Homemade Tabasco style hot sauce

Tabasco sauce has been a constant companion in my life, from being a quick way to add a lovely light heat to any dish to enlivening Bloody Marys on the plane and spicing up dull meals when travelling. I have always been curious about how it is made and an article in the Telegraph in July gave me the perfect excuse to try making my own version.

I roughly followed Edmund Mcllhenny's original method -

'...crushing the ripest peppers, adding a cup of Avery salt to every gallon of crushed pepper, and letting the mixture age in crockery jars. After 30 days he added ‘the best French wine vinegar’ and let the sauce stand for another 30 days.'

But used ingredients that are easily available in London. So the long red chillies you can find in most supermarkets or Asian corner shops. These are fairly mild but tasty. Maldon sea salt is a home favourite and a sharp flavourful apple cider vinegar from Core Fruit Products at Oval farmers market.

Keeping the proportion of 1 cup (236.59ml) of salt to 1 gallon (4.54 litres) of chilli mash I blitzed a big bag of chillies to make a chilli mash and added the same ratio of salt.

I left this mix in a cool dark place for a month to ferment, and then strained the mash through a fine sieve and added enough apple cider vinegar to give the sauce a sour lift.

Ingredients:
about 500g red chillies
Maldon sea salt
apple cider vinegar - to taste

Sterilise a measuring jug, a container with lid for your mash, a large metal spoon and a knife or food processor blade and bowl. I did this by putting them in a big pot of boiling water for a few minutes. Dry well with paper towels.

Wash the chillies thoroughly and remove any green stalks and nasty bits. Either chop them finely, seeds and all, or blitz in a food processor to a coarse mash.

The ratio of salt to chilli mash is 1 cup (236.59ml) of salt to 1 gallon (4.54 litres) of chilli mash. I spooned my mash into a measuring jug and added about 36ml of salt to 700ml of mash. Mix well.

Leave covered in a cool dark place for a month to ferment, then strain through a fine sieve, pressing out the liquid. Discard the leftover pulp. This left me with 250ml of fiery red liquid, to which I added 50ml apple cider vinegar.

This chilli sauce has been incredibly versatile - delicious in everything from drinks, soups and sauces to grilled meats, stews and fish.

I simmered the liquid with butter, sugar, more vinegar and flour, reducing it by half to make a gorgeously piquant hot sauce that is a classic with barbecued or deep fried chicken wings but also worked really well with some smoked prawns instead of aioli or mayonnaise.

Homemade buffalo hot sauce

Ingredients:
200ml chilli liquid
50g unsalted butter
half a tablespoon of sugar
a teaspoon of flour
half to one tablespoon apple cider vinegar

Gently heat the chilli sauce in a small saucepan with the butter until it comes to the boil. Stir in the sugar and half a tablespoon of vinegar.

Sieve the flour into the lightly bubbling mixture and whisk out any lumps. Keep an eye on the flame and allow the sauce to simmer gently as it reduces, whisking occasionally to stop any sticking.

When the sauce will coat the back of a spoon have a taste and add more vinegar and/or sugar if you would like it sweeter or more piquant. Reduce again until you have a nice consistency without it being too thick.

Serve warm as a dip or drizzle over cooked meat, fish, grilled vegetables. Anything that takes your fancy really!

Prawn and pork sesame cakes

When its cold and wet outside I feel like there are two very clear, very different options for what to eat. Either it's some serious comfort food, a good book, and a warm, enveloping duvet, or it has to be something with a good kick of chilli heat to drive the damp chill out of my bones. In the deepest darkest winters in New York I used to make a bowl of rice noodles each morning with coriander, bean sprouts and steaming hot beef broth, piled high with sliced bird's eye chillies. This was rocket fuel for the trip from my little downtown studio flat to the relative warmth of the subway and finally the office. Here in London the cold seems less bitter, but somehow wetter and I find adding something fried and crispy to the chilli mix is the perfect remedy.

200g raw shelled prawns
60g streaky unsmoked bacon, the fattier the better
two small shallots
two tablespoons of dried shrimp
one or two small bird's eye chillies
a pinch of flaked dried chilli
a tablespoon of fish sauce
plenty of ground white pepper
black and white sesame seeds
coriander leaves, to garnish

If you have a food processor, blend together all of the ingredients except the prawns and sesame seeds. Mince the prawns by hand (so they end up with a slightly coarser texture than everything else) and then mix well with the processed paste.

