Hot Sauce Love

Making your own pasta sauce recipe is an easy, healthy and cost-effective way to get dinner done. When you learn some basic procedures, it becomes simple to make a variety of sauces to suit almost any pasta. And since you are controlling the ingredients, you know exactly how this sauce ranks on the healthy scale. A great added bonus to going homemade is that making your own sauce will even save you money over buying the jarred variety. Really – there is no reason making homemade sauces shouldn’t become a part of your cooking toolkit – a skill you’ll be able to use almost every day. Let’s review the procedures of three of the most popular and common sauces you’ll encounter when making pasta.

Become a Master of the Marinara Sauce Recipe

Tomato Sauce is one of the five “Mother Sauces” in French culinary and the starting point for any marinara sauce recipe. There are two parts to this sauce that are made separately with their own procedure and then come together at the end: tomato concasse and a sauce “base”. The sauce base can be meat, vegetables, broth, seafood – whatever you will be using to make YOUR marinara sauce recipe. Tomato concasse sounds fancy, but it simply means a mixture of tomatoes coarsely chopped. But – there is a trick to getting this mixutre sans seeds and skins. Here’s my quick technique for blanching tomatoes, which is the first step in making tomato sauce:

Core tomatoes on one end and score an “x” on the other side with a knife. This will be where the skin peels away during boiling. Place tomatoes in a pot of boiling water. When the skin at the “x” has peeled back, it is time to remove the tomato and shock it in an ice water bath to stop the cooking. This will vary by tomato due to size and ripeness. Peel and seed the tomatoes. Peeling should be very easy. If it’s not, the tomato didn’t stay in the boiling water long enough.

Depending how you’d like your marinara sauce recipe to end up, you can puree the tomato concasse or keep it chunky.

Now, onto the sauce base. For a simple marinara sauce recipe, you will probably keep this vegetarian, adding vegetables if you prefer a chunky sauce or vegetable broth if you prefer a smoother sauce:

Saute chopped onions and garlic in a hot pan with a small amount of olive oil. Add your tomato concasse (or puree). This is also where you’d add any other vegetables, like mushrooms or peppers, to your tomato sauce. Add vegetable broth and reduce to almost dry. Add tomato paste to thicken and color – heat through. Add the seasonings of your choice. Basil and oregano are the common ones, but experiment to find what you like.

You’ve now got a great homemade pasta sauce recipe that you can make almost any night of the week. My guess is that this process would take you about 30-45 minutes to prepare. During this time, your pasta is cooking and your meal is ready in under an hour!

Make any White Sauce Recipe with One Procedure

When you think of a white sauce recipe, most often what you are imagining has its roots in the French mother sauce, bechamel. Bechamel forms the foundation for every white sauce recipe – including the favorite fetuccine Alfredo or even the classic macaroni and cheese. The key to making this velvety white sauce smooth is knowing how much milk to add. This is something that is best determined with your eyes – not a recipe!

You start by melting butter on the stove and then removing it from the heat. As you add some flour – a little at a time – you will be watching for the mixture to thicken up to the consistency of wall paper paste. When it does, you’ve got roux and it is time to return to the heat. Your goal here is to cook the proteins out of the flour. You will know this has happened when the majority of the roux has turned from yellow to white. During the process, you will smell a toasty smell as the proteins cook out. Now you can start adding milk. This is the most important step in making this sauce so take your time here. You will continue to add milk – a little at a time – until the sauce stops thickening. So here’s the process:

Add some milk and stir. Stop stirring and observe. If sauce starts thickening back up over the heat, add more milk. Continue steps 1-3 until the sauce doesn’t thicken back up (in step 3).

I like a garlic flavor to my white sauce recipe so here’s a trick for adding garlic, but not adding the lumps of chopped garlic. I simmer whole garlic cloves in the sauce for a bit and then remove them before serving. This will infuse a nice garlic flavor into my white sauce recipe. Finally, if you are making an Alfredo (or macaroni and cheese), this is where you would add your favorite cheese(s), stirring over heat as they melt.

