Packing heat

Customers like foods hot, and operators are turning to chiles for new ways to deliver the heat. The customers at a Bon Appétit B&I account in Folsom, Calif., love spicy food so much that Matt Kurtz, executive chef, had Sous Chef Bobby Georges create their own hot sauces for the café’s condiment station.

“We took it upon ourselves to get a bunch of different chiles, dried and fresh, and play around with them to make a really good variety of super, super hot sauces,” Kurtz says. “We’ve made sauces that I myself find too uncomfortable [to eat].”

Georges says the most popular sauce is called The Four Horseman, which uses the four hottest chiles the department could source from its produce company: habaneros, ghost chiles, serranos and Thai bird chiles.

“We basically just grind the chiles up in a food processor and add some lime juice, cilantro, salt and pepper,” Georges says. “The customers seem to love that one. Another one is called After Burner, and for that we fry habaneros with some onion in the oil. Then we blend it with the fry oil and make a really rich, spiced spread.”

The department has made about six versions of hot sauces and it tries to carry at least two at a time. “We keep these hot sauces in their own little area of the condiment station so they don’t get into the other stuff,” he says. “[Customers] use these sauces on anything from burgers to fries to pizza.”

Elsewhere in the café, Kurtz uses chiles in a few other dishes, including the café’s Drowned Burrito.

“We take our normal burrito and drown it in a red serrano chili,” Kurtz says. “It’s a very interesting chili. We get it from a local farmer. Normally you buy green serranos, but this farm lets them overripen, then they pick them and dry them. It’s got a clean heat, but it’s a little on the sweeter side.” The sauce is made with the chiles, onion, garlic and puréed tomato.

Kurtz says the café also does a lot of moles with chiles. A recent version was made from dried ancho chiles, pumpkin seeds, nuts and chocolate, which was served over tilapia. Because chiles pack dishes with lots of flavor, Kurtz says dishes like this one are great for a station where they don’t use salt.

Upping the ante

Chiles have taken root in a new concept that opened in January called The Bistro at McKay-Dee Hospital, in Ogden, Utah.

“We’re offering three sandwiches and three salads a week on a rotation,” says Executive Chef Tyler Ehlert. “The flavor profile for the concept allowed us to play with chiles more. We wanted to offer something special with a low price point, and chiles are a great way to add flavor and heat and just a whole new level of excitement to items.”

One example is The Bistro’s pulled pork barbecue sandwich, which has an ancho chile barbecue sauce. For the sauce, Ehlert takes dried ancho chiles and mixes them with apple cider to make a “lovely, warm, hot-to-the-mouth sauce.” Ehlert likes working with ancho chiles because they aren’t too mild and are adaptable.

Ehlert also uses Thai chiles in a Thai chicken lettuce wrap at The Bistro. “We put a little of [the chiles] in the sautéed chicken and then I put a smattering of it in with the peanut dipping sauce,” he says. “The wrap also features carrots, celery, onion, bell peppers and a hoisin brown sugar ginger sauce. Those chiles are really hot and it really kicks the level of that dish up a notch.”

Schools also are getting into the chile game, according to Kathleen Sanderson, food consultant at Foodservice Solutions. Sanderson, in conjunction with the Pacific Northwest Canned Pear Service, recently helped develop nacho recipes that use chipotles for K-12 schools.

“We came up with a barbecue chipotle sauce as a way to deliver the sweetness of the pears with some heat,” Sanderson says. The pear chipotle barbecue sauce is used as both the base and topping for the nachos. The nachos feature ground turkey, onions, Greek yogurt instead of traditional sour cream, cheddar cheese and scallions.

“We also use that sauce for ribs and pizza,” Sanderson says. “The pears deliver a sweetness to the barbecue sauce that would normally come from brown sugar or something similar. Chipotles are nice for schools because they come canned, so they are easy to work with and they’ve got that really rich smoky flavor that you work so hard to achieve.”

Layers of flavor

Marc Powers, executive chef for Bon Appétit at the University of Redlands, in California, has used chiles to great effect at PACCON, a conference for small boutique universities.

Powers, along with several other college Bon Appétit chefs, developed a menu based on a Southwest theme that featured quail stuffed with chorizo and apple with a jalapeño-sage jelly on top.

“We also did ancho-dusted scallops, where I ground up the ancho peppers really fine,” Powers says. “For dessert we did a habanero mocha semifreddo, which kind of messed with your mind a little because it was cold, then you get the chocolate flavor so it’s sweet, then you get the floral and the heat from the habanero. It’s not overwhelming so you really get to experience all those different flavors.

“I like the versatility of working with chiles,” Powers adds. “Most people just go for heat, especially when you are young, you go for what’s the hottest you can get. But when you get a little more seasoned in the industry you need to temper that and you find out that a lot of these peppers have more subtle flavors besides the heat.”