Have a bowl of water handy to dip your hands into every now and then. Take a small handful of the paste and roll it into a vague ball shape before pressing them into small, two-bite sized cakes. The water helps stop the mix from sticking to your hands. Ready a bowl with a shallow layer of the black and white sesame seeds. Heat a frying pan with about a centimetre of oil but don't let it smoke. Take a little cake, pop it on the sesame seeds and then add to the oil seed side down. It should sizzle gently, if not, turn up/down the heat. Continue with the rest of the cakes and fry each for a minute or two on each side until deep golden brown and beginning to crisp at the edges.

Drain the cakes on some kitchen roll before them piling onto a plate and scatter over some coriander leaves. Serve with the spicy lemongrass dipping sauce below.

Spicy lemongrass dipping sauce

You may decide to tone up or down the amount of chilli and chilli oil in this recipe depending on your taste. I find mine change with my mood and the weather, so I take a tiny lick of a sliced chilli and decide then how much to add.

three cloves of garlic, very finely chopped
a stalk of lemongrass, finely sliced and quickly chopped
the juice from a lemon
50ml rice wine vinegar
a tablespoon of fish sauce
two small bird's eye chillies, thinly sliced
a tablespoon of chilli oil, the Chinese kind with dark roasted chilli flakes
a tablespoon of palm sugar
two tablespoons of water
a good handful each of chopped parsley and either coriander or mint
ground black pepper

Mix together all the ingredients and taste, adding more palm sugar, water, chilli, lemon or anything else that you feel needs more representation in the sauce. It should taste additively sweet, tangy, hot and salty.

Steamed fish, Cantonese style

I adore this dish. The ritual of making it reminds me of being a little girl growing up in Hong Kong. Every night Mum and I would have a Cantonese dinner together. This was always of a bowl of clear soup, a bowl of steamed rice, and various little dishes of steamed or stir fried vegetables and meats. The dishes would vary according to season and whim, but there was always a steamed fish. I forget all of the names, but pomfret, butterfish and garoupa featured, to name a few. As a child I mostly recognised them as them as 'big bone fish' or 'small bone fish', a characteristic that was directly related to my enjoyment due to my underdeveloped skills at separating meat from bone with chopsticks, teeth and tongue.

To this day my ability with chopsticks is still outstripped by my enthusiasm when it comes to fish that has just been taken out of the steamer and dressed with a glistening combination of oil and soy sauce. Left to my own devices I resort to a knife and fork to separate the flakes from the bones, before using a spoon to scoop up mouthfuls of fish together with sauce and softened shards of chilli, spring onion and ginger.

You can use any fish at all for this recipe, I love sea bream, sea bass or red mullet. Ask the fishmonger to trim the tail and fins, and clean the fish but leave it whole.

You will need a plate large enough for the fish to lie on and a steamer big enough to fit the plate. If you have a big wok with a lid all you need is a plate stand, a metal ring with legs, and you should be able to accommodate most sizes.

Ingredients:
any whole fish, cleaned and gutted
a couple of spring onions, cut crossways into 2 inch sections and then sliced lengthways into thin strips like matchsticks.
the same amount of ginger, peeled and cut into the same sized pieces as the spring onion
about half the amount of red chilli, again cut into the matchsticks

Sauce:
half a tablespoon of groundnut oil
a slice of ginger
a small shallot, peeled and lightly crushed
two teaspoons of shaoxing wine
a tablespoon of light soy sauce
two teaspoons of dark soy sauce
a teaspoon of sugar
a small pinch of pepper
a teaspoon of sesame oil

Give the fish a good rinse to remove any remaining scales and other less tasty bits like guts still clinging to the insides of the fish. Pat the fish dry with some kitchen paper and weigh it before placing it on a plate. If the fish has been in the fridge then give it some time to come to room temperature so it is not too cold when you steam it.

Combine the spring onion, ginger and chilli shreds and pile them on top of the fish, before gently lowering the plate into a steamer with boiling water. Steam the fish according to the following timings:

Round fish – one minute for every two ounces
Flat fish – one minute for every three ounces

While the fish steams make the sauce. Warm the oil in a small saucepan until the ginger begins to colour, then remove it and the shallot and discard. Take the saucepan off the heat and add the wine, soy sauces, sugar and pepper to the hot oil, stirring to dissolve. Taste the sauce; it should be salty and sweet. Add more soy sauce or sugar if you prefer. Add the sesame oil at the very end.

Be sure to time the steaming carefully and remove the fish at exactly the right time. When the fish is cooked take the plate out and tip it gently over the sink to get rid of the juices in the bottom. Heat the sauce on a high heat until it boils and then pour it all over the fish, which should sizzle deliciously.

Serve at once, either with chopsticks for authenticity or a fish knife and fork for greedy speed.

