On Chili Garlic Sauce

Previously, on tastingmenu.wordpress.com –
* https://tastingmenu.wordpress.com/2020/04/24/nobu-steamed-bass-with-vegetables-and-spicy-garlic-sauce/

Recently my wife alerted me to some issues with chili peppers from Asia. Essentially, we ended up dumping all of our Korean chili flakes (gojugaru) and chili paste (gojujang). Moreover, she was extremely suspicious and also wanted to dump our jar of Lee Kum Kee chili garlic sauce which I’d been using since it was mentioned here: https://nymag.com/restaurants/articles/recipes/stripedbassginger.htm (apparently back in 2020). What was I to do? Fortunately Nobu Miami: The Party Cookbook had their own version of chili garlic sauce (p. 185). The recipe did seem a bit much since I use it, mostly to make spicy lemon dressing, creamy spicy sauce, etc and so a microbatch of the ingredients would look like:

This was already what I had in my refridgerator

getting it ready for the food processor

6 oz (155g) fresno chilis (or jalapeno or habenero (?!?!)) – probably have to be red
6 cloves of garlic (how much is that really?)
1 t salt
1 1/2 T sugar
1 1/2 T rice vinegar
1/2 T mirin

My first unknown was to answer the question of “how do I quantify 6 cloves of garlic for consistency purposes?” That question got answered from my Spinach Appetizer Soup experience when I determined that 8 cloves of garlic came to ~1 1/8 oz. Some algebra suggested that amount would be 3/4 oz+ .09oz (23.91g) for those 6 cloves. My Salter cooking weight scale suggested that its resolution for 24g (as a round up) would still come to 3/4 oz. So I guess that would be my quantitative choice for garlic.

that’s what 3/4 of peeled garlic looks like

So the chili’s I had on hand that were part of this week’s grocery purchase were 8″ red cowhorn chilis.

the rest of the sauce ingredients

To make this, I would have to load all these ingredients into my small food processor and pulse them into

garlic’s at the bottom of of the processor topped with the chilis and ready for the rice vinegar as the liquid to puree

looks ready for the sauce pan

a coarse paste. Then that paste would have to migrate to a small sauce pan to cook over medium high

first the sugar (and the salt!)

…then the mirin…

and finally the chili garlic vinegar puree

heat for about 4 minutes. After those 4 minutes, I would have to lower the heat to a simmer and cook for

on medium high heat

a further 6 minutes, stirring all the while like a risotto to avoid the paste scorching on the bottom of the

second phase of the sauce cook

sauce pan. I know I would be done when most of the liquid had been evaporated off.

basically done; need to let it cool to room temperature for storage

When the cooking was complete, I would need to move the chili garlic sauce off to a nice clean air tight glass jar.

not bad, looks about right; ready for storage

Both my wife and I did a taste test of the Nobu Miami chili garlic sauce. The initial flavor profile starts on the light sweet note and THEN you get the hit of chili and garlic heat with a mild aftertaste of acid from the rice vinegar. After rinsing out palates with milk then water, by comparison, tasting the Lee Kum Kee chili garlic sauce showed a huge flavor profile of salt initially before you get any chili heat, very little sweetness and no aftertaste of acid sharpness.

From one point of view, the Nobu Miami recipe with the restrained salt meant that one had better control of the salt level in the recipe. Sort of like my view on chocolate – use 100% chocolate bars (no sugar) and you can control the amount of sweetness you want in a recipe. I’m looking forward to using this recipe for spicy lemon dressing, creamy spicy sauce. Perhaps my next adventure would be using this for Nobu’s Scallops With Creamy Spicy Sauce.

Thank you Chef Buckley and Matsuhisa-sama for sharing this fundamental recipe!