El Fuego Viviente Chili Sauce | Hacker News Reader

El Fuego Viviente Chili Sauce

github.com

228 pointsotorrillas127 comments

A recipe without 10 pages of useless, boilerplate SEO content?

I have recently purchased an instant pot the SEO content on recipes searched for drive me mad

I feel your pain. My best IP recipes are adaptations I've made from old recipes of my family's.

Here's my Cajun mother-in-law's red beans and rice recipe. She's from Chauvin, LA and this recipe is my favorite for when my wife is away and I'm cooking for the kids.

You'll need:

1 pound red kidney beans

1 link of Hillshire Farms smoked sausage (like polish style)

1-2 bay leaves

Brown rice or long-grain white rice

Crystal brand hot sauce

Rinse 1 pound of red kidney beans, then cover with 3-4" of water and soak overnight. The next morning, dump the water and rinse them thoroughly.

Chop one medium-sized yellow onion and one celery stalk.

In your pressure cooker, go a few times around the pot with olive oil and heat until shimmering.

Add the onion and just brown the shit out of it. Seriously, I always stop too soon. My mother in law gets it all nice and browned, like chocolate. Use sauté mode on your IP and turn it up to the high heat setting. When it's about halfway browned, I add the celery to the pot for the rest of the browning.

Once the onions brown, cut the heat and add 5 cups of water. If I was doing this in the crock or regular pot, I'd add way more but since we're not losing any to steam, give is perfect.

Scrape all of the burnt crap off the bottom of the pan.

Add the beans to the pot along with a bay leaf or two and one link of smoke sausage (like Hillshire Farms polish sausage style) cut into circular slices about 1/4" thick.

Bring to pressure and then cook for 15 minutes. This is how long I did it in my Instant Pot, which may not be the same as your cookers. The IP brings it to 15 PSI and then lowers it and cycles between 10 and 11.5 PSI.

After 15 minutes of cooking, remove from fire and allow the pressure to release naturally. At about 15-20 minutes, I just manually dumped what little pressure there was left.

Salt to taste. Refrigerate overnight before reheating and serving because it just tastes better that way.

Serve over brown rice or regular long-grain white rice if you prefer.

The Cajuns put Crystal brand hot sauce on top. The regular kind (not the extra-hot). It's very tangy. I've never seen a bottle of Tabasco in a Cajun pantry.

https://www.amazon.com/Crystal-Hot-Sauce-Louisianas-Pure/dp/...

Louisiana Brand is also okay if that's all you can get

I notice that it's not uncommon for American recipes to be tied to a specific brand of sauce or similar. I don't see this as often in "European" recepies, here usually the recipe is broken down further or listing a generic ingredients, this makes the recipe more useful in contexts where it is hard to get "Trademark brand sauce", but of course you lose some precision in the flavor..

Modular cooking vs roll your own :)

With hot sauces, there's a very distinct flavor difference between Tabasco, Crystal, Frank's, etc. not to mention there's regional affiliation to what hot sauce you use.

Additionally, I think a lot of "traditional" recipes in the US which were passed down in families came from advertising in the 40s/50s/60s, so they specifically call for "Hellman's Mayonnaise" or "Toll House Chocolate Chips" or "Heinz 57" or whatever.

Branded products having recipes on the label has been a marketing staple in America for a long time. Sometimes you could mail them for a little book of recipes all using that specific brand of oil/chocolate/flour/etc.. Quite a few "old family recipes" are something that Grandma got off of a Crisco tin.

> something that Grandma got off of a Crisco tin

Related – "The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’" on HN a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534495

As another commenter mentioned, the various vinegar-based pepper sauces have a wide range of flavors from fiery (Tabasco) to piquant (Crystal). The Cajuns in my extend family use Crystal and Louisiana Brand sauce. These are more on the tangy side and have much less spice. Even my six year-old likes Crystal on his red beans. I've also seen a few purely local brands in their pantries. I've never seen Tabasco, however.

A few things I forgot:

- add a few bay leaves when you add the beans and water.