A Buttery Garlic Sauce Recipe in Less then 30 Minutes

I saved my favorite garlic sauce recipe for last for a couple of reasons. First, it is a great sauce because you can make it rather quickly, using ingredients you most likely have on hand. However, this homemade pasta sauce recipe can be a little bit trickier than the first two, which makes some shy away from it. But, don’t worry. With a few tips, you’ll be making this one like a pro tonight!

Again, we start with one of the French culinary mother sauces – this time: beurre blanc, a saute of shallot (with garlic) and any liquid mounted with cold butter. The trick to this sauce is to always keep the butter yellow. If your butter stays yellow, it means that the sauce has not broken. Here is my best tip for keeping the butter yellow in your garlic sauce recipe. This is one time, we don’t start with a hot pan (as we normally would in saute method). The cold pan and cold butter hit the heat together. To melt the butter, without burning it:

Melt a little bit of butter. Remove from hit and swirl around to melt more butter Return to heat for a couple of seconds to get the butter hot again. Remove from heat and swirl around to melt more butter. Repeat steps 1-4 until all the butter is melted.

When the butter is melted, you add your shallot and garlic and saute, but you don’t want to brown anything here. Controlling the heat (so as not to separate the butter) is the most important secret for success when making this sauce. Keep the butter yellow – can’t stress that enough! Once the shallots and garlic have cooked to become translucent in color, add a cold liquid (usually white wine) and then cold butter, cut in consistent squares. If the pan starts to get too hot (as evidenced by white specs floating to the top of the butter), you will remove it from heat and add more cold butter to cool the sauce quickly. You can always heat it back up again when you cool it – but you can’t fix it once it has actually broken. When you are satisfied with the consistency and flavor of the garlic sauce recipe you’ve created, add salt and white pepper to taste and serve on your favorite pasta.

A great pasta sauce recipe starts where all sauces start – basic cooking methods and the “mother sauces” of French culinary. You don’t have to be a chef to apply these techniques and make everyday cooking at home easier, tastier and cheaper than eating out at your favorite restaurant.

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It’s that time of year when hosts and hostesses turn their thought to themes for parties celebrating everything from their favorite college or professional football game and Super Bowl parties to Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s parties, and celebrations of All of the other World Holidays during this holiday season.

We at I-ShopTheWorld are what you might call “party people,” so we have some party idea suggestions that will add variety and spice up your party: host a saucy chili cook-off.

Compile your guest list so you can create teams of 3-6 cooks. On your invitation let your guests know they’ll be participating in a chili cook-off and who’ll be on their team (have some extra fun and mix up couples). Ask them to bring any special ingredients they like to use in their chili, but let them know that every thing they could possibly will likely be provided and everyone will be starting with a basic batch of chili you will prepare in advance. Then they can spice it up. Be sure to arrange for enough pots and utensils for each team to have their own. Tell them to BYOA (bring your own apron).

Here’s how it works: The day before your party prepare a big batch of chili starter sauce using your choice of basic ingredients. Here’s one recipe. We suggest you multiply the ingredients to accommodate the number of teams you’ve organized with a hefty batch of starter sauce.

Basic chili sauce recipe to serve 6

• 1 pound lean ground beef or steak chopped into bite-size pieces

• 1/2 cup chopped onion

• 2 chopped garlic cloves

• 1 can (14.5 ounces) diced tomatoes or tomato puree

• 1/2 teaspoon chili powder

• 1 teaspoon salt (regular or garlic)

Preparation:

Spray the skillet with nonstick cooking spray or a light coating of an oil, such as olive oil. Brown the ground beef or chopped steak with the onion. Add the remaining ingredients stirring as you go. Note, you are not adding beans at this point; your guest cooks get to do that. Cover and simmer for at least 20 minutes. Refrigerate till party time.

