Tobasco Reserve

Every now and then, someone offers to send me something for free. Sometimes I accept; sometimes I do not. Sometimes I review it; sometimes I do not. Sometimes I like it; sometimes I do not. This is one of the cases where I accepted the item and decided to review it.
What is it?

Fancy Tobasco Sauce. Perhaps the fanciest of Tobasco sauce. 2011 Tobasco Brand Family Reserve Pepper Sauce from the McIlhenny Co. It's available at Amazon for just shy of $25, and the item description calls it a collector's item. Why?

Well, first of all it's small batch. Second, it's aged. Third, it's blended with premium ingredients. Oh, and the peppers were aged as well. The finest peppers.

Also, it has a wax seal and a little medal. So that's cool.

Now what you should be asking me is, "Brian, now that you've tried it, is this Tobasco Brand Family Reserve Pepper Sauce really worth $25? I mean, it does have a medal that goes around the bottle." To which I say, "Wellllllll… maybe. Probably not. But maybe."

I enjoy Tobasco sauce and other hot pepper sauces. I have even made my own, which is fun and tasty. However, I am not a Tobasco fanatic. There are those who pick a sauce, Tobasco or otherwise, and put it on everything. Everything edible. Probably a couple of other things, but most won't admit to that. Some of these people live a life of Tobasco-centered joy. If you need to buy a gift for one of these people, I would absolutely buy this gift. It's Tobasco-y, it's limited edition, it has slightly fancier bottling, and it comes in a box that makes it easy to wrap. How can you lose?

If you are thinking of buying this for yourself, and you are a Tobasconaut as described above, then I'm afraid I can't help you. I just don't have a refined enough Tobasco palate to be able to adequately judge the awesomeness or lameness of this sauce. Find another review, and check that.

If you are a casual pepper sauce eater, then I would not advise spending the $25 on a bottle of this. Go with the chipotle version, or the habañero version, or Sriracha, or one of the many many small-batch brands of hot sauce. Or make your own. All good choices. But spending $25 on this will not give you such a difference in flavor that a casual hot-sauce consumer would notice. You can get a lot of hot sauce for $25. But several of the other options instead.

Oh, and about that medal: don't leave it on the bottle. If you leave it on, every time you put hot sauce on your food, the medal will fall into said food. It's happened to me three times. Now that I've taken a picture of the thing, I am getting rid of it forever. If you, um, collect hot sauce bottles, set the medal aside and save it for when you've finished with the bottle. It will look nice on the shelf. Well, as nice as a bottle of hot sauce on your shelf is going to look, I suppose.

Fine Cooking Thursdays: Reducing Complexity

Another article is up on Fine Cooking's web site, this time from @megpasz about the temperature at which sauces reduce. I answered the question in my usual overachieving manner. Because, I ask you, how many other columnists will tell you what temperature really is?*

Also, it should be noted that no kittens were harmed in the making of this week's metaphor.



*- Probably only 3. Maybe 4, depending on the day.

Food Mysteries: Broken Alfredo (Sauce)

Friend of The Food Geek Greg Turner of Kitchen Sojourn tells a sad tale of a broken Alfredo sauce, a tale that I am not unfamiliar with. Back in the day, I used to make Alfredo sauce much the same way he did, and while it was tasty, you could feel the arteries clogging while you were chewing, not just after you swallow. Also, it's a finicky sauce. Let's take a look at general path he took to make it:

heat some heavy cream (about 1/2 a cup) over medium heat

Begin adding fresh grated Parmesan cheese, whisking gently

Taste

Add more cheese, whisk

Taste

Add some butter, a little cheese, whisk

Taste

At this point the detail become a little fuzzy. I may have added a splash of milk (2%) to the mix because I was all out of cream. Then, on the final addition of cheese, the sauce absolutely came apart, separated like curds and whey and I was left with a soupy mix of small cheese crumbles (each about the size of a bacon bit) and a watery liquid that was more like skim milk than heavy cream.

A perfectly good, perfectly tasty recipe. Unfortunately, at some point he had to use a milk for a bit of the liquid, and he added a bit more cheese, and the whole thing broke. Clumps of cheese and mess everywhere. Delicious mess, but not delicious enough.

The great thing about this Alfredo sauce is that it's a combination of fat, fat, umami-laden cheese, and salt. You give to guests, they enjoy, and shortly thereafter you break out the home defibrillator. The evening ends with a toast to your health, and everyone considers the dinner a success.

The bad thing about it is that it's, well, too much of a good thing. There's a much easier way to make this kind of sauce that incorporates most of the flavor with not nearly as much death-dealing cholesterol and in a non-breaking manner.

Consider this: with the above recipe, what's providing the structure for the sauce? It's not the cream, and it's not the butter. It's certainly not the salt. Which leaves the cheese.

What you're attempting to do is to melt the cheese in the right way so that the protein loses its rigid form and turns into a connected mesh around the liquid and fat. You are, in effect, making a stretchy bungee-cord net, but out of cheese, for all of the rest of the ingredients.

What most likely went wrong? With a cheese sauce, chances are that there was too much stirring, and the net collapsed into little patches of protein strands, much as if you stretched the strings of the bungee-cord net too far and several broke at once. The fats in the cream and butter stayed with the cheese, because the cheese also contains fat, so it all just stuck together and the water was the odd man out.*

In any case, you're going about this sauce the difficult way. Don't force the cheese to define the structure. Let something else do that work for you, and allow the cream and cheese to provide flavor. Get some sort of starch to do the heavy lifting, and maybe an egg for some emulsification. Try a bechamella.** There's Mario Batali's, which is perfectly good. Add some cheese to it at the end, and you're set. No muss, no fuss. That's an egg-free version, but you could do eggy if you wanted to. That's what I do with my macaroni and cheese.

So, in this case you have the starch in the flour that absorbs liquid and, once it reaches a temperature around the boiling point of water, springs out in all directions. Instead of being a taut bungee cord, it's more like a bunch of springs that are still trying to push out of the confined space. Nothing's getting out of that structure, but it's not in such a precarious position as the protein net.

Also, because you're not forcing the cheese to provide structure, you don't have to use cream, as the cream is less likely to curdle for reasons which I won't go into now, but involves casein. Some other time. In any case, plenty tasty***, healthier, and less fussy. How great is that? That a heap of great.

*- Had the fat separated from the sauce, I would have suspected overheating it. Then the protein strands would have bunched together and squeezed out all the fat.

**- Or, if you haven't gone to the Italian re-education centers like I have, a béchamel.

***- You can go overboard on the cheese reduction, though, so don't skimp there. You still want to taste the parmesan.