Paper Palate

I was going through a few old magazines, trying to catch up, and happened upon an issue of Saveur magazine where they did a piece on the Asian hot sauce condiment, Sriracha. Ten million bottles of this stuff-with-a-kick is sold every year in America alone. The owner of the company, and the creator of the sauce, David Tran, started making and selling it in Vietnam some 25 years ago. When they escaped Vietnam, his family eventually settled in California and restarted their sauce production in a building in Chinatown. Every morning he would visit four local markets in search of fresh red chiles. Once the sauce was done, he would sell it from the back of his minivan to local grocery stores.

Surprisingly enough, even with their massive current production, today the company only has 36 employees. Tran makes his sauce only from mid-September until the end of November, because that’s when the all-important jalapenos are at their peak. After the jalapenos are blended with vinegar and salt, they actually sit for six months to allow the flavors to better marry. Once that’s done, the concoction is then blended with garlic, sugar and other secret ingredients, and finally bottled for sale.

If you’ve seen or used sriracha, you know how distinctive its bottle is. Surprisingly enough, each part of the bottle means something; it’s not just slick marketing. The rooster on the front is symbolic of Tran’s astrological sign. And fittingly, in the Chinese zodiac, roosters are the perfectionists. The bottle is actually the only place when Tran advertises … no print ads exist … which is why his company’s complete contact information is included there. The bottle’s overall design was done with a chile pepper in mind. The green squirt cap represents the stem of a jalapeno and the clear plastic was done to emphasize the bright, chile red color of the sauce inside.

So now that you have a big bottle of sriracha, what are you going to do with it? Tran suggests the following:

- Use in place of ketchup on hot dogs.
- Add it to chopped raw tuna to make spicy tuna sushi rolls.
- Put it on top of cooked eggs.
- Splash some into your beer (for a hot version of “red eye,” which is tomato juice and beer) or your bloody mary.
- Sprinkle it on top of pizza in place of hot pepper flakes.
- Toss it with some hot buttered popcorn.
Add it to stir-fry noodles, pho (Vietnamese soup), or fried rice.
- Use it in place of Tabasco on hot wings or to marinate chicken.
- For an hors d’oeuvre, squirt a small amount of it on top of smoked whitefish served on a cracker.
- Combine it with mayonnaise to use as a dipping sauce for spring rolls or as a condiment for sandwiches.
- Mix it with black Chinese vinegar, soy sauce, and sesame oil as a dipping sauce for pot stickers or dumplings (ratio: three parts vinegar to one part soy sauce, a few drops of sesame oil, and sriracha according to your heat tolerances).
- Combine it with salt to make a dip for fresh pineapple.

Happy eating!