On the day of the party, scoop up an equal amount of the basic chili sauce for each team, then invite them to complete the cook-off by adding any of the following ingredients you’ll have available in whatever quantities they prefer:

• cooked, browned ground pork

• pre-cooked sausage

• cans of beans, including kidney, chili, black, cannelloni, and pinto

• cans of vegetarian refried beans with chilies

• cans of tomato sauce or whole tomatoes with and without chilies

• cans of whole kernel corn

• fresh tomatoes

• fresh red, green, and yellow sweet peppers

• fresh jalapeno peppers

• fresh squash and zucchini

• garlic powder

• paprika

• fresh natural black pepper, white pepper, dried chili spice, and India long pepper spice

• an assortment of gourmet Tortuga sauces, such as Sweet Heat Carib, Mango & Ginger Stir Fry, Hot Caribbean Pepper, and Hell Fire Hot Pepper Sauce.

• jars of Tortuga Gourmet Wildflower and Citrus Honey

Give each team a couple of hours to finish the cook-off, then conduct the taste contest and let your guests vote on the best. If you get a wow! Winner, consider having the team try it again for charity, presuming they have kept track of their ingredients and can repeat the taste (check out those opportunities at http://www.chilicookoff.com).

Consider serving other I-ShopTheWorld products like Thai coffee and tea. Treat your guest cooks to beverages made with Tortuga Rum Punch Mix. And, don’t forget the dessert; you’ll be so busy making the basic chili and organizing teams and ingredients, you may want to serve a variety tray of Tortuga Gourmet Fudge, rum balls, or rum cakes.

Go ahead, just do it.

Tell everyone to “pen” in the date, start arranging the details, and place your order online.

Let I-ShopTheWorld help you concoct the sauciest party your family and friends have ever had.

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Please Reply and Post All of Your Feedback and Comments regarding this Article and …

- Your Saucy Party Ideas?

- Your Best Favorite Chili Recipes?

- Your Favorite / the Best Chili Ingredients?

- How Hot / “How Many Alarms” do You like Your Chili?

- Where do you stand on the “Bean” or “No Beans” “Great Chili Debate”?

- How about Meats in Your Chili?

— Do You prefer Your Chili with or without meat(s)?

— Which meat(s) do You like Best in Your Chili? / makes the Best Chili?

- Your other ideas do You have to Share for Great Parties?

Again, Please Reply and Post All of Your Comments at:

http://i-shoptheworld.com/2008/09/27/how-to-concoct-a-saucy-party/

regarding all of this and anything other Great Party Ideas can think of for the Mutual Benefit of Everyone Around The World, ok?!

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The time to start thinking about cooking BBQ is in the Spring and Summer time, with the warm days ahead and fun social gatherings with your friends and family, there is no better time to turn your attention to making these occasions special by learning how to cook something new.

Creating your own homemade barbecue sauce is straightforward once you have mastered the basics and learned how to combine various kitchen ingredients to make your own favourite sauce.

No doubt you, or members in your family had their own favourite homemade barbecue sauces that they grew up with, well now is your chance to get involved and enjoy learning something new, how to make your own, personal favourite, homemade barbecue sauce.

Here are the basic components of a homemade barbecue sauce.

The barbecue sauce base

Regardless of what type of barbecue sauce you are going to make, you will need a “base” before you can begin. Ideal bases for making a good BBQ sauce are favourites such as number 10 ketchup sauce, honey, mustard, brown sauce and fruit purée sauce bases.

Consistency of the homemade sauce base is one of the main things that you should be looking at when considering making your own BBQ sauce. You want to avoid the base from being too runny or too thick, and this is one of the reasons why using a suitable ketchup is a great place to start experimenting because it gives you a little less to think about initially and will allow you to let your creative juices flow as you consider and use the ingredients that will make up your sauce.

The #10 ketchup is one of the most popular sauce bases to use as it has the ideal consistency and acidity that complements BBQ food by giving a clean edge, or zing, to the flavour. Many pre-bought sauces will not match up to your own personal favourite once you have developed your very own homemade barbecue sauce.

