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Skriven 2012-10-20 14:20:30 av Matt Munson (1:218/109)
Ärende: about hot sauce
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What To Eat With The Best Hot Sauce In The World: A Guide For People Who Arent
Anti-Sriracha Bores
Albert Burneko

You ever been to a hot-sauce specialty shop? These are dimly lit little retail
closets, typically in beachside vacation towns and the like, where you stare at
shelves upon shelves of little hot-sauce bottles and have a chuckle at the
menacingly hyperbolic product names and label imagery used to indicate the
extreme pungency of the liquids contained therein. Nuclear Hell, with a sticker
depicting a mushroom cloud rising above a splintering Old West-style outhouse;
Satan's Blood, in a sinister-looking olde-tymey stoppered glass decanter-style
bottle, with a leering red-skinned devil on the attached label booklet. You get
the idea.

A common feature of these labels is an outrageous six-digit number of something
called Scoville Units, the standard measurement of pungent heat in spicy
foodstuffs. 900,000 SU! the label will say in shocked, blood-dripping font, and
even if you're not familiar with the particulars of the Scoville scale, you're
meant to gather from this that when you use this stuff in your chili, you will
have to serve it with two spoons: one for eating with, and another for stuffing
your internal organs back into your asshole. The wild outer variants of novelty
hot sauce boast Scoville scores well above one million, comparable to those of
riot-control pepper spray; you add them to your barbecue sauce by donning a
spacesuit, opening the bottle, dipping the very tip of a toothpick into the
liquid, holding the toothpick over your pot of barbecue sauce, and getting
gunned down by the ATF.

And really, the novelty hot-sauce thing is mostly just in good fun, because I
think we all understand that these are not actual sauces for human consumption
so much as they are liquefied episodes of Jackass. I mention them here only
because they've played a part in dragging our cultural conception of hot sauce
seemingly inexorably toward the extreme, where the flavor and character of the
sauce are not just secondary, but altogether irrelevant next to the measure of
a sauce's pure heat. The barking-mad logical endpoint of this is pure capsaicin
extract, which does not have a flavor so much as a physiological effect: that
of dissolving all the soft tissue in your body and leaving behind nothing but a
grinning skeleton.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to add pure, unadorned heat to a dish
without changing its flavor, just like there's nothing wrong with adding plain
salt or sugar to a dish. However, chili peppers are delicious, entirely apart
from their pungency, and it's disappointing to see them reduced by most hot
sauces to mere capsaicin delivery vehicles. Take even the more moderate,
mainstream-y hot saucesTabasco, Texas Pete, Frank's. What do they taste like?
Not chili peppers, but vinegar and salt.
What To Eat With The Best Hot Sauce In The World: A Guide For People Who Aren't
Anti-Sriracha Bores

The Foodspin archives: Chicken thighs | Popeye's biscuits | Salad | Candy corn
Oreos | Chili | Red Bull Total Zero | French toast | Sriracha

Enter sriracha. (And exit some inevitable number of drearily pinheaded
anti-sriracha bores who prioritize the maintenance of their insufferable,
all-rejecting past-that-ness over experiencing things that are
goodcongratulations, two-legged buckets of feces! You have persevered over
enjoyment! Your reward is a gilded tube of Go-Gurt.) For the unacquainted,
sriracha is the name of a type of fire-engine-red Thai chili sauce that is
currently colonizing every last corner of planet Earth; most commonly, when
people refer to sriracha, they are talking specifically about the Huy Fong
Foods brand with the rooster logo on the bottle, and they are talking about
this brand because it is the best thing in the entire world.

Here's what sets sriracha apart from what's typically sold as hot sauce (apart
from the fact that you have to walk over to the "Asian" aisle at your
supermarket to find it): it is an actual sauce, thick and rich and opaque, as
opposed to flavorful vinegar; and it tastes, vividly and brightly and damn near
erotically, of red chilis. Both of these distinctions arise from the fact that
sriracha is actually made of pureed chilis, rather than simply infused with
them. If you guessed that this means it's also furiously hot, you're fuckin'-A
right it is. It is also deliciously garlicky and tart and sweet and salty.
These attributes combine to make it the most inexplicably yet undeniably
red-tasting thing I can think of. My wife says it tastes like exclamation
points, and that's true, too.

