How much do we depend on chilli sauces all over the world?

The cuisine of Morocco is much celebrated in the West.

There are highly-rated Moroccan restaurants in America. Moroccan cookbooks are popular all over the world. Everybody loves Moroccan food.

 

Except for me.

 

   Believe me, I tried. One reason I enjoy travel so much is that it gives me the chance to taste unfamiliar cuisines. And for the most part, because I am relatively open-minded when it comes to food, I love them all.

 

   But not this time.

 

   To my unsophisticated, very desi palate, Moroccan food tasted much too bland. Many times, it was just too sweet. Moroccans love sugar. They will give a savoury chicken pastilla a dusting of icing sugar. A tagine, with its apricots and sweet flavours, will remind Indians of a curry made by a halwai who is not allowed to use masalas.

 

   I know. I really am an unsophisticated bumpkin when it comes to appreciating Moroccan cuisine. But I found a sort of solution.

 

   Even before I first went to Morocco two decades ago, I had fallen in love with harissa, the chilli-rich paste (i.e. chutney) that is popular all over North Africa and is probably of Tunisian origin. So I added harissa to everything I ate in Morocco. By the end I was even slathering it on my hamburger patties. It made all the food taste so much better.

 

   At its most basic level, harissa is made by pounding at least two kinds of chillis — Baklouti chillis and red chillis — plus garlic, caraway, cumin, coriander seeds etc. There are fancy versions of harissa too with rose petals, dates, etc. But I like the spicy versions as you may have guessed.

 

   I used it as we would use a chutney or a pickle in India to add flavour to bland food and for the most part, it served its purpose.

 

   All this got me thinking: how much do we depend on spicy, chilli sauces all over the world?

 

   Oddly enough, India is the one country that has no sauce tradition. We use pickles to add flavour to our meals and when we make spicy chutneys, they are usually fresh and thick and hardly ever liquid enough to fit into sauce bottles.

 

  In that respect, we are unlike our neighbours in the rest of Asia and very different from America where hot sauces outsell Ketchup in many markets.

 

   The most famous hot sauce in America used to be Tabasco. You probably think Tabasco is a brand name (which it is now) but it is actually a kind of red chilli, named after the Mexican state of Tabasco. It found fame in the 1880s when a sugar planter in Louisiana took to cultivating Tabasco chillis and turned them into a special sauce. Since then, his sauce has travelled the world and been frequently copied, but never bettered.

 

   It is still made by the descendants of the creator who stick to the original recipe of mashing the chillies and ageing them in whisky barrels. They make nearly 800,000 bottles of Tabasco every single day and sell them in 160 countries.

 

"The strange thing is that in many restaurants in China you don’t actually find chilli-sauce on the tables."

   It is now fashionable to knock Tabasco as being too boring, too thin and too old-fashioned but I still love it. It is a sauce that goes particularly well with tomatoes.  Mix it into a Bloody Mary and it adds a much-needed kick. It elevates any tomato-based pasta sauce. And if you add a few drops of Tabasco to a puddle of tomato ketchup, you will have the perfect condiment.

 

   But Tabasco has faced so much competition in recent years that the company has diversified and now makes at least eight different variations of the original.

 

   Some of the competition has come because of the demands of so-called chilli-heads. Indians, who have grown up eating chillies, find this hard to comprehend but in the West, the ability to eat very hot chillis is treated as a sign of virility or, at the very least, a superpower.

 

   The hotness of chillis is measured on something called the Scoville scale and chilli-heads keep looking for chillies that rate the highest on the Scoville scale. Our own Bhut Jolokia was tops once but it has been overtaken by many newly cultivated varieties. Sauces made from these super hot chillis have a snob appeal for chilli heads and other such lunatics who look down on Tabasco and treat it as being too mild.

 

   I have no problem with the super hot chilli sauces (if you want to burn your mouth, be my guest) except that they have the effect of numbing your palate so that you can’t taste anything through the chilli heat which seems to me to defeat the object of a chilli-sauce.

 

   In America, Tabasco has faced another (non chilli-head-driven) kind of threat: from Asian chilli sauces. The most successful of these is Sriracha. I went to Sriracha, which is a town in Thailand, some years ago and wrote about the sauce that bears its name on these pages so I won’t repeat myself. (The piece is easy enough to find on the internet.)

 

   But broadly, Sriracha is a Thai sauce, based on traditional relishes and condiments. It only found global fame when a Vietnamese immigrant to America started making his own version and passing it off as a Vietnamese sauce. The US Sriracha (made by Huy Fong, a company founded by David Tran) is hotter than most Thai versions (which raises its standing in chilli-head circles) and has a more obvious bottled-sauce taste than the artisanal brands which sell in Thailand.

 

   For the record though, while the Thais like chilli and often use freshly chopped chillis in Nam Pla (fish sauce) as a table seasoning, they don’t like their Sriracha as much as Americans love their bogus version. In Thailand, Sriracha goes with only a few dishes (omelettes for example) while nearly everything else is eaten with a fresh seasoning or a dip.

 

   The chilli sauce that most of us grew up on, however, is none of these. It is the Cal-manufactured chilli sauce that all Chinese-restaurants used to serve. It looks and tastes like kaddu ketchup that’s been left out in the sun too long. Then the Golden Dragon, India’s first Sichuan restaurant, introduced us to a freshly made chilli-garlic sauce, created on the premises which is far more delicious than the bottled Calcutta version and has now become a standard condiment at Indian Chinese restaurants.

 

   The strange thing is that in many restaurants in China you don’t actually find chilli-sauce on the tables. In fact, in many parts of China there is no tradition of placing lots of condiments on the table. That practice started with Chinese restaurants in America and then spread all over the world. Even the fresh chilli sauce (mashed cooked chillis in oil) that is traditionally served with dim sum in many parts of the world is not a standard condiment at dim sum restaurants in China.

 

   What you will find in Sichuan, however — and now in much of the world — is a chilli crisp. It’s like a chilli oil or sauce but it contains crisp ingredients that alter its texture. Over the last five years it has become the hottest Chinese condiment on the planet and you get all kinds of variations.

 

   You can buy imported versions everywhere in India these days but my favourite is local and artisanal. A small family enterprise in Delhi (online orders only) called Pickle Shickle makes the best chilli crisp I have tasted outside of China. It's not even authentically Chinese.

 

   Prateeka Chawla who is part of the Pickle Shickle family, told me it is based on a Burmese sauce called Nyoutijam. They do two versions, one with shrimp and one without. They call it Mere Piyaaz Gaye Rangoon. (As I said, it’s not very Chinese!)

 

   Try it. In times of need, it may help you out as harissa helped me in Morocco. And it’s delicious at all times anyway!