If you were considering making something that had a fruitier flavour, you can use a pre-made fruit sauce and use that as your base for a slightly sweeter and fruitier flavour and adjust it to your taste, using other ingredients. Alternatively, you could use a small quantity of ketchup base and then sweat down fruit and create your own fruit purée to add to your sauce.

Acidity

Acidity is very important in a homemade barbecue sauce as its presence provides a clean-tasting zing that prepares and excites the taste buds. Controlling this acidity is important and a matter of personal preference, and experimentation with fruit-infused vinegars, such as cider, apple and raspberry all offer unique and distinct flavours that complement any homemade barbecue sauce.

You can make your own fruit-infused vinegars very easily by purchasing a good quality white wine vinegar, adding some to a sterilised bottle along with raw fruits of choice, seal, and allow to soak slowly, in a cool and dark place for 1 or 2 months.

Once the fruit has had enough time to break down in the vinegar, you find that it has taken on a pleasant fruity tang and can be used in not only your homemade barbecue sauce, but also in a salad dressing along with a little olive oil. Remember that a little goes a long way.

Other ingredients that will complement your homemade barbecue sauce base, are seasoning’s and vegetables that will add a distinctness to it and separate it from the typical, off-the-shelf variety.

Worcestershire sauce for example, adds a low-down meaty flavour and is similar in colour to soy sauce, though it tastes nothing like soy sauce at all. Widely used, Worcestershire sauce has a slightly spicy tang to it as well as a dark colour that will deepen the colour of the sauce that you are making.

Other great ingredients are Tabasco sauce for example that adds a mildly hot, fruity pepper flavour and is excellent as a component for sauces that are going to be used on chicken, baby back ribs and chicken wings. If you want to try a slightly milder alternative to Tabasco, Cholula hot sauce is similar in flavour, though slightly less piquant to its hotter counterpart.

For a full and more rounded flavour you can add sauces similar to Texas Pete’s hot sauce, which has a fairly thick ketchup-like consistency and adds a broad and mild mix of spices. Once again, there are many alternatives to thick sauces that you can add to your homemade barbecue sauce, and it is worthwhile experimenting with them in very small batches and pick out the flavours that excite your taste-buds the most.

Read the labels, pick out the flavours and aromas that appeal to you and then note them down for future use.

Seasoning’s

Now that you have the base of your homemade barbecue sauce well under way, you can take a look at the spices, salt, pepper and sugar that will be used in relatively small quantities to give your BBQ sauce its own distinct flavour.

If you haven’t used a particular seasoning before, start off by using small quantities to avoid over-powering your first homemade barbecue sauce.

Cinnamon for example is a particularly strong bark-like spice that is also available in ground form. Use it like salt, by adding a little at a time until you get the balance right with the other flavours. Use too much and you will find that just like salt, the cinnamon will almost certainly overpower everything else you have in your sauce. Unless you particularly like cinnamon, use it very sparingly.

Here is a short list of seasoning’s that you can use in your homemade barbecue sauce to give you some ideas.

Spices such as cayenne, Jamaican jerk seasoning, red pepper flakes (in moderation), clove, cinnamon, ground ginger, coriander, garlic, mango powder, mustard, paprika, cumin, oregano, and parsley are all excellent choices.

Whole seeded chilli peppers such as Chipotle adds a dark and smoky flavour, Habanero and Scotch Bonnet peppers add a lot of heat along with a delicious fruit flavour, red bell peppers for great fruitiness but little heat, Serrano and similar long carrot-shaped chillies also offer a nice fruit flavour along with a mild-heat.

Sweetness

To add sweetness if necessary to your homemade barbecue sauce, you can use sugars and sweeteners that suit your personal preference. Palm sugar has a unique and distinct flavour that has an Eastern influence, cane sugar, molasses and dark brown sugar are also widely used.

