A. Maki:

Mark Bittman’s NYTimes article of Nov. 18th on homemade hot sauce (read here) made me reminisce about our own Hay Market sriracha. Different from his recipe, I recall that we used cider vinegar instead of white wine vinegar, and that we tossed in a healthy amount of garlic. Owen, if you’ve got this recipe on paper somewhere, post it here for a useful side-by-side comparison.

Also, have you ever been to THE ‘hot sauce blog’?

O. Maloy:

We made two versions of the sriracha. The first was simply a combination of habaneros, jalapenos, fresh cayenne peppers, tons of garlic and a few glugs of cider vinegar. I don’t have the exact recipe, but I would guesstimate that we added…

  • 1 part habanero,
  • 2 parts jalapeno,
  • 3 parts cayenne, and
  • 2 parts garlic,

…all rough chopped, to a saucepan and poured in enough vinegar to just cover them, and a pinch of salt. We then allowed the chili mixture to simmered for about 20 minutes. After removing the pot from the heat and allowing the chili mixture to cool, we poured everything into a food processor and pureed it into a sauce.

This was my favorite recipe. It was delicious, had a great red color, was firey hot, and did not spoil since it contained so much vinegar. The other version was made with all green chiles and had some cilantro in it.

Sriracha: Put it in your SALAD DRESSING

I found out the secret to great salad dressing: sriracha. I added just a tiny bit of sriracha to my last batch of salad dressing, which was made of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, dijon mustard, salt, pepper and a scant half teaspoon of sriracha. 

The sriracha added a little something to the background that took the dressing above and beyond your typical homemade dressing. Also, I was afraid that it would add a southeast Asian flare to the salad that I didn’t quite want at the time, but it did no such thing. The sriracha helped to emulsify the salad dressing, too.

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