Rick Bayless Salsa Essentials: Roasted Habanero Salsa

[Music] hey thanks for joining me in the kitchen today i have an essential salsa for you that is like absolutely one of my very favorites but you have to like spicy things because this is an habanero salsa and i'm going to show you how you make it in the absolute best way the way they make it in the yucatan peninsula and these are the people that domesticated this chili these are the people that really know what what it's all about so i've got three ounces now that maybe around 10 or 12 of these if they're pretty big then maybe eight of them or so these are the orange habaneros in the yucatan peninsula they have both the orange and the green habaneros some people prefer one or the other in the united states it seems like that all we can get is the orange habanero so i take it because i like them now what makes this thing so special is the flavor of the habanero it's different than every other chili that you're going to lay your hands on it has this fruitiness this floral quality about it that makes it really spectacular it also has an amazing amount of heat so you have to make the salsa in the way that i'm going to show you so that you can use just droplets of it over a dish and then you're going to get all the flavor and bridle the heat a little bit now while these are roasting in this dry komal that i have here you could use just a dry skillet for this i'm going to put three cloves of garlic that are still in their little papery husks there and let them roast right alongside the habaneros this is going to take some place around 10 minutes or so i'm just going to keep turning them until the habaneros are blackened and blistered on the outside and the garlic is completely soft on the [Music] inside [Music] okay i touched the the garlic to make sure that it was completely soft through you can see that these have the little black spots all over them but critical thing is that when you touch them that you know that they're soft they've cooked all the way through so we'll take all these guys off now and i'm going to put them directly into a food processor here of course we've got to to peel the garlic before we put it in with them it smells so good in here you get that that aroma of the habanero coming through just in that roasting process there peel off the little papery skins from these guys here oh and you can see they've got little spots on them see this one here it's got a spot like that that's okay that's going to add depth of flavor to what we're working on here and i'll add these guys too now if you made this salsa with raw garlic the raw garlic would just overtake it and the reason that i like to work this this roasted habanero salsa is because a little goes a long way and you can keep this in your refrigerator for at least a week i'm going to say you could push it to two weeks for most people okay so i've got those guys in there we'll put those guys off to the side the little peels there and then i like to do this in a food processor because my blender is large and um this is not enough material for it to grind it up but in the yucatan of course they would use a molcajete in a very traditional kitchen i'm just going to pulse it until everything is more or less finely chopped i want a little texture to be in this but you'll notice that because of the garlic it will stick on the sides of the the blender but now i am going to add a seasoning of lime juice to it so i'm going to squeeze fresh lime now you have to kind of stand back from that because if you get right your face right over it all that heat will come up and greet you it usually takes for this amount a couple of tablespoons these are kind of small limes so i'm going to put the both sides both halves of it in there so there we go with that add just a tiny bit of water because i know it's going to knead it and then scrape down the sides of the food processor so that we can get everything moving again through it now we want this to be a what i would call a coarse puree certainly not smooth but a puree that has a little bit of texture to it so top goes back on and now i'm just going to run this so everything is moving much better because we have added the liquid ingredients to it of course we have to add salt to this to bring the flavors up so again avert your face when you take the top off of it like that add the salt to it i think it'll take about that much salt and then we will run the machine one more time now we have to determine texture on this how runny do we want it to be what i've got right now doesn't seem runny at all i'm going to scrape it into this small bowl that we have here as i said a little of this goes a long way but i do want to make sure that this the salsa that we end up with isn't too thick and what i've got right now seems too thick to me because people would have a tendency to put a full teaspoon of it on something and that probably for a lot of people would be a little bit too much so i'm going to add a little bit more liquid to it see it's mounding up here i'm going to add a little bit more liquid to it stir that now this is the texture that i'm looking for here you see how beautiful that is maybe just even a touch more now i don't want to leave you hanging with just a salsa that is so hot you can't imagine uh what it's going to go on i never did taste it either i usually taste this in a different way that i would taste other kinds of salsa so i'm going to just put a little bit of it like that on the on my palm and then taste that to see it it blossoms in your mouth all of those wonderful habanero flavors but as you can hear with my voice it's also all that habanero heat so i don't want to leave you hanging with this salsa so i'm going to show you something that is a very very quick use for it and i think that this will make you much more inclined to make this salsa take a little bit of good mayonnaise here and i'm going to add to that a little bit of this habanero salsa so probably just about a teaspoon will be the right amount stir that in and you have an abanero mayo here you could add a little bit of chopped cilantro to this i think it's going to take just a touch more just by looking at it here and then give that a taste and see so the creaminess of the mayo really does temper the heat but it doesn't obliterate the flavor so you get this really wonderful abanera mayo then you add equal portions of buttermilk and sour cream to this and a little bit of black pepper perhaps some garlic and you've got an amazing ranch dressing and then if you want to add a little bit of crumbled blue cheese to it then you've got a really wonderful blue cheese an abanero blue cheese dressing that is absolutely spectacular as a dip for vegetables so think outside the box of course this is delicious on cochinita pibil on poke chuuk on many many yucatan dishes um or just if you like spicy food and you want to smear a little this on on top of a fish fillet before you put it under the broiler or on the grill it works great for all of those things but think about the use of it in a creamy mixture like this habanero mayo or a ranch dressing or a blue cheese dressing because i think you're gonna love the flavor

Channel: Rick Bayless

Views: 102,058

Rating: 4.9520683 out of 5

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Id: Cd-asIZYjeA

Length: 9min 15sec (555 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021