From the Houston Press Eating Our Words blog:

This recipe originally appeared during the rodeo barbecue cook-off. It’s complicated, but the results are spectacular.

Borrego actually means mutton in Spanish, but for some reason, Anglos are more comfortable translating it to “lamb.” Which is odd when you think about it, since Anglos are usually squeamish about eating [...]]]>
From the Houston Press Eating Our Words blog:

This recipe originally appeared during the rodeo barbecue cook-off. It’s complicated, but the results are spectacular.

Borrego actually means mutton in Spanish, but for some reason, Anglos are more comfortable translating it to “lamb.” Which is odd when you think about it, since Anglos are usually squeamish about eating veal, suckling pig, tiny cabritos and other baby animals.

Mutton used to be a traditional meat in Texas barbecue and is still found at a few African-American barbecue joints such as Ruthie’s in Navasota and Sam’s in Austin. So call this “Mexican mutton barbecue” if you like.The smoky-flavored, falling-off-the-bone tender meat this recipe yields is even tastier than the the stewed goat dish called birria.

Mexican barbacoa is still made in a smoker by a few Tejano barbecue enthusiasts, but commercial pit barbacoa is all but extinct in Texas. Vera’s in Brownsville is one of the last restaurants in the state to use a real pit to make barbacoa. In the old days, Mexican ranch hands used to wrap cow heads up in canvas or maguey leaves and bury them in the coals. (In the movie Giant, Elizabeth Taylor faints when they unwrap the package and show her the head.) But health departments frown on such traditional barbacoa these days.

Square-cut lamb shoulder isn’t the most common roast in the world, but if your butcher can’t find one, try a Mexican meat market.

Barbacoa de Borrego

Hope you’ve five or six hours, because this ain’t fast food. Make sure you’ve got everything you need before you get started.

Equipment: Barbecue smoker or large covered grill, charcoal, hardwood logs, chips or chunks, starter chimney, soup pot, blender, roasting pan, heavy duty aluminum foil, fire gloves or pot holder mitts

7-8 pound square-cut lamb shoulder roast
2 tablespoons grill rub (or salt, pepper and chili powder)

For the chile puree:
2 ancho chiles, stemmed and seeded
2 guajillo chiles, stemmed and seeded
2 chipotle chiles, stemmed and seeded

For the soup:
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 celery stalks, cleaned and chopped
1 onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
14.5 ounce can stewed tomatoes
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
Leaves from 3 sprigs fresh rosemary, cleaned and chopped
Leaves from 3 sprigs fresh thyme, cleaned and chopped
Salt and pepper to taste

For Serving:
24 warm flour tortillas
1 cup chopped onions
2 tablespoons chopped cilantro
2 cups refried beans

Rub the lamb roast with seasonings and allow to marinate for a few hours. Light about 25 charcoal briquettes in a chimney and prepare a grill with the coals on one side only. Brown the lamb roast over the hot fire for a few minutes, turning often. Move it to the cool side of the grill or to the smoking chamber of an offset barbecue smoker. Put some hardwood on the coals and close the lid. Allow the roast to smoke for an hour and a half to two hours at around 250 degrees turning to cook evenly.

Meanwhile, in a saucepan over low heat, simmer the chiles in water to cover. Allow them to sit in the hot water for ten to twenty minutes until soft. Puree the chiles in a blender adding the soaking water a little at a time until the puree is smooth.

In a soup pot, heat the oil over medium heat and add the onions and celery. Stir and cook for five minutes or until softened. Add the garlic and cook another few minutes. Add the chile puree and cook for a three minutes stirring well. Add the remaining vegetables and herbs and 8 cups of water and bring the mixture to a boil. Turn down the heat and allow to simmer while the lamb smokes.

Add more charcoal and wood to the fire. Place a metal roasting pan on the grill directly

over the coals. Carefully pour the chile broth into the roasting pan. Place the lamb roast in the roasting pan with the soup, rib bones down.
Allow the lamb to simmer and smoke for an hour to an hour and half, replenishing the liquid level if needed.

With the aid of fire gloves or pot holders, cover the roast and the roasting pan with aluminum foil and seal tightly. Simmer over the coals or in a 300 oven for another hour or 2 until the lamb meat is extremely tender. You want the roast to be intact, but the meat to be very soft.