- you can also add diced bell pepper when you add the chopped celery. These, along with onion, form the "Cajun Trinity", their form of mirepoix.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...

Enjoy!

The secret to my hot sauces is pressure cooking in my Instant Pot. I wouldn't do it for fermented sauces, but if you like the cleaner-tasting hot sauces the IP is where it's at.

By SEO content are you talking about the blogs where they put like a multi page story about how amazing the recipe is, and what their family thinks of it, and that time they went to a little restaurant in a foreign country and had something like X, and then at the very end a barebones recipe copied out of allrecipes or some other site? I've noticed those dominate in the past few years

I'm not sure if it's actual SEO or just bored housewives/grandmas rambling, getting consistent visits from the same demographic and riding the feedback loop to the top of Google results, in my case most of the recipes I find (I'd say 80% to throw a number) seem original, and there's no way a bot can write all the uninteresting bullcrap they're prefaced by.

Not a bot but you can (and it's very common) to hire people to write the copy for you.

Oh, didn't think of that possibility, makes sense.

"So before I tell you about this nacho recipe, let me tell you my entire life history, really diving into every time I ever at chips, cheese, or any combination thereof..."

Whenever I find a recipe that doesn't start like that I bookmark it. This is my gold standard for internet recipes (in Spanish): http://www.lapaella.net/receta-paella-valenciana/

What a fantastic format, I can see why.

The idea of open source recipes on GitHub is so charming to me.

Less to me, because the product is the source. Github here is the way for distribution. It is a fairly nice medium for markdown files and without ads, but dedicated recipe sites have recommendations, comments and sometimes ways to directly order the ingredients.

Oh god yes.

I love cooking but soo many recipe sites are absolutely unusable due to ads.

You still have to build it from source with local dependencies.

I agree. I especially like the idea of branching recipes, being able to find spicier, sweeter, etc. versions of the main branch.

Not to mention, branches containing ingredient substitutions considerate of allergy-free/religious/moral dietary needs.

Also pull requests for pork! SCNR.

Pulled pork?

Open sauce

So, basically every recipe site ever? If a recipe is posted on the internet, then it is, by definition "open source." Or are you referring to recipes posted with permissive, copy-left licenses, or are you referring to something else?

Tangent: I’m a programmer who currently works as a cook. Kitchens are operating systems and many principles from OS design are applicable if you want to streamline service. Instead of programs, the kitchen must run multiple orders concurrently and efficiently. Containers, lowboys, refrigerators and the walk-in cooler are different cache/memory levels and become smaller the closer they are to your station. Batch processing (cooking, plating, finishing, etc.) will increase throughput, but sometimes latency is more important (you might want to immediately plate and finish an order if the customer has been waiting an hour). If chef says “on the fly” they want that order to preempt any existing orders in progress.
The term “operating system” might seem overly general but I think it’s pretty apt.

That's because some of those principles used in computer science are adopted from older disciplines.

Another place for open source recipes is wikibooks:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Table_of_Contents

I'd love to see a salsas repo. There are hundreds (thousands?) of salsas in the Americas. It would be awesome to have them catalogued and to have recipes written. awesome-salsa?

Hey everyone! I made the sauce and put it online on Github. I am a fan of fermented food and love cooking. Nice to see all the comments!

I visited the Marie Sharp's factory in Belize ~a decade ago, that was a really cool experience. It's an impressively sized business and something of a national pride.
Not to mention, all the sauces are super delicious.

Habanero chili is extremely hot but has a sweet, fruity flavor. I haven't tasted piri piri chili, but I'm sure this sauce is delicious. I'm kinda upset the chilis are deseeded, though.

Habanero is delicious! My favorite hot sauce is “Inner Beauty” which is basically an emulsion of habaneros, yellow mustard, brown sugar, mango, orange juice, with some cumin and curry. It’s so good, especially on beef and chicken, but you have to like serious heat.

Habanero and mustard makes a great base flavor for hot sauces. My introduction was via Aji Chombo hot sauce from Panama. The addition of sweet and fruitiness and the cumin and curry sounds amazing.

