someday we were doing like hot chocolate and the blender was completely contaminated with capsicum and everything was super spicy, you know, that kind of stuff happened all the time. There was this, that's also a nasty story. This friend of my father who was like his mentor and eating chili. And this guy would put to his daughters on the toothbrush a little bit of chili, you know, to get his daughters used to the spiciness. Yo. And he would hold him.
They would read, you know, already grown up woman reminded me of doing that, you know, like. That's some real psychopath shit. Yeah, absolutely. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I kind of respect it, but also it's kind of too troubling. But it is wrong, but it's funny, you know, like. One of the most classic sauces in Venezuela, they call it picante de suero. Suero is not what we understand in Europe as suero. It's basically kind of like a sour cream.
It's like a fermented fatty milk until it gets like really creamy. Yeah. And just adding some chili to that. And usually oregano and that's it. It's also quite common to preserve it in taparas, which are like this natural wooden bottles that indigenous people make like from ancestral times. And they call it, yeah, picante de tapara, which is the receptacle where it's inside. That's a super nice one. Then there's another one.
You find this more in the Amazonas, which is made with ants, which is called either catara or picante de bachaco. And I actually thought for a long time that the ants had a spiciness that was an alternative spiciness to capsicum because that's another thing. This is the only thing that is spicy in the world because you have wasabi, which is something completely different. Yeah. Pepper, like black pepper, which is also something different. But this kind of spiciness, it's only in chilies.
And that for me, it's also super interesting. Absolutely. So I thought that these ants were also spicy, but not. Then I found out that they add chili to the ant sauce, and that's what makes it spicy. And these are traditional Venezuelan sauces. My father, like his signature sauce, and this is what he did, which was more civilized to teach children how to eat hot sauces. This was kind of like, have you ever cooked passion fruit when you cook the shells?
No. You can make like marmalade, like a compote out of the shells. This has like a lot of texture. And this is a traditional dessert done in Venezuela, because also the passion fruits used in Venezuela are completely different than the ones you find here in Europe. These ones are like 10-inch bowl size and shape. So on the whole flesh of the shells, you cook them in the passion fruit juice. Then you peel the outer layer. You don't want that. You only want the white side.
And then you get like this compote, this sticky compote. And he would do like a super light chili sauce with that, which was like a sweet spicy marmalade. It sounds delicious. Yeah. That sounds really good. It's super nice, man. Super nice. Yeah. Chili and passion fruit, it works really, really well. Last year I was doing a hot sauce with yuzu juice and like mandarin, but also with passion fruit with yellow habaneros.
And just like you say, like just like a little bit of salt, a little bit of garlic, and then the citrus juice, and then just need it to ferment for a little bit. And then kind of I pasteurized it and then chilled it. And it was so good, you know? Nice. Because you have the fruitiness of the chili, but then you have like the really freshness of like the yuzu with the mandarin. Like it was super, super nice.
Like one other thing that like really blew me away was when I first went to Mexico and like I discovered the whole world of chilies that make up the Mexican food culture, you know? That's crazy. Yeah. That was mind blowing to me because again, you know, it's not sort of like, oh, you know, spicy, but like the different capsicums, they have certain uses when they're fresh and then they're dried and then they're smoked, you know, some are smoky, some are really sweet, you know?
Some are really chocolatey. And when the first time you go to a Mexican food market and have these huge bags of chilies that are like piled up in baskets, you know? It's like for me, like as a European chef, it felt like being on a different planet and seeing ingredients that I've never seen for the first time in my life. Yeah, that's awesome, man. I also remember, no, I definitely need to do that. I've never been in Mexico and it's something that I really need to do.
And also, yeah, get into the whole chili culture over there because you have like this complex sauces like mole, then you have like this pickled jalapenos, which are amazing. And of course there has to be hundreds of things that I have no idea about, you know? Yeah, for sure.
