Ode To Vietnamese Chili Garlic Sauce

Just giving you a heads-up that this is not going to rhyme. I'm not that poetic.

There are two condiments I cannot live without: Dijon mustard and chili paste/sauce (you start to think of it in terms of being a sauce when you use it as liberally as I do).

I'm more than a little obsessed. I can go through a jam-jar sized amount of chili paste in a few weeks. Partly out of practicality because I sometimes don't know how long it'll take to go bad since the recycled jars weren't sterilized first, and partly out of addiction. Don't get me wrong, I hate the overwhelming "I want to die" kind of heat that happens when you eat too much, but I absolutely love the flavour of the chilies. So it's not so much the burn I'm going for, but the way the burn combines with the flavour and the way the paste combines with my meal.

I have a new favourite Vietnamese website - VietWorldKitchen. This woman is a good resource for all food things Vietnamese. She does a bit of fusion, but the classics are there. She's my go-to gal for pho info and I would trust her word blindly on dumplings and bun. Everything is authentic. So when I saw a few recipes for chili sauces I got a little giddy. I had just finished my last bottle of pickled chilies and had been turned off tomato-based sauces since a disappointing experience with the Wasselton chili paste from McGill's Organic Campus. Not that it was bad, but it just wasnt pure chili. I was craving some sweet heat and this was going to be it!

Basically, I'd been considering hot sauces for a few weeks and then when I went to the Mile End market last week I bought a huge bag of fresh chilies. The conversation went something like this:

"Do you have any hot peppers?" ("les piments forts" in French = "strong" peppers)
"Yes." The man turns around to get a bag. He starts taking some out.
"I'll take them all."
The man stops. He looks at me. He looks at the bag. I smile encouragingly.

$6 later I had at least three batches worth of peppers. This was a good idea I picked up from VietWorldKitchen. Buy a whole bunch so if one recipe isn't stupendous, you can try another. It's hard to find organic red chilies in Montreal. Really this is supposed to be made with red chilies that look like jalapenos, so shorter, rounder-edged ones, but I have absolutely no idea what these ones were. That's very dangerous when making a chili sauce because each pepper's heat can be completely different. Fortunately I like to live dangerously with pepper heat, and I can always adjust flavours later. You can also just use less of the stuff if it's hotter, or add a little more sugar or vinegar.

So I stuck my bag of chilies into my backpack, slung my purchased whole watermelon in a bag over my left shoulder and my canteloupe over my right and marched the 10 minutes to the metro, made the 25 minute trip to my stop and then marched the 7 minutes home. I had deep red marks in my shoulders but I had chilies and fruit. All in all I was a happy girl. What I do for fresh organic produce...

So VietWorldKitchen has a lot of chili sauce options and I plan to make it through all of them. I decided to start with the cooked homemade garlic chili paste. 

Ingredients:

6 ounces of my long, red, hot chilies, stemmed and chopped (you can also use cayennes, fresnos, habaneros, jalapeno, long, serrano, Thai, or a combination, but good luck figuring out which is which. Often the vendors don't even know. They're all just "chilies")
4 cloves garlic, chopped

1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tbsp sugar (I used a sugar substitute, xylitol, because the sugar here doesn't really need to act like a preservative like it does in jams or other canned goods, I think.
1 1/2 tbsp brown rice vinegar (the recipe actually calls for distilled white vinegar but I figured I didn't want to go buy that and this would just add a little sweetness and flavour. I think it did)

All you do is stick everything in the blender and don't over-blend it. You want it to be kind of rough and a little chunky. The recipe says to take a whiff, but make sure you follow the American fish wafting instructions and use your hand to move the smell of the chilies toward your face. Don't stick your face right over the contents of the blender or you may be crying for awhile. Or sneezing, or coughing, or swearing at me. The wafted smell should be enough to make you tear up a little or sweat.

Taste and adjust the flavor by adding extra salt or sugar. (You can stop here and you've made the raw version of this, but I like the cooked version because it reduces the heat a little and emphasizes the flavour of the chilies). 

Transfer the blender contents to a small saucepan, bring it to a boil over medium heat, then reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer for about 5 minutes, or until it no longer smells raw (again, fish wafting technique). Remove from the heat and set aside to cool. Transfer to a jar, let cool, and store in the refrigerator. Makes about 2/3 cup and lasts a few months. Unless you're me.

It makes the best ketchup...

Be careful, though, because it's really not ketchup.

 

Vietnamese Hmong Spicy Eggplant

I found a new, wonderful website. It's not new, but it's new to me: VietWorldKitchen. I was reading about pho', but then I saw this recipe, and it basically made my day. Maybe it was a slow day, but, oh, how I love eggplant. I didn't have any scallions or cilantro, and I only had dried chilies, so I kind of massacred the recipe, but it worked out well in the end, and I got to use my mortar and pestle, which is basically my goal in life.

I boiled my eggplants whole in some water, turning them to cook them through (they were the long, thin kind, so slightly less bitter than the big purple ones. They were at a very good price at my farmers' markets). Then I let them cool while I chopped some fresh mint (it's what I had. I didn't know if it would be a good replacement for cilantro, but I figured I'd give it a go. Oh, I also threw 8 red chilies into the eggplant-boiling liquid to resuscitate them. The recipe calls for fresh, but no way was I going to go out and buy eight chilies when they probably wouldn't even end up being the right kind anyway. So I sliced my resuscitated (and slightly boiled...) chilies open, got rid of the hot seeds (the seeds don't add flavour, just burning heat) and threw the flesh into the mortar and pestle with the salt and mint.  I just skipped the scallion, but I could have added some diced shallot if I'd wanted.

Now the fun part - the mashing. You crush it all up with the pestle. There is good mortar and pestle technique and then there's bad.  Mine is lacking. I watched an episode of Poh's Kitchen (you can find the podcast on iTunes for free) where she talks about it, but it's a small screen on my iPod and I'm maybe a slow learner. Anyway, everything got mashed in the end, and that's the point, really. You're now supposed to mash in the peeled eggplant, so I mashed a little at a time, and then just mashed in another bigger bowl (carefully!). The above picture is what came out. Oh it was so good. My chilies weren't Thai chilies so the heat was different, but my goodness it was hot. Now I love heat. I LOVE heat, but this was really, really hot. I ate a lot of it anyway, because the flavour was still SO good (my tongue could still find flavour through the slightly mind-numbing heat), but if you are scared of heat, I'd say use 2-3 chilies only. You're missing all the fun, and colour, but you won't have a fit on the flour. Not that I did.

Oh, the mint worked out nicely in the end.