It's great to get so many hot sauce making ideas. I've still got a batch of Trindad moruga scorpion chillies in the freezer after growing them last summer, but they're so hot that I haven't really figured out what sauce to make from them.

Sounds like something I will like to make at home. What is curry though?

Oh sorry, curry powder 1. It’s a mixed spice like “chilli powder” and it just works for this. Even better, here’s the recipe for this hot sauce!
Use gloves. Do not touch your face. Work fast.
http://www.foodthinkers.com/inner-beauty-hot-sauce/
Try it on meatloaf, a burger, or roasted some chicken marinated in it. Tooooo good!
1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry_powder

I assume in this case he is referring to curry powder which is a variable blend of spices commonly used in Indian curries.
It can however also mean curry leaves which come from a tree and are usually added to a recipe whole.
Edit: nm, it looks like he meant curry powder

I generally eat very spicy food, and I can't even detect spiciness in food that will make other people cough. I ate half a chilli (the body/skin) and found it moderately hot, but the next time I ate the other half (the part containing the seeds) and had to run to the fridge for some milk urgently. Be warned.
(It was great though)

I make craft hot sauces, and I stand by deseeding and depithing. If I want heat, I'll use a hotter pepper. Thai birds in particular carry most of the heat in the flesh, for example. The flavor difference from using flesh only is huge.

do you have any suggestions for hot sauces with serranos and hananeros that have been fermenting for ~one year? Read that some sauces ferment peppers for multiple years and decided to ferment for a while but they are pretty funky now...

If they don't have any off flavors but are too funky, I would cook some additional peppers to blend in and then add acid (probably white vinegar) to bring the ph down, salt to taste, and (depending on your texture preferences) blend and strain.

Can you explain this ? Do seeds produce a bad flavour ?

It’s commonly thought that the seeds are the spiciest part of a chili, which is the impression Matticus_Rex seems to be under. In fact, the heat comes from the white pith (which they mentioned) and ridges around the seeds.

The seeds are definitely coated in a sticky juice that is spicy (I've seperated them out and eaten them individually. It's the bitterness that really sucks, though.

There's some heat, but the reason I deseed is mostly flavor. Seeds make up a non-negligible portion of the mass, and have no pepper flavor and a slight bitterness. You get better flavor without them.

Seeds make up a non-negligible portion of the mass, and have no pepper flavor and a slight bitterness. You get better flavor without them.

I make hot sauce using fatalii[0] chillies (similar heat to habaneros but IMO superior flavor). I de-seed them, pressure steam them in an Instant Pot electric pressure cooker, then blend them with cider vinegar, lime juice, salt, and a little xantham gum to stop it separating in storage. I pour it into glass jars, pasteurize it by steaming it with the lids resting on the jars but not sealed (ambient pressure, not increased pressure, because when I tried pressure steaming the sauce bubbled out from the jars and made a mess), close the lids while still hot, and keep refrigerated.
This makes a delicious sauce that, even without the seeds, is still much too hot for those who aren't chilli aficionados.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatalii

Might have thought that you were me if not for the cider vinegar. I find that it overpowers the flavor of the peppers. I mostly use white vinegar and citric acid, with the occasional lime juice.

I'll try white vinegar for the next batch, thanks.

i would only ever remove seeds and pith. They don't really contribute good flavor- just bitterness and extreme heat.

A year ago Cinc was posted as a Show HN [1]. I'm surprised this concept isn't more popular / common.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14799111

Need an open source for Cholula sauce :D I replaced my ketchup with that to reduce my calorie count, and save a few $

Interesting use of github
How do you know Microsoft won’t steal your secret sauce?

There’s nothing to steal, it’s open sauce.

Comment of the day!

The Aquaself strips are a water hardness test for those who are curious (I had to google it)

Water hardness isn't measured from 0-14. Those are pH testing strips (aquaself pH Teststreifen).

