Hot Sauce (please excuse cheesy wild west vignettes)
Megan sent me a big bag of dried Guajillo chiles, and so far they’ve served me quite well. The Guajillos are somewhat mild (a mere 2,500~5,000 Scovilles) but taste great and they’ve single handedly put me on a Mexican food kick thats lasted a few weeks and survived a trip to Taco Bell. The first thing I made with these was some homemade Hot Sauce, which got most of its heat from habaneros, but its flavor from the guajillos. The recipe was close to that from the Bromberg Bros:
- 3 c white vinegar
- 3 habaneros
- 2 guajillos
- 2 T salt
- 1 Lb carrots
The first step is to trim and deseed the peppers and to peel and chop the carrots. Next fire up the chiles with the vinegar and the salt in a deece sauce pan until boilage occurs. At the same time simmer the carrots in an inch or two of water for about 10 minutes or until they’re soft. When the peppers boil you have to take them off the heat and set them to cool, this is best done somewhere you don’t need to be because the air can get a little thick if you know what I mean. When they’re about room temp puree them in the blender and then strain them into a decent size vessel. Just a note: this makes about a quarter century’s worth of hot sauce, so you may want to split it up and give some away.
When the carrots are done blend them and add them to the peppers. I had to cut mine down with a bit of water to get the heat right, do so as needed. Like most things of this nature, this stuff gets better every day it sits in the fridge.
Salsa
When it comes to making stuff like salsa, I find that more is better, way better. So when its not turning out quite right just add more of this, more of that, then go back and add more of the other thing, and in the end you have twice as much salsa as planned… Kick Ass! This is about what I ended up with:
- 2 cups cherry tomatoes
- 1 plum tomato
- 1 kumato tomato
- 1 can whole peeled tomatoes
- 1 onion
- 4 cloves garlic
- 1/2 yellow pepper
- 3 guajillo chiles
- 1 c cilantro
- 1 c corn
- 4 T lime juice
- 2 T olive oil
- 1 t cumin
- 1/4 t salt
- 3 T above hot sauce
I started off with some of the tomatoes, the onion, the garlic, the bell pep, and the chiles with the olive oil in the broiler. The rest of the tomatoes where added later when I found it wasn’t tomatoey enough. Still, I would recommend this though because you get a nice combination of the roasted and fresh tomato texture/flavor. I also had to pull the dried chiles from the broiler almost right away cause they where about to catch on fire (duh).
The rest just went in the food processor in taste-add-taste-add fashion. This was good when it came out, but by the end of the week it was incredible. Here are some of the things it found its way into:
Quesadillas
Black Bean Lettuce Wraps
Fish Taco Salad
