The Hot Sauce Cookbook: Turn Up the Heat with 60+ Pepper Sauce Recipes

by Robb Walsh

From veteran cookbook author Robb Walsh, this definitive guide to the world's most beloved condiment is a must-have for fans of dishes that can never be too spicy.

Here’s a cookbook that really packs a punch. With dozens of recipes for homemade pepper sauces and salsas—including riffs on classic brands like Frank’s RedHot, Texas Pete, Crystal, and Sriracha—plus step-by-step instructions for fermenting your own pepper mash,  The Hot Sauce Cookbook  will leave you amazed by the fire and vibrancy of your homemade sauces. Recipes for Meso-american salsas, Indonesian sambal, and Ethiopian berbere showcase the sweeping history and range of hot sauces around the world. If your taste buds can handle it, Walsh also serves up more than fifty recipes for spice-centric dishes—including Pickapeppa Pot Roast, the Original Buffalo Wing, Mexican Micheladas, and more. Whether you’re a die-hard chilehead or just a DIY-type in search of a new pantry project, your cooking is sure to climb up the Scoville scale with  The Hot Sauce Cookbook.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food, Nonfiction, Ebooks

144 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Robb Walsh is the author of four previous Texas cookbooks, including The Tex-Mex Cookbook. He is also the food critic for the Houston Press.

Reviews

[Buck Wilde · Rating 1 out of 5]

Full of interesting history and needlessly complicated recipes for things everyone already knows how to make. You would think the hot sauce cookbook would be a cookbook specializing in hot sauce preparation, right? And there are maybe three or four of those recipes squirreled away between instructions on how to make chicken wings, pork tacos, and a spicy cole slaw he had from a food truck in Seattle once.

The prevalence of grocery store name-brand sauces used in the ingredient lists make this feel more like a shilling vehicle than labor of love by "one of the foremost hot sauce authorities in the country".

And then this rootin' tootin' Big Tabasco mouthpiece has the fucking audacity to tell me to cook with vegetable oil and margarine like I'm some kind of illiterate prediabetic 1950s housewife. If you think I'm going to fry my arterial lining to do justice to your Pickapeppa™ brand Authentic Pot Roast All Rights Reserved, you're sorely misled.

I changed my mind. I was gonna do two stars for the cool history facts, but if you opt to recommend vegetable oil instead of olive oil or good old fashioned Christian butter, you don't deserve two stars. Poisonmonger rats only get one star. And that's better than most rats get. Clinically speaking and in the experimental condition, they usually just get tumors from eating reheated vegetable oil.

[Jiro Dreams of Suchy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found a lot of really fun recipes in here

Pineapple pique on a full fish will be a Puerto Rican treat! Still never got an answer to what I can do with my abundance of habaneros but got some inspiration

[James Zaksek · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very informative book about some of the sauces I am very interested in making. I marked the book all over with how interesting it was. I love everything to do with heat and hot sauce, so this was a neat book to read!

[Dray · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book knows its way around hot sauces, i especially liked the chapter on fermented hot sauces.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is small but gives a great foundation on making your own hot sauce at home. Alot of good recipes to be had in this one book

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few hot sauce recipes, but I was hoping for a book of recipes for hot sauces, instead of using hot sauces in food recipes.

[Theresa Girolami · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love hot stuff and this book had some great ideas.

[Matt Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting short book on the general history and use of chiles in world foods. The breakdown by region is a smart choice and the included recipes sound good and are simple to follow.
However, while a good overview, the content lacks much depth and I feel like I will have to do more reading on the subject. Many of the recipes are for meals to season with hot sauce (lots of them meat/fish-based). Maybe it should be titled 'A Hot Sauce Cookbook' instead.
It's hard to seriously complain for $13 but do treat it as an introduction and don't expect a textbook.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

My husband was given this as a birthday gift a couple weeks ago, I have used two recipes so far and looking forward to using quite a few others....We love this cookbook: its layout, the photos and the explanations on the peppers are the best I have seen in a cookbook yet. This is a great choice if want to learn all the basics on using chilis!!

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointed in this. It was too verbose and didn't hold my interest, some of the recipes also seemed overly complicated and just not interesting enough. Still there were some unique ones that I would like to try (someday).

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not just a cookbook, Walsh includes lots of history and context, but not so much as to overwhelm. Recipes sound pretty good and call for ingredients you can actually find in regular grocery stores.

[Amy M Weissenburger · Rating 5 out of 5]

When pepper season kicks off in August, who wants homemade Sriracha??

[Jared Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good cookbook detailing how to make your own hot sauce paste and various recipes.

[Calvin Schnurr · Rating 5 out of 5]

A delightful little book

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brief and surprisingly information-dense.