Allow the roast to cool slightly. Clean the meat away from the bones and chop lightly. Serve the cleaned meat in some chile broth. You can also serve some of the broth in a cup as a first course. Warm the flour tortillas. Warm the refried beans. Combine the chopped cilantro with the chopped onions and place in a bowl on the table. Everybody get to make their own tacos.

Yields around 4 pounds of meat.

-Robb Walsh

Writing about food as a freelancer was a tough way to make a living and I was about ready to give up after several years of poverty. My fortunes changed when this article about bumming around the Caribbean looking for new hot sauces was published in American Way magazine and won the 1996 James Beard Journalism [...]]]> Writing about food as a freelancer was a tough way to make a living and I was about ready to give up after several years of poverty. My fortunes changed when this article about bumming around the Caribbean looking for new hot sauces was published in American Way magazine and won the 1996 James Beard Journalism Award in the Magazine Feature Writing with Recipes category.

The little house looks like it’s about to slip off the cliffside into the thicket of banana plants and herb gardens below. Knocking on the door, I am greeted by reggae on the radio and several loud, simultaneous conversations. “Come in, it’s open!” somebody finally hollers over the din.

Inside, seven women are sitting around a kitchen table cleaning herbs and laughing. Out the window behind them, I can see the green squares of hundreds of garden plots covering the steep slopes of Trinidad’s Paramin Hills. Stacked along the wall is the treasure I’ve travelled thousands of miles to find, cases upon cases of “Genuine Paramin Pepper Sauce.”

Hillary Boisson is the Parmin Women’s Group’s unofficial leader. She is scrutinizing my T-shirt trying to find some clue as to what this large sunburnt American wants in her clubhouse kitchen. The T-shirt reads: “Austin Hot Sauce Contest, Fourth Annual.”

I am on a hot sauce safari, I explain. I have been island-hopping in the Caribbean for three weeks now, stalking elusive pepper sauces. To find their little salsa factory, I had to brave the treacherous switchbacks of the nearly vertical one-lane road in an overheating truck. The Paramin Women’s Group is suitably impressed.

The Austin Hot Sauce Contest, which I started while working as a food writer at the Austin Chronicle, is where I had my first encounter with Caribbean-style pepper sauces. Over the years the contest has turned into the world’s largest (as far as we can tell, anyway) with over three hundred hot sauces entered every year.

For the past few years, Caribbean-style hot sauces made with habaneros and scotch bonnet peppers have been running away with the show. Instead of the jalapeño, tomatoes, onions and garlic used to make Mexican-style hot sauces, these vibrant Caribbean salsas are made with various combinations of Scotch bonnets, papaya, mango, or pineapple and seasoned with fresh herbs, ginger, allspice or mustard; they taste sensational.

After I got hooked, I started looking for Caribbean pepper sauces in the supermarket, but I found that there weren’t many to choose from. The most exotic sauces, like Dragon’s Breath, Apocalyptic Hot Sauce, and Voodoo Jerk Slather are made in small batches and sold by mail order through pepper-cult publications like Chile Pepper Magazine and the Mo Hotta Mo Betta catalog.

“The Paramin Women’s Group has been meeting for 26 years,” Veronica Romany tells me. “We used to make handicrafts, baskets, crocheting, that kind of thing. But you know we grow the best herbs and peppers here in Paramin, so for the last year, we’ve been bottling pepper sauce.”

Sensing that I’ve made a momentous discovery, I buy a bottle of Genuine Paramin Pepper Sauce and open it on the spot. I dip my little finger into the bottle and taste it, much to the amusement of the Paramin Women’s Group. Their pepper sauce is one of the most unique bottled sauces I’ve ever tried. But I can’t indentify the source of its strong herbal taste and aroma.

“That’s shadow benny,” Veronica giggles.

“Shadow benny?” I ask dumbfounded.

“Here, this stuff,” she says leading me to a full tub of the dark green herb. I put my nose into it and sniff; the aroma is a pungent slap in the face.

