Tangled Branches: Satiated
riveting tales of how we sustain ourselves
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Seeking Inner Beauty
...This is a continuation of a post I started over on my garden blog...
Inner Beauty is a hot sauce with a large crowd of admirers. Just Google Inner Beauty sauce and you'll see what I mean. I don't remember exactly when I first tasted Inner Beauty, but it was probably in the late 1980s. I saw it on a store shelf and thought it was cute. It followed me home. We didn't really know what to do with it. Tasted it and thought it might be good as a sauce for grilled meat. The first time we tried it out, we used it as a basting sauce for grilled chicken. And the second time and the third time and ... I don't think we ever used it any other way, except that the chicken was sometimes pork chops. Time passed. The sauce disappeared from the store where we'd been buying it. A few years later we spotted a bottle again (somewhere), but it didn't look quite the same. Label change? We weren't sure, not having bought any in a long while. Well, we bought it anyway, but it didn't taste quite the same either. Maybe it changed, maybe we changed, but at any rate we never bought another bottle. And then we forgot all about it.
Until a couple of weekends ago when we were talking about spicy condiments and one of us said "Hey, remember when we used to put Inner Beauty on chicken and pork chops on the grill? I wonder if we can still buy that stuff?". No. But supposedly the recipe is in a book (Big Flavors of the Hot Sun) by Chris Schlesinger, the originator of Inner Beauty. Well, yes, except that recipe isn't the same as this other recipe by the same cook and author. And neither one is the same as the list of ingredients on the label of the bottled sauce according to this post on eGullet.
But I don't usually follow recipes to the letter anyhow, so I took those as suggestions and started blending. No wait, first I went shopping. I don't usually have papayas around the house, but I'm lucky to live near a Korean/international supermarket and they have 2 or 3 brands of tropical fruit purees in the freezer case. And I picked up a bottle of pineapple juice concentrate. And some orange juice. Now stocked with tropical fruit juices, concentrates and purees, I got the rest of the ingredients from the garden and pantry.
I didn't grow any habaneros or scotch bonnet peppers this year, but I do have Ají Dulce and Lemon Drop and Prik Ki Nue. I assumed those would give the flavor (from Ají Dulce and Lemon Drop) and heat level (Lemon Drop and Prik Ki Nue) I was aiming at. Then, I added a few other pepper varieties for good measure - Czechoslovakian Black and Aci Sivri because I like their fruity flavors and Fish for additional heat and color.
These are the ingredients and quantities from my notes:
4 Ají Dulce peppers (ripe)
2 Lemon Drop peppers (green)
2 Prik Ki Nue peppers (green)
1 Czechoslovakian Black pepper (ripe)
1 Aci Sivri pepper (green)
2 Fish peppers (ripe)
3 to 4 oz. frozen papaya
1/4 cup orange juice
1/4 cup pineapple juice concentrate
2 Tbsp. light brown sugar
2 tsp. dark brown sugar
1 Tbsp. molasses
3 Tbsp. Plochman's mild yellow mustard
3 Tbsp. rice vinegar
1 tsp. peanut oil
1/2 tsp. Penzey's Hot Curry Powder
1/4 tsp. ground ancho chile pepper
1/4 tsp. turmeric
1/4 tsp. ground allspice
1 tsp. Japanese sea salt
Chop the chile peppers fine in a blender. Add fruit juices and fruit and continue blending until mixture is fairly smooth. Add sugars, molasses, mustard and vinegar and blend. Since this was an experiment, I tasted and took notes while measuring and adding ingredients until I thought it tasted good.
I couldn't stand the idea of putting raw curry powder and turmeric into this or anything else, so I heated a small amount of oil in a small frying pan and sizzled the spices in it for a few seconds as in the Indian cooking technique of tarka or phodina. As soon as that was fragrant and sizzling, I poured the spice mixture into the blender, added the salt, and blended until I thought it was as smooth a mixture as I was going to get.
So how did it turn out? It was more fruity and less mustardy than we remember the bottled sauce. And I'm ambivalent about the ground spices; I didn't think they were really necessary so I used them in token amounts which had very little effect on the finished product. The sauce was not blazingly hot, but I don't remember the original bottled sauce as being all that hot either. For the first use, I marinated some pork chops in it and we grilled them without additional basting and found the heat level just about right. Last night though, I used it as a sauce for chicken wings, and we thought it would be better if it was hotter.
But here's my problem. It's not the same as the bottled sauce, but my spouse says it's better than the bottled sauce. Now what do I do? Keep making it this way to please the spouse? Or try to get it closer to the bottled product? I may taste some of the supposedly similar commercial products for reference. I'm thinking of Lottie's in particular. Anybody else have a favorite hot sauce?
posted by Entangled at 7:07 AM
2 Comments:
Wow, Entangled! This sounds almost alchemical (turning peppers into gold?)! Thanks for doing the ground work and posting followup notes. I'm with you on the raw spices!
Our Friend Ben: Come to think of it, I don't remember the price of a bottle of Inner Beauty but I'm sure they made money on it. That's probably not what you meant though ;-)
I'm going to be making another batch soon. We've almost finished this one.
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