Yeah, you're probably right.
Most pH strips I've used have only 1 color, I guess you need 4 to measure across the whole range.

Interesting to see Github used as a recipe repository. Git does make a lot of sense I guess for recipes.
Personally, I like my chilli sauce to be vinegar based. Kaitaia Fire [1] is my favourite. I'm not sure if you can buy it anywhere outside of Australia and New Zealand though.
[1] https://kaitaia-fire-ltd.myshopify.com/

If you like vinegar-based, try Cholula. I'm really enjoying it.

The best foods are fermented. :9

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum ?
Strange how such a wildly popular sauce vanished from the face of the Earth.

They still have fermented fish sauce in some parts of Southern Italy. Also, I understand the Thai and other Asian fish sauces are somewhat similar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colatura_di_Alici

And not just "fish sauces". Fermented fish paste adds richness and body. Even if the fishiness isn't obvious.

There's also Surströmming which is a swedish type of fermented Baltic Sea herring.

How is garum different from Asian fish sauces like nước mắm?
Also, I'd posit that Worcestershire sauce is the spiritual descendant of garum.

From my research, garum was a ticker paste that involved a lot more solids. Most fish sauces, especially the Asian ones that get used in the western world, tend to be clear.
Last time I was in Thailand I delved into foods made with tai pla. It's a sauce that is thicker and made from fish entrails. Based on descriptions of garum I've read, this seems to be very close.
It's tough to accurately describe taste and flavor in literature.

My understanding is that Worcestershire or fish sauce (like in Thai cuisine) are a close approximation.

For the fermentation aficionados.
People's Republic of Fermentation.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDfUp9XK6kA176NN76_4v...

This hot sauce looks delicious.
I know some people think it's heavy on the vinegar, but there's nothing wrong with original Tabasco – peppers, vinegar, salt. No modern food additives.

Always scared about fermenting things like this. How do I know it has the right culture in it and I won't die?

Microscope or roll the dice.

I'm curious what culture you are worried about that would both ferment the food, and also kill you.

The experience seems to be that organisms which tolerate high salt won't kill you.[0] Ditto for low pH.[1] And the bacteria in high-salt fermenting produce lactic acid.
0) https://foodsafety.wisc.edu/assets/pdf_Files/Fermented_Veget...
1) https://www.healthycanning.com/acidity-low-ph-is-what-makes-...

You just have to trust that we've been doing it for thousands of years without killing ourselves. As long as you've got plenty of salt and a low pH, you'll be fine.
I've made all sorts of fermented foods over the years, pickles, beer, spirits, bread, etc. Haven't gotten sick yet.

It's really hard to get wrong. The salt kills most of the bad things and the capsaicin and garlic have potent anti-fungal properties which make it especially difficult to mess up. If you remember to turn your ferment once a day or so it'll go very well. (By turn I mean physically mixing the material at the top of the jar down into the depths of the jar and dredging up the stuff at the bottom for a while to sit at the top. This keeps "scum" from forming, but the scum won't kill you and can be safely scraped away without spoiling the batch if it does form.)

You could also look at it this way: This technology is thousands of years old and predates refrigeration and most basic sanitation. It's that easy.

The pH test reads 6 however, which is out of the safe range afaik.

If you look at the color of the top block, it's matching somewhere between 3 and 4. Botulism is avoided if the pH is under 4.6.
The test strip is sitting on 6 but it would have to be darker to have that high a pH.

This is the correct reading. I had it at 3-4 as well. The camera also saturates the colors a bit.

It does not. I the camera distorts the colors a bit, but when I made the reading, I had it at somewhere between 3-4. This was also confirmed by simply tasting the brine. It is very acidic.

I'd recommend watching the series "It's Alive" from Bon Appetit. There's an episode on fermented hot sauce.