Shadow benny proves to be a variety of the herb called culantro in Latin America. Seldom seen in the U.S., it is a distant cousin to cilantro. The thick-leafed herb has an even stronger flavor than cilantro. In Trinidadian cooking, shadow benny is used in intensely-flavored dishes because it tends to overpower almost any other taste. But it is just the herb to stand up to the full fury of Trinidad’s congo peppers.

Congo peppers and their Caribbean cousins, the Scotch Bonnet and the habanero are members of the pepper species called Capsicum chinense ; they are the hottest peppers in the world. But while they may be the most incendiary peppers under the sun, they are also one of the tastiest. Their distinctive fruitiness, with hints of apricot, peach and citrus is the main flavor of this new breed of hot sauce that has set the world on fire.

I ask the Paramin Women’s Group if they can ship their hot sauce to the United States. They have never done it before and they are a little unclear on the technicalities, someday they may figure it out. Nevertheless, I doubt we’ll be seeing Genuine Paramin Pepper Sauce on our local grocery store shelves anytime soon. Looking around the kitchen, I realize that one order from a supermarket would wipe out the world’s entire supply of Genuine Paramin Pepper Sauce.

This kind of small scale production is the reason that the Caribbean’s most fascinating hot sauces remain closely guarded secrets. The only shelves you’ll find these bottles on are inside the refrigerator doors of the pepper sauce cognescenti.

Bob Kennedy is the maker of the underground classics called Virgin Fire hot sauces. His line includes the tangy, sweet sauce called Pineapple Sizzle and the ferocious liquid lava known as Dragon’s Breath. Kennedy lives on the eccentric island of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Bumping around the island’s dirt roads in his Jeep, Kennedy gives me a tour on the way to his pepper farm. Two-thirds of St. John is national parkland and the rest is inhabitated by a gang of self-professed oddballs, he explains. Stopping at a beach along the way, Kennedy points to the bumper sticker on back of a parked Jeep. It reads: “St. John U.S.V.I. We’re all here because we’re not all there.”

Kennedy cooks Virgin Fire sauces up thirty gallons at a time in his kitchen. His house sits on top of a hill looking out over much of St. John and the island of Tortola across the water. In the kitchen of his ramshackle hilltop duplex, Kennedy reluctantly agreed to part with one of the increasingly hard-to-find bottles of his legendary Pineapple Sizzle.

“The drought this year has ruined us,” complains Kennedy. “Water was so scarce, that at one point they were bringing water trucks over on the ferry from St. Thomas.” The water-poor Virgin Islands are a tough place to try and make pepper sauces. The tour of Kennedy’s garden was a requiem. Inadequate rainfall had killed the peppers and the fruit trees that once supplied his raw ingredients. The cost of trucked-in water makes irrigation financially impossible.

“We had to pull out of the Mo Hotta Mo Betta catalog because we just couldn’t keep up with the orders anymore,” Kennedy admits ruefully. He hates the idea of leaving St John, but Kennedy is determined to pack up his operation and relocate to Puerto Rico where he will have a constant supply of peppers and access to a bottling plant. He predicts that he will soon be able to supply all the Pineapple Sizzle and Dragon’s Breath anybody could want.

Across the bay on the more populous island of St. Thomas, Richard Reimer is having the same problems with the pepper supply at his Virgin Island Herb and Pepper Company. But somehow Reimer has managed to scrounge up enough peppers to keep up with the demand.

I meet Reimer over a cold beer at the Normandie Bar, the oldest watering hole on St. Thomas in picturesque Frenchtown. Reimer hands me a bottle of his most popular sauce, but he stops me before I can taste it. Apocalyptic Hot Sauce is an insanely hot mixture of pure peppers and vinegar and it’s recommended for cooking, not eating out of the bottle, he tells me. But Reimer makes two other sauces that taste great straight out of the bottle. His Peppered Ginger Hot Sauce has a wonderful gingery burn and his Curry Garlic Hot Sauce tastes like an fiery Indian curry. These two aren’t sold in the catalog and I happily stuff them into my pcokets.

Reimer and two other cottage hot sauce companies on St. Thomas, Heat Wave and Uncle Willie’s, do a steady business selling hot sauces to the endless stream of tourists who disembark from cruise ships in Charlotte Amalie’s harbor every day.

