Hot Sauce Redux

Right before we left for Peru we ran out of hot sauce. Tragic, I know. In our house this is unacceptable since hot sauce, we believe, pretty much goes on everything. Now that I have the time I thought I would restock the old version and experiment with some new additions.

First, I pretty much followed the hot sauce recipe I had up here before with the simple substitutions of 1/2 apple cider vinegar and 1/2 white vinegar instead of all white vinegar and habaneros for serranos. I've finally decided that I don't like apple cider vinegar all that much. I think it overpowers whatever it is put in (including pickles; I discovered this with some B&Bs that I canned) not allowing the other ingredients to shine. I also discovered that, at least with this hot sauce, there is a too hot. If I was making something like Tabasco I'd be less concerned, but here I want to taste the peppers and garlic as well. So, with that in mind I think I'll go back to jalapenos and serranos, more garlic (instead of the 2-3 I wrote before I'd probably up it to 6 cloves), error on the side of less vinegar as I mentioned before (near 2 cups for ~2lbs peppers) and to under season with salt and sugar at first then add more if need be (2-3 tablespoons of sugar to start and 1 tablespoon of salt). 

Here it is again with some modifications:

1.5-2 lbs roasted peppers (jalapenos and serranos work well)

2 cups white vinegar to start (add more to taste)

6 garlic cloves

2-3 tablespoons sugar to start 

1 tablespoon salt to start

I've discovered that recipes like this are really all about playing around...even if they do end up poorly like they did tonight. Oh well, now I think I've got it down! Speaking of playing around...

I also decided to try and make the same hot sauce, but with these amazing dried chile moras from Spice Market in Silver Lake that I found. I learned that they are basically chipotles, but the jalapenos (which are smoked and dried to create chipotles) are just picked younger resulting in a sweeter, more raison like flavor. Of course, since they are smoke, they have a...well...smokey flavor. They smelled delicious in the jar so I couldn't pass them up. I followed my original recipe and since I made the above hot sauce first I decided not to include the apple cider vinegar and go easy on seasoning at first. 

Since the chiles are dried I toasted them in a pan for about a minute and then rehydrated them in boiling water for ~1 hour. After this I followed my basic hot sauce recipe and I think the resulting sauce is great. It's smokey, sweet, and spicy. I threw in some habaneros since I was led to believe moras aren't very spicy....they are. I think I'd leave the habaneros out next time so you can taste the flavor of the chiles better without searing off your taste buds. 

Making both of these was great since I got to practice making hot sauces and learning what about the seasonings are important. These are very easy to play around with in terms of execution and cost! 

Homemade Caesar

Whisk, whisk, whisk!

Well, after finals, Peru, and lab presentations I found time to do something! I've been wanting to try out a caesar dressing for awhile and I had most of the ingredients on hand so here it is. This version, which is a mix of a couple of recipes, includes egg yolk, olive oil, vegetable oil, lemon juice, garlic, anchovy, a dash of worcestershire sauce and dijon mustard, salt, pepper, and parmigiano reggiano. Whisk the yolk and the oil together slowly and then combine the rest of the ingredients to mix. Done, simple, and delicious! Unfortunately, this dressing is one of those things that once you make it and realize what exactly is in it you can't eat it very often anymore. Bah.

Mise en place

I made this two nights in a row and I tweaked it the second time to better suit my tastes. I started with one egg yolk, 1/4 cup oil (I did olive), 2 anchovy fillets minced, ~2 garlic cloves minced, probably 3 tablespoons cup lemon juice, a dash of worcestershire and dijon, salt, pepper, and a hefty amount of parmigiano reggiano. This was pretty good, but I thought it could be more...pure? The second night I started out the same with the egg and oil and then did 3 fillets, 1 garlic clove, 1.5 tablespoons lemon juice, no worcestershire, 1/2 teaspoon dijon, salt, pepper, and a small grating of parmigiano reggiano. I thought this version was a lot more clean and more simple tasting, which I liked more!

Hollandaise Sauce

Classic French cooking, specifically basic sauces, is one of the skills that I wish I could master or at least begin to understand since I feel that the base recipes can be launched into a variety of dishes. Hollandaise and mayonnaise are really the only two classic French sauces that I've begun to become sufficient at making. Homemade mayonnaise really trumps and ruins anything store bought and will easily elevate any aoili that you traditionally use store bought mayonnaise for. Hollandaise is, well, just amazing if made correctly. I've enjoyed it over Jessica's homemade brioche and poached egg with a slice of serrano ham giving some elegance to the classic eggs benedict.

I think that I'm relatively good at making these sauces since they a science experiment at heart given that they are both emulsions with mayonnaise being a oil-egg yolk emulsion while hollandaise is a butter-egg yolk emulsion with both containing water. Essentially, an emulsion is two liquids that don't normally mix (fat and water) are mixed with an emulsifier and become evenly dispersed. One of the best emulsifiers are egg yolks since they contain so many proteins. These proteins when beaten and heated will denature (fall apart) and expose their hydrophobic (water hating) areas and hydrophilic (water loving areas) areas to the oil and water. The hydrophobic parts of the proteins will associate with the fats since these are, too, hydrophobic while the hydrophilic parts will interact with the water. Basically, this functions to reduce the tension between the water and oil interface to form the emulsion and stabilizes the emulsion by preventing the oil from interacting with the water and separating out into two layers. Simply put: the egg yolk allows for a homogeneous mixture of oil and water to be formed.

Emulsions are a bit difficult to form and keep together, but I attribute my ability to do so to my science background and knowing how interactions like this "feel" and look. I used my hollandaise to dip my artichoke in, which is new to me since I grew up eating them with melted butter with lemon juice. I followed Julia Child's recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1, which calls for butter, egg yolks, water, lemon juice, and salt. Being Julia Child, this recipe turned out a lot more buttery than I'm used to, but this was fine for my artichoke application!