I mean, you know, like we all know chipotle chilies, you know, they have this smokiness, the depth, you know, and you have ancho chilies, you know, which are really, they're almost like kind of pasty, like very sweet, but kind of like, yeah, it's very difficult to describe, you know? Chile de arbol, you know, like there's so many. And there's such basic ingredients for like the traditional Mexican food culture, you know?
Obviously, like Mexico is a big place and the cooking is very different from north to south, you know? I mean, north is kind of like coast to desert and the south is basically jungle, you know? And then all the mountainous regions and stuff, you know? I mean, Mexico is very diverse, I don't want to generalize it, but yeah, it's so beautiful, you know? And it's like, I can't think of any other country that has such a diverse use of chilies really than Mexico.
Yeah, maybe, yeah, maybe in South America, maybe Peru, perhaps not, but I think maybe in Asia, but yeah, Mexico is its own thing with chili. And this goes back to Aztec times, yeah. For sure, yeah. Yeah, another one, another good one is in the Bolivian Amazonas. They have this chili that it's called gusanito, which means little worm. It's a green one with like a funny shape, like if a worm is trying to walk, you know, like this waved shape of the worm.
And anywhere in the Bolivian Amazonas, in any eatery, you will find a bottle filled with that. And I think it's just fermented. Man, that's so delicious. Last time my friend Kenzo came to visit, he brought me some. That's something I really crave about the Bolivian gastronomy. Super nice. Another very different one is the rocoto in Peru, you know that one? Oh yeah, of course. Yeah, that's the only one I know that has black seeds, which is completely uncommon.
I don't know any other chili with black seeds. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I can't think of any. Yeah, but I mean, Peru has such a cool chili culture also, you know, aciabarillo, aci, mirasor, super, super nice, you know. And like, again, you're so ingrained in the culture there. I mean, Peru is kind of like the birthplace of a lot of stuff, it feels like. You know, like, for example, this is one Peruvian dish that I really, really like. It's called aji de gallina.
And it's basically a chicken stew. But aji is like the word that they use for chili, you know, but it's kind of like aji de gallina means like this chicken stew with chile amarillo, I think it is. Yeah, yeah. Aji amarillo. And it's super nice. It's also a very unusual dish, you know, because it's kind of got cheese in it and stuff. And it's super, super delicious. Yeah, there are like some variations of that in Venezuela with different names.
For instance, there is this super common seafood soup in Peru called chupé. And Venezuela will have a chicken chupé. And that's something from Caracas. I don't know how the story is, why they have the same name and they share some ingredients. It's also like a creamy stew with cheese. Yeah, like no idea what the relationship is between those two. Yeah, and also talking about like chilies, Venezuela has a chili, it's called aji dulce, which is not spicy at all.
Pretty much like you could say it's like a baby pepper, but no, it's a chili. It looks like a habanero. It's super aromatic and it's one of the staple ingredients of Venezuelan cuisine. That's actually what makes Venezuelan cuisine so difficult to cook abroad, because this is a very hard to find ingredient.
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, no, like with a lot of these, especially Latin American cultures, it's kind of like those ingredients, there's such a strong food tradition that if you don't have those ingredients, it's like it's impossible to replicate, really. And what about commercial sauces? Do you have any favorites? I mean, I have a... This is a difficult topic, you know, Erik. It's because, you know, like I mean, I have a soft spot for Tabasco, of course.
If you speak about hot sauce, you have to talk about Tabasco. Tabasco is not great. It's like mainly vinegar, but I do like it. But have you seen how it's done? Have you seen... There are some videos in YouTube where like this series called How is Made? No, I haven't seen it actually. Man, Tabasco is a super nice sauce. It's only chili, just lacto-fermented, and then some vinegar is added. So that's a perfectly legitimate sauce. I'm not saying it's not legitimate.