If you're already familiar with sriracha, you likely first encountered it at a
Vietnamese pho joint, where in short order you progressed from adding a tiny
droplet of it to your peanut sauce to dumping an entire bottle of it into your
soup and then sucking the dregs out of the bottle with crazed, spiral-eyed
intensity. You accommodated your subsequent lifetime ban from the establishment
by moving on to purchasing the stuff in bottles at your local supermarket. You
now add it to everything that you eatyou're here today not so much for tips on
what sorts of things to top with a generous squirt of sriracha, but in the hope
that I might reveal which gauge of intravenous catheter to use for pumping it
directly into your heart. To you I say that this entire column is secretly an
invitation for someone to reveal exactly that down in the comments.

For those who are only now learning of sriracha, or those who are finally
making the decision to try it, my impulse is to make a list of all the various
foods that can be improved by a healthy dash of the stuff, but the fact is, in
my experience, the only thing that isn't improved at least a little bit by
putting sriracha on it is the human eyeball. Definitely don't put it on your
eyeball. Not even if you're going to eat your eyeball, because, please don't
eat your eyeball.

I guess that's not very helpful advice. You're looking to try sriracha, and you
want some suggestions for how to introduce yourself to the stuff. An obvious
and delicious answer is to hie thee to a pho joint or Thai restaurant and try
it in the cuisines of its origin. A particularly fun thing to do is to see how
the addition of sriracha changes (and improves) the sorts of things that might
typically contain hot sauce as an actual ingredient. See how their flavors are
brightened, enriched, livened up by swapping out the Frank's or Texas Pete or
Tabasco or whatever for sriracha.

Add some to your barbecue sauce, your chili, your vegetable soup, your Bloody
Mary. Stir some into your taco meat while it cooks in the pan; add another
stripe of it directly to the taco during assembly. Whisk some into your
homemade salad dressing, rmoulade, and Buffalo wing sauce. It's welcome in
curry; it's divine in red beans and rice; it will send your salsa into goddamn
orbit. Stir it into hummus. Fold it into butter; spread the butter on a
tortilla; toast the tortilla in the broiler for a minute; die happy. Get some
carryout sushi; stir some sriracha into a tablespoon of mayonnaise; dip; weep.
Mix it into cake batter like some kind of apeshit mad-scientist superhero. Go
fucking crazy! You can't lose!

Or, put it directly on things as a condiment. This is where I'd recommend
moderate application at firstsmall, gorgeous little ruby-red dots of the stuff,
here and there on your dishboth because sriracha is genuinely spicy, and
because it is very bold and can overwhelm other flavors in a way that you might
not appreciate in those first tentative minutes before you discover that it is
the only thing you ever want to taste again in your life. On roasted chicken,
steamed or roasted vegetables, grilled fish, ramen noodles, French fries. On
pizza. Oh yeah. Scrambled eggs. Mmmmmm. Macaroni and cheese. Oh God. OhmyGod!

[composes self]

Ultimately, the thing to do with sriracha is to have fun with it. It tastes
fun: bright and lively and happy, with that magical cherry tomato effect of
bringing your palate and salivary glands to sudden, singing, dancing life.

People like to talk about how they want their eventual memorial services to be
lively, celebratory affairs: Show a slideshow of funny moments from my life and
tell stories and drink a lot and laugh a lot and do the chicken dance! It's a
wonderful notion, but things rarely play out that way, for the obvious reason
that those who survive their loved ones rarely feel so great about it in the
immediate aftermath of saying goodbye. Few get to have fun funerals. As you
embark on your sriracha adventure, spare a moment to congratulate boring old
hot sauce on being one of them.

Albert Burneko is an eating enthusiast and father of two. His work can be found
destroying everything of value in his crumbling home. Peevishly correct his
foolishness at albertburneko@gmail.com.
-from deadspin.com
Matt


... Democracy is 3 wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner
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