recipehouse:
(via Sriracha Bacon Beer Cheese Dip - With Salt and Wit)
This Sriracha Bacon Beer Cheese Dip recipe sounds like a perfect spicy snack for a Super Bowl Sunday crowd! I’d want to try using a lager or light pale ale from a local craft brewery rather than the Bud Light Lime they call for, but to each their own… 🔥🐖🍺🧀
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Did you know that green Sriracha exists?! Not only is green Sriracha sauce available for purchase in bottles, my friend—Chef Kajsa Alger—was kind enough to send me the green Sriracha recipe she uses at her Hollywood restaurant, Mud Hen Tavern!
First up: let’s talk about the Midori Sriracha sauce from Musashi Foods! Midori (みどり) is a Japanese word meaning “green”, and this green Sriracha is quite different than the red rooster sauce we know and love. Made with green serrano chiles, garlic, rice vinegar, brown sugar, and salt, Musashi’s green Sriracha has a very bright, almost grassy flavor to it from the young peppers, and as their label says, “it captures the essence of Sriracha with a Japanese twist.”
You can purchase Midori green Sriracha via Amazon or from Musashi Foods directly.
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Second up is discussing this green Sriracha spin from Mud Hen Tavern. It’s one of my absolute favorite places to eat in Los Angeles, and one of my favorite dishes there is called Angry Eggs, which consists of deviled eggs with green Sriracha, red Sriracha, and a spicy Indian reshampatti chile powder. Thank to chefs Kajsa Alger and Susan Feniger, who were kind enough to share their green Sriracha recipe with us… just don’t expect it to taste anything like the Musashi Foods Midori Sriracha or the Huy Fong Foods red original! The addition of dried coconut, roasted chiles, and fresh herbs makes this a Sriracha tasting experience unto itself!
Green Sriracha recipe from Mud Hen Tavern
Reprinted from Susan Feniger’s Street Food: Irresistibly Crispy, Creamy, Crunchy, Spicy, Sticky, Sweet Recipes with permission.
Makes 4 cups“A mildly spicy, almost fruity, herbal fresh condiment, it is fantastic on a piece of grilled fish, on roasted chicken, and on sautéed mushrooms. It’s also great as a garnish for a rich soup, on top of mashed avocados with feta cheese, or as a dip for crudités. This Sriracha sauce is different from the typical red sauce you see in squeeze bottles in every Asian restaurant. I still use chiles, but I use poblanos, which give the sauce a rich, gentle heat.” —chef Susan Feniger
Put roughly a third of the roasted poblano chiles, serrano chiles, garlic, coconut, ginger, turmeric, cilantro, Thai basil, mint, chives, lime leaves, and lemongrass in a blender. Add all of the oil, water, lime juice, and salt. Puree until smooth. (You may need to pulse the blender in the initial stages of blending so that the ingredients don’t catch in the blender.)
Depending on the size of your blender, you may be able to continue adding ingredients to the pureed sauce until all of the ingredients are used. If you need more space, pour half of the pureed sauce into a bowl and continue blending the remaining ingredients in batches, always using a little bit of the original sauce to start with.
When all of the ingredients are blended smoothly, pour the sauce into a medium bowl and stir well. This green Sriracha sauce can be stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.
Related recipe:
Sriracha Deviled Eggs recipe from The Sriracha Cookbook (via Serious Eats)
Post by Kimberly Beck
Ever since I joined the Sriracha Cookbook team back in April, I have been exposed to a whole new subculture of people that I never even knew existed - Sriracha enthusiasts! I suppose I’d seen a Sriracha bottle here or there, but I never really took note. Now I am intimately involved in a world of festivals and swag and all kinds of hoopla over this spicy red sauce. And it is, I have discovered, a most delicious condiment that I whole-heartedly welcome into my life - and my kitchen! The more I use it, the more I think, how did I ever live without it?
Although I understand there to be many Sriracha purists out there who are loyal and monogamous to the Huy Fong Foods “Rooster Sauce” that started it all, the Sriracha Cookbook Team loves to explore new Sriracha horizons. There are, after all, so many interesting brands out there creating their own flavor profile for this beloved sauce. That’s why we were delighted to see a spanking new product just released from Oso Pepper Company at the Electronic Sriracha Festival in San Jose this past August.
Vincent and Myra Verret, owners of Oso Pepper Company, are proud of their latest offering, Cry Out! Sriracha Chili Sauce. And for good reason. Their sauce has approximately 1/5th of the sugar content compared to other Sriracha brands on the market with its sweetness coming from a base of pureed red bell peppers. Not only that, it contains about 1/3rd of the salt content, making it a great hot alternative for people on a low-sodium diet.
The Verrets aren’t all about the heat, though. In fact, Vincent says, “We are not fans of the vinegar and salt blast one has to endure with most hot sauces on the market today. Nor are we fans of the heat (insanely hot) for heat’s sake. So, we worked to develop products which keep within our market’s accepted flavor profiles. Plain and simply, flavors we enjoy without the salt, the vinegar blast, or the insane heat.”