I tell Reimer about my pepper sauce safari and ask him which islands he thinks I should visit. “The islands with the most water have the best produce,” Reimer replies. “Haiti, Trinidad, Jamaica and Dominica.”

It’s been said that if Columbus ever returned to the West Indies, Dominica is the only place he’d still recognize. The nature island, as it’s often called because of its unspoiled landscape, is tucked away in the Lesser Antilles between the French-speaking islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique; it is often confused with Haiti’s neighbor, the Dominican Republic.

Tourists are invisible in Dominica. Only a tiny trickle of visitors come here to begin with. And nearly all the backpacking nature-lovers disappear into Dominica’s vast unexplored rain forest as soon as they arrive. The island’s 360 rivers feature spectacular waterfalls, some of which were only recently discovered when a hurricane blew away the dense vegetation that surrounded them.

But as Richard Reimer suggested, the bounty of fresh water makes Dominica a great place to grow things. And peppers are one of the island’s main crops. They call the pepper variety here piment bonda man jack. (The name is an off-color creole joke about Mrs. Jacque’s behind). The pepper with the racy name looks and tastes a lot like the congo pepper of Trinidad.

Since 1944, the Bello Pepper Sauce Company in the tiny village of Castle Comfort has purchased the lion’s share of the island’s pepper crop and turned it into one of the Caribbean’s most popular hot sauces. The bullet-shaped shaker bottle containing Bello’s Special Pepper Sauce can be found on almost any island in the Caribbean. It is a vinegary orange sauce that tastes a little like a fruity version of Tabasco sauce.

Bello’s hot sauce has more of a mass-produced commercial flavor than most of my favorites, so I wasn’t expecting much when I stopped by their factory. Michael Fagan, son of the owners of the company, gave me a tour of the enormous pepper-crushing operation and Juslin Adonis, the head pepper buyer, showed me some of the latest crop of peppers. Michael, whose dark skin and distinctively sharp nose make him look part Amerindian, was born and raised in New York and recently returned to Dominica to handle the company’s marketing efforts.

My impressions of Bello hot sauce took a drastic change for the better when I sat down with Fagan and tasted another hot sauce Bello makes. Working with a British food marketing company called Encona, Bello has developed a delicious, thick, chunky and extremely hot sauce made with peppers, papaya, onions, vinegar and other spices called West Indian Pepper Sauce. It’s currently Great Britain’s top-selling hot sauce, the Brits are consuming 6-8 container loads of the stuff every month.

Luckily for us, Bello has decided to sell the same product under its own label in the United States. The chunky British formula is simply called Bello Hot Pepper Sauce. This thick, fruity, naturally-aged, tonsil-torcher has already been discovered by the chile cult through the Mo Hotta Mo Betta catalog.

In Bello’s research labs, New Mexico-educated quality control director Allan Phillip shows me a bottle of a new dark yellow, mustard-tumeric-based formula that Bello is working on. Michael Fagan hopes to sell all three of his hot sauces someday in the United States. Unlike the little hot sauce companies which are struggling to ship mail order customers a couple of bottles at a time, Bello could easily ship a container load of hot sauce to your front door tomorrow.

However, they’ve already got a little competition in the U.S. market – from a fried chicken chain, of all things. Trinidad Habanero Pepper Sauce is made by Trinidad’s Royal Castle chicken chain, famous for its fried chicken, but even better known for the sensational hot sauce they use as a marinade and serve alongside it. Trinidad Habanero Pepper Sauce is currently sold in thirty-five states, and is featured on the tables of the Planet Hollywood chain. (Like many other pepper sauce producers, this company has adopted “habanero” as a generic name for Scotch bonnets, congo peppers and all the other cultivars of the capsicum chinense family because the name is so well-known in the U.S., even though the Spanish word is not used in Trinidad.)

Royal Castle’s owner, American-born Marie Permenter, was well aware of the pent-up demand for exotic hot sauces in the United States. With plenty of sauce in inventory, she decided to try her hand at the export business.

With her Southern accent and planter’s manner, Mrs. Permenter seems like an unlikely hot sauce magnate. But every month the orders increase and more barrels of Royal Castle’s hot sauce are sent to its bottling operation in Florida.

