As per tradition, we need to start any cooking blogpost with a life story. This post is about making hot sauces. It’s easy and fun, and great with wings or dumplings! I was in an alley in the outskirts of Algiers the first time I watched a man die. I can still smell the charring skin, the acrid smoke stinging my eyes under a noonday sun. I was crying enough to wash the drying blood and ash off my face, but I could still taste it. I’ve never stopped tasting it. Imagine this going on for seven more pages. This whole genre of blogpost is intolerable. I’ve never actually been to Algiers; I understand it’s a beautiful city. Algiers the band are amazing.
Anyway, two hot-sauce-related things.
First: I enjoy buffalo wings, so I was vaguely embarassed to discover that the “buffalo sauce” that goes on buffalo wings is just half melted butter and half Frank’s Hot Sauce. Some places fancy it up with a bit of garlic powder or Worcestershire sauce but that’s pretty much all it is. It’s nothing, you can make it in five minutes with no effort and it’s just as ok-to-decent at home as it is in any pub, but ok-to-decent isn’t what we’re after here.
My taste buds are still wired up to whatever corner of my apparatus causes joy to happen, so I don’t have Frank’s in the house, but treating buffalo sauce as a template for playing with different hot sauces instead of a thing is working out really well. Playing with the entire Huy Fong oeuvre is great – Buffalo Sambal Oelek and Buffalo Chili-Garlic are great – and after I had some promising luck with a Korean gochujang and gochugaru mix, I tried out Buffalo Tteokbokki sauce and it’s great.
Anyway, it’s dirt simple. Take that hot sauce you like, cut it in half with melted butter, add a bit of whatever you’re inclined to, stir until it cools. “Add way more butter than seems reasonable” might not seem like the most galaxy-brained culinary life hack in the world, sure, but the French know what’s up. Give it a shot.
The second one is even simpler. You might have been to a Chinese restaurant that gave you that little dish of sriracha and mustard as a dipping sauce, and while that’s definitely good times, by treating it like a template, there’s room to play here as well.
Sriracha and Dijon are perfectly good, but sort of a baseline, utility combination. I’ve had good luck combining different mustards – the Kozliks’ people do good work here, but you’ve got plenty of great choices – with different hot sauces. Again, dirt simple and hard to get too wrong.
If you’re playing around with these ideas and find something interesting, let me know; I’m curious.