You can use any sugars that you prefer, though darker sugars generally have more flavour and are more suitable for use in a BBQ sauce. More exotic sweeteners such as passion fruit and guava syrups can also be used to good effect, along with regular honey and golden syrup.

If your homemade barbecue sauce is going to be used to baste your meats and poultry during cooking over a hot grill, remember that the high sugar content can burn easily and it will invariably result in blackened food.

Take this into account when cooking your food and adjust your technique accordingly. Using the “low-and-slow” method of cooking is the perfect way to cook food that is coated in a high sugar content BBQ sauce.

Salt

Salt is a very important part of cooking, seasoning any food improves the flavour and when used in BBQ sauces, it is used in the same manner, to add flavour and also balance the sweetness and acidity. Use salt sparingly during the last 15 minutes of reduction time to adjust the taste to your liking by allowing the salt to cook through the sauce slowly, while stirring continuously.

Taste a small amount of the sauce, not forgetting to allow it to cool first beforehand, and determine whether you have reached the right balance.

It all comes down to a matter of personal preference that is based on our upbringing and regional influences. Use the ingredients and flavours that talk to your taste buds, experiment and make it your own unique homemade barbecue sauce.

Thickeners

To prevent yourself from making the most common mistake when creating your first homemade barbecue sauce, avoid the addition of sauce thickeners such as corn starch, gelatine, flour, butter and cream as these will impair the flavour and potentially ruin your BBQ sauce.

Thickeners are not required as your homemade barbecue sauce will be thickened naturally by the evaporation of liquids, and reduced gently on a relatively low heat in a saucepan until the ideal consistency is achieved.

Making your homemade barbecue sauce

This section is not designed to be a particular recipe, just some basic guidelines in the preparation of your homemade barbecue sauce.

To start with you will need a pan large enough to hold all of your ingredients with some room to spare to allow the BBQ sauce to bubble gently without overflowing onto your cooker, and now add the following ingredients;

500ml of #10 ketchup

50ml cider vinegar

1 large onion coarsely chopped

2 large garlic gloves, finely chopped

1 thumb sized piece of ginger, finely sliced

1 tsp Tabasco sauce

1 tbls passion-fruit syrup

1 tsp coriander powder

1 tsp cumin powder

2 finely chopped seeded hot red chillies

1 tbls brown sugar

Salt to taste

Once you have all of the ingredients in the pan, stir until thoroughly combined and raise the temperature of the pan until it achieves a boil, then immediately reduce the heat so that the mixture is just simmering very gently around the edges of the pan.

Do not cover the pan and stir occasionally with a plastic or wooden spoon, checking for any sauce that may have start to stick to the bottom of the pan. If the sauce begins to stick, reduce the heat a little, stir, and check again in a few minutes. Refrain from adding water during cooking as this will only serve to prolong the reduction process.

The reduction process can take up to 4 hours depending on your ingredients and desired sauce consistency. Allow plenty of time for making your homemade barbecue sauce prior to use, preferably allowing 24 hours for the sauce to cool properly and allow the ingredients to finally combine and stabilise the flavours before use.

Your BBQ sauce can be prepared and refrigerated ahead of use using a sterilised jar or suitable air-tight jar making it ideal for continued use if you are going to have several barbecues during the week. Your homemade barbecue sauce will be at its best for up to a week if stored in the refrigerator.

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Capsicum is a genus of plants from the Solanaceae family, cultivated for thousands of years by the people of the tropical Americas.

The term chilli or chile is widely used and it refers exclusively to the smaller, hot types of capsicum fruits. Its orthography is common in Spanish although the name varies depending on the location. For example, in South America it is better known as ají, locoto or rocoto, meanwhile in USA it is called bell pepper and in Canada and the United Kingdon only like pepper.

The spelling of this word is very important to make the difference between the capsicum fruit “chili” and the country Chile which is named after the Quechua chin (“cold”), tchili (“snow”), or chilli (“where the land ends”).