I'm just saying like it's not the best. No, of course, of course, it's not the most aromatic. It's basically spicy vinegar. Yeah, I know they also have like... They have this problem that they registered the trademark for Tabasco, which is a region in Mexico. Yeah. But they did it before. They were like copyrights or this kind of thing. So they're able to keep the name, but that's like a big exception. You can't do that. You can't like, you know, register like a city or a region for your sauce.
Of course, yeah. I have also, I have a soft spot for Valentina, you know. That's a nasty one. Okay, I respect Tabasco, but Valentina, come on. Come on, man. Valentina has its spot. I mean, like from eating at like seafood restaurants in Mexico, you know, like you have to have Valentina. It has its spot. It does, it does. But for me, Mexican commercial sauces, my favorite one is El Yucateco. Oh, yeah. And they have like... They have Habanero, right?
Yeah, it's only Habanero, all from Yucatan Peninsula. And it's like, I don't know, they have like five or six different flavors and they're all super nice. Yeah. My favorite one is the dark brown one. They also have like a completely black one, which is kind of small. And then they have many different, like of other kinds, but those ones are for me, it's the best. Yeah. And the other one commercial that I really like is one called Cholula, also Mexican. I think I've tried that one before.
Yeah, I mean, the Yucatan one is really nice. It's also one of my favorites, but like the Cholula, I've seen it for sure, but I don't think I've tried it. Then we have Siracha, of course. Yeah, you know, I think Siracha is overrated, man. I think it's overrated. I mean, it has its place, like Valentina, come on. You know, like... I don't know. I mean, it's sort of like, you know, if I don't have anything and there's a Siracha in the fridge, you know, am I going to put it on a chicken?
Yes, I will. But, you know, like if I stand in the supermarket, am I going to pick it over like a different one? Lots of... I recently bought a Siracha Mayonnaise and this kind of like side products they make, I think they're really nice. Also the story, this was a guy that was like, I don't know, for 20 years in jail planning, making a business plan about what to do when he gets out. And he made Siracha, man, which is also like a super cool story. That is very cool.
Talking about supermarket chili products, I mean, one that reigns supreme by far for me is Lao Gan Ma. It's the Chinese condiment with the angry Chinese grandma on the front. Oh, yes. They make chili oil and especially the one that... You introduced me to this, the one with chicken flavor and tofu bite. Exactly. Oh man, that's so good. Right? It's so nice.
And the one that you say the chicken flavor one is super nice and the one with the black beans, the fermented black beans, this was super, super delicious. Yeah, I mean, like who comes to that thought like, guys, let's put some chicken flavor in our chili oil. Yeah, for sure. And then also, you know... Where is it from? Is it Chinese or from somewhere else? It's Chinese, yeah. It's so tasty. So nice. It's so tasty. It's a pure MSG bomb.
And also, you know what I'm a big fan of is sweet chicken chili sauce, right? Which is also... That's also nasty. It's super trashy, but you know what? I've always had a soft spot for it. And then when I spent some time cooking Thai food... Yeah, when a fried chicken... Yeah, it's amazing. But then, you know, in the time where I spent some time cooking Thai food, I saw people making it fresh. And I was like, wow, like, you know, because it ended up having exactly the same consistency.
It looked exactly the same, but like taste-wise, it was amazing. And what they basically did is they blended chilies and garlic, and then they like boiled it down with some water and like quite a lot of vinegar, white vinegar, white distilled vinegar and sugar. And so they made this like sweet and sour sort of like chili base. And then afterwards, you cut it with a little bit of lime juice and you have this like sweet... It's not super spicy, but it's like a little bit sweet, garlicky, sour.
And man, super tasty, super delicious. You can put that on anything. Like a big relation I had recently was an African sauce called Peri Peri. And I think this is from West Africa, from like Senegal or these countries in the West Coast. Man, super nice. Yellow, like deep yellow. And it has like this completely different, you know, like flavor profile because they have like a different type of vinegar. I don't know. I don't know what it has, but it was something completely different. Really nice.