+1 I linked it already in the README

In general if it tastes OK and doesn't have visible growths (e.g. fuzz, green or white patches) then it's fine. A lactic acid fermentation will actually kill most pathogens, so it's surprisingly safe.
The yeast and other lactic acid bacteria are coating (and usually inside) the produce, so you don't need to worry a lot about "the right culture". (If you want to be sure, you can collect a starter culture, but that's quite advanced.)
Source: I make beer.
More authoritative source: http://houston.afdo.org/uploads/1/5/9/4/15948626/1000_jay-ne...

Marie Sharp's is the best all around hot sauce I've ever tried, absolutely love this.

Newbie question: Are Marie Sharps's sauces fermented? Or is this a variation of the recipe? I was in Belize a few months ago and these sauces are the only things I brought back. Wish I bought more.

I am not sure. The reason I mentioned it was more about the ingredients. I really like the use of carrots etc for the mild and earthy sweetness and not having added sugar. Fermentation brings a mild and round acidity, which is not as sharp on the tongue as vinegar.

Do you think you'd lose any flavor/goodness if you strained it prior to bottling? If you have made a strained or more finely blended version of this were there any key learnings?

A big part of this style of sauce is the chunkiness. We used to make tons of these types of sauces growing up, and some things changed the flavor more than others. Leaving it a bit chunky is best for this style (with carrots/etc), i.m.o.
Straining it changes the flavor the most, in my experience. It filters out the pepper skins, seeds, carrot bits, etc which add a significant portion of the flavor. I find it more astringent and less sweet after straining. At that point, I'd prefer to make "sport peppers" (fermented peppers and garlic left whole while the vinegar solution is used as a sauce).
Blending it to a fine paste seems to have less of an effect on the flavor, but it makes it a lot hotter. I'd assume that's because it releases more of the capsicum in the seeds. It also removes the variability you get with a chunky sauce (e.g. sweet bit, then hot bit). Whether that's good or bad is a matter of opinion, but I rather like the variability.

Hmm... And on a side note, I just realized that the rest of the world does not use the term "sport peppers" the way I do (the exception being a couple of regional brands). I never thought of them as the peppers on a Chicago style hot dog... Today I learned!

You could probably hit it with some kind of a blender if it's too chunky.

Also... With fermented sauces, once you store it, should/could you pasteurize it?

You could, but there's really no need. The salt used in the brine brings the PH to a spot which is really inhospitable to bad bugs.

Salt doesn't change the PH.
The fermentation produces acid though.

True, salinity !== alkalinity

Not only that, but salt and capsaicin -- the thing that makes hot peppers hot -- both tend to kill stuff.

It would be unnecessary and could potentially actually reduce its shelf life while altering the flavor and texture in possibly undesirable ways.

Very cool. First time I read a recipe on GitHub, too, and it's incredibily efficient without 2 pages of introduction.

git clone https://github.com/allrecipes/awesome-sauces
Obligatory as I have ADD.

How does this taste? Sweet? Sour? I'm a big fan of gochujang because it isn't so tangy.

Probably a nice tang from the lactic acid and the only sweetness would be residual from the vegetables.

Why github? You couldn’t just use pastebin? It’s a recipe! How much collaboration are you expecting to happen? Are you expecting people to file issues about your chili sauce?

Wouldn't that be great? If you think about it, it's surprising how GitHub's potential as a platform has been solely used for code up until now, taking into account that pretty much anything that can be represented as text may benefit from its "social coding" features.

Lawyers have also been using github too for some time now.
2013 jduclos.com/notes/github-for-lawyers
Previous HN Discussion on the topic from 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13446275

There is much more to managing legal documents than simply tracking content changes. GitHub is not an effective tool for this, read some of the criticisms in the thread. There are better market offerings for lawyers that make signing, printing, and securing documents much easier.

I don't know why this is flagged. I'm honestly interested. Why not a bunch of other things, like Dropbox Paper or Google Docs?

I flagged the original submission because I honestly thought it was spam or a joke or something. Perhaps it’s a vindictive flag in return.
But yeah, there’s not much else to say about a recipe on GitHub aside from the fact that it is on GitHub. Am I the only one that finds it strange? Am I taking crazy pills?