Fruity fiery chilli sauce

I am completely addicted to chilli sauce. Recently I made about a litre of the stuff and since then its featured in pretty much every dinner in some form. It's a brilliant marinade for spicy hot chicken wings, a dip for pizza crusts, a quick sauce for noodles, hell, I even had it on vanilla ice cream and it was awesome.

Making chilli sauce is simple enough, but the fun part is making it exactly how you like it. Whether it's fiery hot or mild, syrupy sweet or sour, a freshly made chilli sauce tastes bright and fruity, a world away from store bought jars. I'd recommend wearing rubber gloves when removing the seeds - not only do chillies stain your hands, but the compound that produces heat, capsaicin, lingers on your fingertips even after lots of hand washing. I found out the wrong way when I rubbed my eyes after making my first attempt at this recipe...

Ingredients:
500g fresh red chillies

a clove of garlic, crushed
an equal amount of ginger, peeled and grated
25ml of rice wine vinegar
2 teaspoons of sesame oil
juice of 1 and a half lemons
1 tablespoon of sea salt

a few very hot chillies, like scotch bonnets (optional)

You'll need a food processor for this. You could maybe try using a stick blender - if you do let me know how it goes!

Slice the stems off the chillies, then split each one in half lengthways and remove all the seeds and white pith. Chop the chillies roughly and put them in a food processor with the rest of the ingredients, except for the very hot chillies if you are using them. Whizz everything into a pulp, then have a tiny taste. If the sauce is too mild for your liking start adding the scotch bonnets one by one. Mix thoroughly each time before tasting again, until you're happy with the result. Your chilli sauce should keep for a long time in the fridge.

Poussin and caribbean salsa

Serves two with a vegetable side dish or salad

One fat poussin, spatchcocked
A few good pinches of chilli flakes
Juice and zest of half a lemon
A few cloves of garlic
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Half a cucumber, peeled and seeds scraped out with a teaspoon
Two spring onions
A mild hot green pepper, seeded
A pinch of thyme leaves
Salt and pepper
Juice of a lime
150ml crème fraîche

If you have a mortar and pestle, pound the chilli with some salt and then add the garlic to make a thick paste. Otherwise crush the garlic with the flat of a blade and some salt and crumble in the chilli. Add the pepper, lemon and olive oil and mix together well. Smear the marinade all over the poussin and leave it in a bowl covered with cling film or in a clear plastic food bag for as long as possible before cooking. An hour is fine, four to six hours is brilliant. Turn and massage the meat if you happen to be passing by.

If you have a food processor, blend all the ingredients for the salsa but leave it a little chunky. Otherwise finely chop the cucumber, spring onion and pepper and mix in the other bits. Cover with cling film and leave the salsa to sit for one hour or more in the fridge.

When you are ready to cook, heat a cast iron grill pan over a low heat for at least ten minutes until the pan is hot and smoking. Add the poussin, skin side down and press down on the meat with a spatula so the skin gets lovely and charred. Cook the poussin slowly over a low heat. It will stick to the pan at first, but don't turn it over until the skin releases from the pan on its own. It should take 20-30 minutes to cook the poussin, turning once or twice. To check it is done stick a skewer into the thickest part of the leg and catch some juices with a spoon. If they run clear, without any pinky red blood, then the chicken is cooked.

Rest the poussin for ten minutes on a wooden board under some foil, then chop in half and serve, accomapnied with the bowl of salsa for dipping and smearing.

Photos to come...

A sauce for artichokes

I am in Italy. It is the artichoke season and the Mercato Centrale in Florence offers a bewildering number of varieties. Should we choose the carciofi Romani from Sicily, tightly budded globes the size of an orange, only edible after long slow cooking? Or the thorny purple petaled Morellino artichokes from the Tuscan wildlands of Maremma, teardrop shaped and tender enough to eat raw?

We bought Morellini, removed their tough outer leaves, cut off their spiny tops and boiled them for about 20 minutes in salted water with half a lemon. You can also add the stalks, but peel off the tough fibrous skins first, once softened they are equally delicious. Cover all the cut parts with lemon juice while you work to stop them going black.

Here is the recipe for a sauce:

1 hard boiled egg
1 tin of anchovy fillets
a large bunch of parsley, chives, fennel and tarragon
150 ml extra virgin olive oil
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
125ml natural Greek yoghurt
grated zest of half a lemon
juice of one lemon
Salt and pepper

Purée all of the above until you have a sauce with the consistency of thin mayonnaise. Adjust the olive oil, lemon, salt and pepper to taste.

Serve as a dipping sauce for hot artichokes petals, hearts and stalks.