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Home > Sangre Celestial > Beyond salsa: What to do with jalapeños
Podcast: Sangre Celestial
Episode:

Beyond salsa: What to do with jalapeños
Category: Arts
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2025-06-26 19:00:00
Description: If you live in LA, chances are you love spicy food. Whether it’s Mexican, Thai, Korean, or Indian, these cuisines have hooked us to heat-induced endorphins flooding our brains. And at home, most of us add ground/flaked chiles or pastes into our cooking, or eat spicy condiments with our food. Breeders have decided that we shouldn’t have spicy jalapeños, which makes them harder to find. So if you like your heat amped up, feel free to customize the following ideas by adding serranos or habaneros. I’ve chosen three condiments that are easy to make, easy to eat, and don’t require canning. 1) Cowboy candy or candied jalpeños are perfect for folks who like the combo of hot and sweet. 2) Shatta gives you the essence of the chile, is the simplest to make, and can be used anywhere. 3) Korean soy sauce pickles are more like a side dish, but once you make the combo of daikon and jalapeños, you’ll find yourself making it again and using it as a condiment. This recipe for the Palestinian condiment shatta is reprinted with permission from “Falastin: A Cookbook by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley,” copyright © 2020. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Photography credit: Jenny Zarins © 2020. First up is the Palestinian all-purpose fermented chile condiment called shatta. I use Sami Tamimi’s recipe from his book Falastin . Every time I make it, I use it on everything until it’s gone. Because the chiles are fermented with salt, they keep in the fridge up to six months, but you will likely use them up before then. To make shatta, start with sterilized jars. I wash and rinse them, then fill with boiling water, then drain and dry well. For this recipe, I keep red and green separate. I always make shatta when red jalapeños show up in the stores. The recipe starts like the candied jalapeños. You trim and slice the chiles. You put the slices in a jar, add salt, then mix it all well. Put the lid on and put the jar in the fridge for three days. After that short ferment, chop them up in a food processor to a texture you like. I make it nearly into a paste but not quite. Then put the mixture into a bowl and add a bit of cider vinegar and lemon juice. Stir it up, then put back in the jar. Cover it with olive oil to seal it, and put the lid back on. You’ll find yourself making Sami’s shatta over and over again. Candied jalapeños have a craveable hot-sweet flavor. Photo by Evan Kleiman. Next we have the craveable hot-sweet cowboy candy aka candied jalapeños. The prep is simple, but if you slice up a lot of them, remember to use gloves. Even the milder jalapeños will give your hands a buzz after a while. Because jalapeños are so mild, I always leave the seeds in. You trim the stem end, then cut the chiles crosswise into rings. I think it’s better eating and prettier to use a combination of red and green chiles in the recipe. I use a recipe from thekitchn.com . After you slice the chiles, it’s time to make the syrup, which is comprised of sugar, apple cider vinegar, mustard seeds, celery seeds, turmeric. You simply boil it all together until the sugar dissolves. Then you add the sliced chiles to the syrup and cook. Then you remove them from the liquid and reduce the liquid by a third. When that’s done and the jalapeños are in jars, you pour the reduced liquid over and let them cool before chilling. These Korean soy sauce pickles from Sarah and Nam Soon Ahn, the authors of “ Umma ,” are made with daikon radishes and jalapeños. Photo by Kritsada Panichgul at America's Test Kitchen. Our third condiment is Korean soy sauce pickles . I use a recipe from Sarah Ahn and her mother Nam Soon Ahn. They wrote the cookbook Umma . You slice daikon radishes into one-inch squares and the jalapeño into slices. Then you heat up equal amounts of soy sauce, water, and vinegar with a little bit less of the sugar. Stir around until it comes to a slight boil. Turn off heat and wait five mins. Add the warm sauce mixture to the chopped veggies in an airtight container. When the mixture has cooled completely, close the lid of your container and place in the fridge. After three days, the mixture will be ready to eat.
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