FWIW, I downvoted the initial comment because it did not read as a honest inquiry, but more like "you're wrong, and I'm gonna ask a few dishonest questions to repeat how wrong you are".

I sure hope someone would fork it and iterate on the recipe, that's why version control exists. So you can have, you know, versions. Recipes are like software, except food pops out. Change the recipe, change the food. Change the recipe a little, change the food a little. Why wouldn't you want to post it to Github?

I'm not opposed to the idea, it just seems like a stretch of what github is made for. What did they select as the programming language for the repo? Junior devs struggle with git concepts, how will this catch on for mainstream recipe users?
Recipes are nothing like software. Software can return expected results for everyone who uses it. But everyone can tell you a story of a recipe not turning out right. The hardware for compiling a recipe is way too imprecise for the micro adjustments a version control system would be useful for. Compiling a recipe is all about reading and understanding what the author is intending and then adjusting for your own equipment and tastes.
It's also just a cheap post. What, now we can upload otherwise unnoteworthy content to github, and suddenly we're on the front page of HN?

> The hardware for compiling a recipe is way too imprecise for the micro adjustments a version control system would be useful for.
Not a bad point, I didn't think about it like that. However, I think this would be more useful to the people who are competent enough to implement nuanced recipes. Small changes in the recipe can lead to large changes in the food, much larger than the error between competent cooks. What if you have different tastes than the original recipe, and I like your taste? I'd wanna know about your changes, especially if I had the skills to implement them and I had a passion for cooking.
Plus, Generations have already been iterating and verbally passing down recipes for thousands of years. Most of that history is gone, and all we have is a thin slice which is what we know today. You only stand to gain by using version control for recipes.
But sure, Github probably won't explode as the go-to recipe database, because the intersection of git users and competent cooks is small compared the amount of cooks.
> It's also just a cheap post. What, now we can upload otherwise unnoteworthy content to github, and suddenly we're on the front page of HN?
This is not too important to me. Hey, we're all here talking about the post, so maybe it is noteworthy.

So it’s noteworthy and interesting, but here I am getting crushed with flags and downvotes. github can do no wrong, all within its walls are sacred, how dare he speak against our holy temple

Chiles are the vegetable. Chili is the meat and bean stew-like concoction.

Possibly in your particular corner of the world - but preferred spellings for Chili/Chilli/Chile vary all over the place.
In fact I imagine the reason you spell the vegetable one way and the recipe the other is that they're both regional variations of the same word from different places too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_pepper
I don’t go around telling britons to get rid of their Us or trade in their Zs for Ss. No point in it.

The word is actually straight from the Nahuatl language. Original has a little more of a t at the beginning, like tchee-lee.

That recipe crates the conditions for Botulism which is fatal. You can’t store low acid vegetables in air tight containers without boiling them or adding an acid.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulism

Botulinum can't grow below pH 4.6, so to be safer, you could replace some of the water with vinegar, or pasteurize the garlic before adding it.

Substituting vinegar is really not a great suggestion for a recipe that doesn't call for it. It will affect the taste quite a lot.

This is incorrect, and why the recipe emphasizes a brine of 5% salt. Botulism cannot survive in saline conditions.
Lacto-fermentation is the oldest means of food preservation aside from cooking and drying. It is used throughout the world for preserving everything from sauerkraut to pickles to kimchi to capers to fish. The garlic and the capsaicin also have antimicrobial properties that prevent especially molds from growing, making this a very easy ferment.

The test shows a pH of 6 however.

These vegetables are not being stored in a low-acidity environment.
The fermentation converts sugars to acids. You don't add the acid to the veggies. The bacteria convert sugars into acid and lower the pH.
This is why pickles (cucumber) and sour kraut does not go bad.

Pickling involves vinegar though.

Some types of pickles, sure, but often traditionally it's just lactic acid fermentation without any added vinegar. Half- or full-sour dill pickles are just made with a 3-5% salt brine and spices. The acidity comes from the fermentation process, not added vinegar.
https://www.seriouseats.com/2017/08/preserving-pickle-cucumb...

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