Red Chili Sauce

This is a sauce I try to keep on hand at all times. I usually make the specified batch size – which is enough to fill my 5 qt. dutch oven – and transfer it to a few plastic quart containers and freeze.

I use it for a variety of dishes: chili, of course; enchiladas (replacing Kenji’s sauce here); it’s awesome for braising any number of meats; it’s great on huevos rancheros; and, if it’s a particular spicy batch (I’ve done 100% arbol – though a small batch), it’s good as a general sriracha replacement.

Adapted from The Adequate Man and this post is mainly just cut-and-paste from various relevant pieces of that article. None of the wittiness is mine…

Ingredients

• 5 oz. (150 g) Pasilla
• 5 oz. (150 g) New Mexico
• ⅔ oz (20 g) Arbol
• 1T cumin, toasted
• 1 large onion, sliced
• 1 bulb garlic (whole cloves or smashed)
• 2T oregano
• ½ stick cinammon
• 4 bay leaves
• 3 Qt chicken stock (enough to fill pot to nearly the top)
• 1 t coffee grounds
• 2 T fish sauce
• 2 oz. beer

Process

1. Toast your chiles first, by heating up your empty pot and then dropping the chilis into it and moving them around a little bit with a wooden spoon until they’re smoking and fragrant. Somewhat near the end of this toasting, add the cumin. Since it will sit on the bottom no matter how much you stir, you don’t want to add until near the end. This will impart, well, a toasty flavor to your eventual sauce. You can also not do this.
2. Add remaining ingredients (up to like a centimeter or two below the brim) and boil
3. Reduce heat to simmer and simmer for 90 minutes
4. Separate most liquid from the solids
5. Working in batches, run through a food mill through the most coarse plate.
6. Run again through most fine plate. I add the once-processed, smooth-ish sauce back to the stuff that didn’t make it through the first time to rehydrate and give fleshy parts another chance to make it through.
7. This “first run” should be very smooth and delicious. Something akin to “The Path of Insanity” mentioned in the source article and copied below.
8. Create a second run by adding leftover solids to separated liquid and blend.
9. Run new batch through finest plate of food mill to get something that’s still really awesome, but a little less smooth.
10. Add salt and something sweet (e.g., honey) to taste. If it could also benefit from a bit of acidic brightness, add some orange juice.
11. Make use of the leftover solids, which should be pretty well broken up into flake-like chunks by drying them and using them as pepper flakes. I put them in a toaster oven on the lowest setting (200° F) for 45 minutes or so, mixing up and putting back in for another 45 minutes or so.

The Path of Insanity

“The Path of Insanity involves pressing, laboriously, this blended but likely still quite ragged sauce through a layer of cheesecloth or a fine mesh strainer, until what’s left is a pathetic, insultingly tiny quantity of perfectly smooth and uniform sauce. Then it involves mixing this sauce with a whole lot of the likely very large leftover quantity of the liquid in which you simmered the chilis and whatnot lo these many years ago, plus those bay leaves you set aside earlier. Then it involves returning this substance to a pot on the stove and simmering it uncovered until it reduces to its final form, perfectly smooth and blood red and with the thickness of a hearty bisque. Then it involves braising some meat of some sort in there, so that the sauce takes on the flavor of the meat and the meat takes on the flavor of the sauce. Then it involves pulling the meat part with a fork or your fingers and eating it, oh man, eating the absolute damn hell out of it, gory with that impossibly smooth and rich sauce, hands and face red with it, hunching over the food like a feverish prospector over a pan filled with bright gold, until the police come.”