This recipe is adapted from Modernist Cuisine at Home’s Buffalo Hot Sauce recipe. Yields 250 grams (~9 fl oz).
Habenero Hot Sauce and Mash
Ingredients:
200 g canola oil
80 g white onion thinly sliced
2 egg yolks (~50g)
35 g vinegar
15 g lemon juice
2 habanero peppers sliced
15 g paprika powder
15 g red cayenne pepper powder
5 cloves garlic thinly sliced
Kosher salt to taste
Think of this recipe as three components that can be modified. First we’ll be creating a flavored oil with our pungent ingredients. Then we add an emulsifying agent, egg yolks, and finish off with some acids and salt.
- Combine oil, onion, garlic, paprika, cayenne, and habanero into a pan and heat to a slow simmer for 30 minutes. You don’t want to burn the ingredients — you can and it taste interesting — but extract the flavors.
- Strain through a fine mesh strainer into a small bowl. Push down to get as much oil out and reserve the mash — it goes great with tacos and potatoes like chipotle peppers in adobo.
- In another bowl place your egg yolks and blend in the flavored oil you extracted in step 2.
- Mix in lemon juice and vinegar
- Salt to taste
I like to store this sauce in a squeeze bottle like this and serve chilled with tacos, meats, and potatoes. It even goes good on popcorn.
To adapt this recipe you can think of it as 3 separate components as I mentioned earlier. Hot sauces like Franks Red Hot use water and tomatoes for the base and vinegar for the acid. Cholula uses arbol and pequin peppers but a similar base to Franks — recipe here. So feel free to try different bases, different levels of heat, and different acids to get that perfect flavor your after. I love white vinegar in mine.
