The Hot Sauce Cookbook: A Complete Guide to Making Your Own, Finding the Best, and Spicing Up Meals with World-Class Pepper Sauces by Robb Walsh
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
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.