Now Fliman and Ballan were about to reveal the secrets of their sauce! Well, one of their sauces, anyway. Alongside their classic pepper sauce, they also produce a thicker "With Garlic" sauce and a "More Heat" variety that has five times the habaneros. Today's formula, however, was to be a seasonal specialty—the Fresnos, normally sourced from Florida, were instead grown on the rooftop of the nearby Brooklyn Grange farm, making this "NYC Rooftop" edition (as it's billed on the A&B website) essentially a locavore sauce. (Except that the Scotch Bonnets, which replaced habaneros, came from the Dominican Republic. Whatevs.) The secrets, meanwhile, were hardly secret.
As I watched intently, five workers staff shredded carrots, onions, and half the chiles (a mere 150+ pounds!), and heated them along with a ton of white vinegar in a 60-gallon vat while another worker puréed the mixture using an industrial stick blender. After an hour or two of very gentle simmering and puréeing, the sauce was smooth, crimson, and ready to be bottled. Boom, done.
Alex Lau
Shredding time. Photo: Alex Lau
Naturally, it's not all that simple. There's a ton of things that Fliman and Ballan—childhood friends who grew up loving spicy food in northern New Jersey—considered as they developed their formula, from the type of chiles to the strength of the vinegar to how they wanted the sauce to be used. Fliman favors highly "versatile" sauces that can go with anything from eggs to steak to the base of a vinaigrette; some sauces on the market, however, have flavor profiles that are, well, more niche.
"I'm not going to add a mango purée to my eggs in the morning," Fliman said.
That said, Ballan—also 32, a former corporate bank strategist and former cook at Buddakan—broke all hot sauces down into four fundamentals:
1. Chiles This is perhaps the most important part: What kind of chiles do you like? Also, how do you figure out what kind of chiles you like? Well, you taste them, he said. You go to the supermarket or the farmers' market, buy a bunch of different kinds, from the familiar jalapeños and serranos to the weirder ones, and just try them. Nibble the tip, see how powerful they are and where the spice hits you (the tip of your tongue? the back of your throat?), and what other flavors they have. Then, once you know what you like, use those chiles.
Of course, it gets more complicated than that. You can roast or smoke chiles to alter their flavors or soften thick skins, which is particularly good for green chiles, since they tend to turn brown after being puréed. Cooking chiles mellows their heat, too; conversely, leaving them raw and including the ribs and seeds (but not the tough, bitter stems) gives you the full brunt of their power.
2. Acid Sure, you could just purée a ton of chiles and call that a sauce, but an acid is going to help draw out flavor, preserve the ingredients, and turn it into something you could truly call a sauce. A&B uses white vinegar at 5% (that strength helps them create the right pH needed for bottling, and it's actually pretty standard for grocery-store white vinegar), but if you're not concerned with FDA guidelines or creating a shelf-stable product, there are tons of other vinegars out there to play with. (I'm a big fan of the sweetness that apple cider vinegar brings.) Beyond vinegars, there are also citrus juices to add—but as Fliman noted, you shouldn't cook them. Either add them at the end to complement a vinegar or use them in a raw sauce.
3. Aromatics For some, aromatics such as carrots, onions, garlic, and ginger may be optional, but for A&B they contribute that garden-fresh flavor they're after. They also tend to require some cooking, both to bring out their sweetness and temper either their texture or their raw power.
4. Salt It's cooking, so there has to be salt. A&B uses kosher because... why? It's just what they've always used, Fliman said, and it's always worked. Good enough for me.
Alex Lau
The finished product. Photo: Alex Lau
These four categories may seem obvious, but I don't think I'd ever quite thought of hot-sauce-making in such an organized way. It made me notice, too, that Fliman had skipped over a potential fifth category: Extras—everything from fruits to oils to spices. And as I looked ahead to the hot-sauce experimentation that I'd be performing for the next installment of this series, I decided I'd attempt two varieties, one hewing closely to A&B's "American-style" principles ("bright, fresh flavors and honest, true ingredients," according to Fliman), the other building on them into something... well, I guess you'd call it Grosser. Tune in next week to see how it went!