Oso Pepper Company started as a “humble backyard garden” producing fruits and veggies for the Verret family table in 2008. Since then, it has grown into a family owned operation producing several varieties of sauces and pickled products. And there is more to come! Expect to see their Surf Sauce coming soon with mango, pineapple, habanero, and red jalapeno. In the meantime, Cry Out! Sriracha Chili Sauce is available now for online ordering at the Oso Pepper Company website.
Check it out!
Whole Foods Market has just recently entered the Sriracha game with its own version of the sauce—Ninja Squirrel Sriracha—that’s available exclusively at Whole Foods locations around the country. Naturally, I wanted to give it a taste, so I got a bottle (or two or six) and also got to interview its creator about its origins!
Ninja Squirrel Sriracha is the brainchild of Derek Sarno, who is both the Senior Global Chef at Whole Foods Market and one-half of the fraternal duo that runs the popular plant-based vegan community Wicked Healthy Food (along with his brother/cookbook author extraordinaire, Chad Sarno). I met Derek a few years back while judging the Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival (which I’m doing again this year… 8/24/14!) and we’ve remained buddies since, so I was especially stoked to learn he was working on his own Sriracha recipe!
As for the taste… it’s delicious! There’s a really nice heat that hangs out for a minute or two without being overpowering. The ingredient list calls out a red jalapeño puree, a nondescript “red chili puree”, and a habanero pepper powder, the last of which I suspect may be what leaves the nice lingering spice. Regarding the chile blend they went with, Derek notes, “I was looking for hot, yet palatable, sweet, twangy, and delicious. It took trial and error to discover what worked.” The other winning quality of this Sriracha is the pronounced garlic flavor, which comes right to the forefront of the sauce’s profile once the initial heat burst starts to wane, and it all balances really nicely.
Thankfully, Derek was also happy to shed some light on how Ninja Squirrel Sriracha came to be; check out my e-mail interview with him below!
Derek Sarno—creator of Whole Foods Market’s Ninja Squirrel Sriracha—out in the field
How did Ninja Squirrel Sriracha come about?
“Honestly, Ninja Squirrel Sriracha came about after I approached the Rooster company Huy Fong and they didn’t want to produce a modified version without preservatives for Whole Foods. Being the fanatic that I am, I had to find a way to produce one without preservatives and that is up to par with our quality standards for ingredients.”
How did you finally get it to the final formulation?
“Not too long. After several trials and tastings, we landed on what worked in maybe a few months.”
What was the inspiration behind the name “Ninja Squirrel Sriracha”?
“When I was a kid, we had cut a tree down in the yard and we soon discover some baby squirrels in it. The momma squirrel had come and taken all but one of the little guys and after a while, we realized she wasn’t coming back for this one… so I scooped him up and took care of him. Nursing and feeding him with little baby bottles until he grew big and strong. We named him ‘The Gooch’, after the bully in Diff'rent Strokes; he was the original Ninja Squirrel and the inspiration behind the theme.”
How would you compare it to other Sriracha brands on the market?
“We’ll have to let the people decide. I’m pretty partial to our brand for obvious reasons, and being clean and non-GMO is a huge part of that.”
What are your favorite things to do with Sriracha?
“Well, Randy, you know me pretty well from following social media outlets and food postings… and I think it’s more appropriate to ask: 'What are things you might not actually put Sriracha on?’ That’s a tough one considering my newest thought is to do a Sriracha toothpaste! I bet you’d like it.”
Where and when can people find it?
You should be able to find it in every Whole Foods Market, and if it’s not in your store yet, it will be. It’s rolling out nationally and is exclusive to WFM.
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Disclosure: Sample bottles were provided to me at no cost. I received no compensation for this post. Derek is a friend, and I am a former employee of Whole Foods Market, but that did not affect my decision to profile them nor did it bias my opinion/review. (I actually got fired from Whole Foods… funny story I’ll have to share sometime!)
Was anybody else EXTREMELY disappointed with the Lay’s Sriracha potato chips that came from the last “Do Us A Flavor” contest? Formulated with sour cream, whey, cream cheese, Cheddar cheese, and Swiss cheese—among other mystery ingredients that aren’t in real Sriracha—it’s no wonder they missed the mark.
Well, here’s my solution: submitting “Actually Tastes Like Sriracha” as a flavor. But I NEED your votes to make this a possibility! There’s this whole rule thingy on the contest that says that new potential flavors must not “be the same or substantially similar to the original Do Us a Flavor finalists (Cheesy Garlic Bread, Chicken & Waffles and Sriracha)”… but my argument is that they were so far from a recognizable Sriracha flavor, that making something that does actually taste like Sriracha will be completely new!
But even if it’s disqualified on this little technicality, I’d love to send a strong message to Lay’s to let them know, “We who love Sriracha most thought your Sriracha chips were OK, but they tasted NOTHING like Sriracha!!” And the more votes I can get, the stronger that message is! And who could pass up an opportunity to win $1,000,000? Oh… did I forget to mention there’s a fatty prize for the winner?!? ;)
VOTE for “Actually Tastes Like Sriracha” in the Lay’s Do Us A Flavor competition [DoUsAFlavor.com]
ALSO AVAILABLE NOW!
This book is not associated with or endorsed by Huy Fong Foods, Inc.
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