The sauce made famous by the Trinidadian chicken chain is a hot green condiment made with a domesticated wild herb called Spanish thyme, along with congo peppers, garlic, onions, mustard and fresh ginger. Unlike many sauces that are simply hot, the heat of the peppers is beautifully balanced with fresh herbs and spices. Though shipped in relatively large quantities, Trinidad Habanero Pepper Sauce still manages to taste homemade.

Like her neighbors, the Paramin Women’s Group, Marie Permenter of Royal Castle gets all her herbs from the farmers who work the tiny mountain plots in the Paramin Hills, where the slopes are so steep that tractors are useless and irrigation is impossible. It’s an impractical place for farming, but during the wet season, rain falls on the Paramin Hills every day. And according to Marie Permenter, the quality of the herbs and peppers grown on these steep slopes with pure jungle rainwater under the hot Trinidadian sun is the secret of a truly great hot sauce.

As I leave the Paramin Women and drive back down the hill at sunset, I stop to watch a couple of farmers returning from work in their herb plots a few hundred feet below. They look like ants crawling up a green patchwork curtain. People sure are willing to go to a lot of trouble to make a better hot sauce, I muse to myself.

On my three week Caribbean hot sauce safari, I’ve met some people who already run vast multi-national hot sauce empires, some whose sauces may soon catch fire, and some talented home chefs and women’s clubs who are happy to make hot sauces for a tiny audience of friends and fanatics. There’s a place under the sun for all of them, I think, smiling as I caress what will soon become the only bottle of Genuine Paramin Pepper Sauce in the United States.

This article appeared in Cooking Light Magazine in June 2004, at about the same time that the cookbook Nuevo Tex-Mex was published.

Tex-Mex first blazed across American tastebuds in the Wild West of the 1880s. In those days, young Hispanic women with roses pinned to the bosoms of their dresses sashayed around San Antonio’s Military Square peddling [...]]]> This article appeared in Cooking Light Magazine in June 2004, at about the same time that the cookbook Nuevo Tex-Mex was published.

Tex-Mex first blazed across American tastebuds in the Wild West of the 1880s. In those days, young Hispanic women with roses pinned to the bosoms of their dresses sashayed around San Antonio’s Military Square peddling tacos, tamales and chili con carne to lonesome cowboys. The Chili Queens, as they were known, were famous both for their flirtatious sales pitches and for the spiciness of the Tex-Mex specialities they sold.

The Chili Queens gave Tex-Mex tacos, tamales and chili con carne a pretty exciting reputation. Of course, nobody called it Tex-Mex in those days. It was simply known as Mexican food. In fact, we were still calling it Mexican food some eighty years later when Americans fell in love with crispy tacos and tortillas chips in the late 1960s.

The term “Tex-Mex” didn’t come along until the 1970s when Mexican cooking authorities convinced us that this sort of Texan-Mexican fusion cooking wasn’t really Mexican food at all. The name was something of an insult, it divided Mexican food into two categories. Guacamole and tamales were authentic Mexican food. The gloppy, cheese-covered platters, the fast food tacos–and all the other stuff that didn’t get any respect–that was Tex-Mex. Suddenly, one of America’s oldest and most popular regional cooking styles had been demoted to junk food status.

The Southwestern cuisine movement of the 1980s and 1990s didn’t do much for Tex-Mex’s reputation either. Southwestern chefs turned the ingredients of Mexico and the border states into an elegant and refined new American regional cooking style that made Tex-Mex seem even more dated and cheesy.

But then, something strange happened. In the early 1990s, Paris, the food capital of the world, went head over heels for Tex-Mex. The unpretentious simplicity of the cooking and the Wild West image of the name sparked the French imagination. Making the cheese enchiladas with aged Gruyère didn’t hurt either.

The French did the same thing for Tex-Mex that they had once done for blue jeans–they transformed an inexpensive American commodity into something chic and fashionable. Nowadays, there are Tex-Mex restaurants in London, Tokyo, and Oman. Thanks to the enthusiasm of our foreign friends, Tex-Mex is now one of the most popular cuisines in the world.