There is also some disagreement about whether it is proper to use the word “pepper” when discussing chili peppers because “pepper” originally referred to the genus Piper, not capsicum. Despite this dispute, a sense of pepper referring to capsicum is supported by English dictionaries.

Even though chilis are considered as a vegetable, they are transformed in hot sauces or chili pepper powder to be used in culinary dishes as spice.

Since at least 7500 years BC, chili peppers were domesticated by prehistoric people starting in the south with Peru to Mexico in the north of the Americas. Some of these countries used capsicum fruits with medical purposes.

In most European countries and in the continental United States of America, only Jalapeño pepper is produced but habanero chiles do not grow well because of the climate. Only in San Diego or Florida, they survive from one growing season to the next.

Around 6000 years ago, archaeological activities in south western Ecuador found evidences of capsicum products crops which prove they have been one of the first cultivated products in human diet.

It was only after Columbus’ time when chilis were known and cultivated around the globe. He was one of the first Europeans to find these capsicum fruits. Because of their similarity in taste to the Old World peppers of the Piper genus, he decided to give the same name in order to associate them with the known Asian spice.

In 1493, Diego Alvarez Chanca, a physician on Columbus’ second voyage, brought the first capsicum peppers to Spain and analyze its medical effects. Since this moment, it began commerce between Mexico, as a Spanish colony, with Asia. Hot peppers spread rapidly into the Philippines, India, China, Korea and Japan where they were incorporated into local dishes.

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When it comes to delicious meals, you can have healthy too! Today more than ever, delicious foods are geared at providing healthy benefits in a scrumptious dish that will be a favorite for years to come. Fried chili chicken is a delicious blend of healthy chicken spiced to perfect without the unnecessary additions of added fat or sugar.

Instead of depending on additives that enhance the flavor of the meal, this is one meal that takes simple ingredients and makes them into one dish easy to fix and enjoyed by everyone. Take a closer look at why this is a favorite in my house!

Fried Chili Chicken

Ingredients:

2 tbsp flour

¼ tsp cayenne

1 tsp chili powder

½ tsp ground cumin

½ tsp dried oregano

½ tsp garlic powder

½ tsp salt

4 chicken breasts, cubed

3 tbsp vegetable oil

1 onion, chopped

2 cups chicken broth

¼ cup chili powder

1 tbsp hot New Mexico chili powder

1 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp dried oregano

20oz can pinto beans, drained

Directions:

In a plastic bag: mix the flour, cayenne, chili powder, cumin, oregano, garlic powder, and salt and toss together. Add the chicken cubes and shake until evenly coated with the spice mixture.

Heat 2 tbsp of oil in a large skillet and cook the chicken, turning as needed until chicken is lightly browned, set aside. Heat the remaining oil in the same skillet and sauté for 5 minutes. Put the chicken & onion mixture in a large saucepan with the chicken broth.

Add all remaining ingredients – except pinto beans – bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 1 hour (add water if needed). Add the beans, taste and adjust seasonings if needed.

Tip: this is a hot temperature chili! Hard crust country bread, thick sliced, lightly sprinkled with oil and toasted or grilled is all you’ll need with this spicy chicken chili.

Dry soup: many Mexican dishes feature bread or tortillas that are soaked in a sauce until the dish resembles more a casserole or a heavy stew than a soup. In Mexico, they refer to these dishes as dry soups.

Canned or fresh peppers: with the ever growing interest in Mexican cuisine across the USA, you will likely find be able to find fresh chilies to meet the needs for your cooking. However, if you must use canned, plan to use about half as much as you would of fresh because the peppers become more packed during the canning process.

When I make this for my family, I try using more goodness by using fresh peppers toasted to perfection. In addition, you will find it is easy to make pinto beans in the Crockpot while at work. This is a great way to insure you are not getting added sodium from canned beans. Also, I can choose the herbs and spices my family loves. You can, of course, find your own!

Fried chili chicken offers an exceptional recipe that is easy to make and tastes absolutely delicious. A favorite in my house, you will find that this can be a favorite in yours too.

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