The reality of Tex-Mex’s new-found fame is only beginning to sink in at home. When you say Tex-Mex in the United States, most people still think of cheese-covered combination plates. But that’s starting to change. Over the course of the decade, the innovations of the Southwestern cuisine have trickled down into the popular cooking style of the Southwest. Ingredients that used to seem exotic, like ancho chiles, black beans and epazote, have found their way into everybody’s cupboards.

The Señorita Platter is disappearing and a new kind of Texan-Mexican fusion cuisine is taking its place. Instead of yellow cheese enchiladas in chili gravy, we’re eating spinach enchiladas in chipotle sauce. There’s wild mushrooms on the nachos, grilled fish in the tacos and pineapple in the salsa. It’s not fancy enough to call Southwestern cuisine, and it’s not old-fashioned Tex-Mex either.

In a new cookbook called Nuevo Tex-Mex, Chef David Garrido and I have tried to capture some of the excitement of this modern north-of-the-border Mexican food. You’ll find something pleasantly familiar about Nuevo Tex-Mex because it’s actually just a modern version of classic Tex-Mex. And like the original, it’s still crunchy, spicy, eat-it-with-your-fingers food that goes great with frozen margaritas or ice cold beer. Although Nuevo Tex-Mex dishes use fresh ingredients instead of the usual, pre-packaged Tex-Mex stuff, we think you’ll find the recipes surprisingly easy.

Of course, using fresh ingredients in Tex-Mex cooking isn’t really a new idea. The Chili Queens of San Antonio weren’t serving pre-formed tacos, canned chili, or instant sauces either. In the Wild West of the 1880s, fresh ingredients and homemade preparations were a given.

Nuevo Tex-Mex may borrow a few ideas from French Tex-Mex and from Southwestern cuisine, but it’s also a return to that made-from-scratch spirit of the frontier. We hope your family and friends will be just as enchanted by these Nuevo Tex-Mex dishes as the cowboys of the old West were by the original.

Confetti Salsa If you’re looking for a colorful garnish, this yellow tomato, purple onion and roasted green and red chile combination is just the ticket. The citrus juices make it nice and tart.

1/2 cup diced red pepper, roasted, seeded and peeled
1/2 cup diced poblano chile, roasted, seeded and peeled
1 cup diced yellow tomato
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
2 tablespoons minced serrano chile
1/4 cup chopped ancho chile
1/2 cup diced purple onion
3 tablespoons orange juice
2 tablespoon lime juice
Salt to taste

Combine all ingredients in a bowl and refrigerate for 15 minutes to allow the flavors to blend. Yields 3 cups

Shrimp and Corn Quesadillas

Place one tortilla in a non-stick skillet over low heat and top with 1/4 cup grated cheese. Spoon 1/2 a cup of corn mixture over the cheese and top with another tortilla. Cook for 2 to 3 minutes, pressing down on the top tortilla with a spatula until you can feel the corn mixture sticking to the melted cheese. Turn carefully and cook on the other side pressing down with the spatula to stick the quesadilla together. Repeat for each quesadilla. Put each quesadilla on a plate, cut into quarters and top with Confetti Salsa. Serve with a green salad with fat-free dressing. Yields 3 quesadillas

Fresh gulf shrimp and sweet corn straight off the cob are a sensational combination. With a zesty salsa on top and a tossed green salad on the side, this makes a stunning summertime lunch.

1 tablespoon butter

1 garlic clove, minced
1/2 onion, chopped
1 cup of fresh corn kernels, off the cob
1/2 jalapeño chile, minced
2/3 cup chopped tomato (about 1/2 a large tomato)
4 large or 6 medium shrimp, cleaned and coarsely chopped
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons minced cilantro
Salt to taste
3/4 cup grated Oaxacan string cheese (or mozzarella)
6 six inch flour tortillas
1 cup Confetti Salsa (see recipe)

In a medium saute pan over medium heat combine the butter, garlic, onion and corn and cook the mixture until the garlic turns light brown. Add the jalapeño and tomato and cook for 4 minutes or until the tomato is softened. Add the shrimp, lemon juice and cilantro and cook until the shrimp is opaque