I really do enjoy Nova Scotia despite the fact that they seem completely lost on a few major ethnic cuisines. Scottish and English food traditions are easily found as are all the delicious permutations of French, Quebecois, and Acadian but you’d hard pressed to find Japanese, authentic Chinese, or most any Southeast Asian fare you care to name in any significance. Today’s target however comes from closer to home on this very continent… Mexican. The affable, informative, and always entertaining Rick Bayless would be lost for lunch here. Not a decent taco in sight.
You know tacos? Those things that come in delightfully warm tortillas with loads of grilled goodness piled in and tickled with a spicy kick? They simply don’t exist here, at least not out in the broader public. The gourmet burrito craze that’s sweeping across the rest of the planet? Not in these neighbourhoods. I don’t think I’ve seen even a single Taco Bell in the province, not that it would qualify as real food Mexican or otherwise, but that should tell you something about the local appetite for spicy. The two poor souls I’ve found in Halifax trying to make a living in the category have had to dumb down their fare to meet the mild palate of their clientele. The whole chile-laced genre seems to be absent from the Maritime food lexicon. If you asked for fish tacos in a local restaurant, they’d snicker and think you were mental. Shame really since the ocean is right there.
Luckily in my kitchen I’m a regular taco-making whirlwind a night or two every week but I’m not going to try to change the whole province in one go by myself. Not yet at least. There are countless taco making compendiums out there on the information highway for the adventurous few to test drive in the privacy of their own kitchens away from local scorn. Today instead I’m going to focus on a core ingredient that is common elsewhere but nearly impossible to find in authentic versions on the shelves of Atlantic Canada and thus must be manufactured at home if you want the good stuff. I’m talking chile-rich taco sauce here. Read more below or shift into video mode on the googlytubes.
Taco sauce to my mind is a curious concoction that sits somewhere between milder salsas and potent “hot” sauces. Used more generously than the latter, it can still have bite but not so much that a spoonful will ruin an average taco of most any make. Quite the contrary, it elevates the humble soft- or hard-shelled taco and their burrito cousins to bright new heights. Blended smooth compared to most salsa, it is perhaps most importantly uses a base of chiles. Certainly acidic tomatoes and vinegars make cameos in most versions but they’re sidekicks to the underlying big chile dance. Chiles first with other flavours following their lead as it were.
La Victoria’s original “Salsa Brava” brand from California was the sauce I grew up on as a taco-obsessed kid and it’s still a fine product to this very day. The company dates the recipe back to their original beginnings in 1917 and looking at the ingredient label, it doesn’t seem like much has changed. Even if you make your own fresh taco sauce with my little formula here, I still recommend getting a bottle if your local stocks provide to taste test as a solid benchmark to work towards and, with a little luck of the chile draw, possibly improve upon.
If you don’t live in the south-western bits of mainland America, it can be a long mule train through the desert to obtain bottles of this red elixir. Shipping charges for those of us across borders are obscenely prohibitive for what is otherwise a $3 bottle of sauce on the supermarket shelves of California. The last quote I had for a case of the stuff shipped to Canada worked out to $20 a bottle. That’s highway taco bandit robbery pure and simple so off to the reinvention kitchen I went.
Fresh onions and chiles are critical for this to taste right. Firm and unblemished in all cases save for the dried chiles which should still be intact examples with some degree of pliable nature to their dried flesh. I’ve used a mix of chile breeds that I can get locally, dried being a bit easier source than fresh up here in Canada, but you might have to substitute to suit your local market. I’ve tried to give clues for acceptable substitutes in the ingredient list. Notice that it’s a *mix* of different chiles and their associated flavours. Take that as confirmation you should get several different sorts into your batch for a more interesting profile. I like things fairly hot but if that’s not your own taco truck choice, adjust as necessary to match your heat tolerances. For the food curious, be sure to taste a fingertip full warm out of the blender and then again once it’s had a day to chill and meld together. The flavour difference is quite the eye opener… literally.
This recipe has none of the preservatives of the commercial product, benign as they may be, so keep it refrigerated until you use it up over your next few taco nights. It actually ‘matures’ a bit with good effect over the first week and my guess (purely a guess, test at your own risk) is that with the acidic tomatoes and vinegar in there, it would be good up to six weeks if kept in the coolest part of your fridge. While you could halve the recipe for a smaller batch, the common size for tomato paste tins is 156g (5.5 ounces) so that’s where I extrapolated the batch size. I’m a taco-eating madman so getting through a quart of this stuff in a month is no problem at my house. Of course burritos and fajitas wouldn’t hate to have a quick shot of these flavours either and thinned a bit with water, it could pass as a fine enchilada sauce or even cover some fresh tamales so don’t be afraid to make an entire litre at a go. Worst case, make a full batch and give half to your neighbour in exchange for tortillas and avocados. Or possibly a giant sombrero.
Despite the original La Victoria version being shelf-stable until opened, I have not tried to properly can or heat process this sauce for longer term storage because I think it would lose something in the attempt. Plus the ingredients are available to me year round, even up in cold and snowy Canada, so I’d just as soon make a fresh batch when needed.
Luckily for us all, tinned tomato paste is usually cooked from very fresh harvests right at the peak of season. Most producers are even clever enough to use the right sort of tomatoes. My experiments with cooking down fresh ‘paste’ tomatoes yielded no real benefits over the tinned supply. I also played around with various spices I thought might help but in the end, those extra flavours just weren’t needed. They were good but they weren’t the ‘clean’ taco sauce I remembered. If you get curious, toasted cumin, freshly ground peppercorns, and concentrated onion and garlic powders all added interesting dimensions in my tests. Fresh coriander leaf (aka cilantro) was a total fail so save yourself that misery.
Measurements are in gram weights for accuracy because that matters for this recipe. If you don’t have an accurate kitchen scale, shame on you. They’re cheap these days and even discount versions are reasonably accurate if you read the reviews beforehand. Buy one
I use a high-power superblender
115 g dried California Red or Guajillo chiles (mild and red)
15 g fresh Habanero chiles (or Scotch Bonnet, very very hot)
8 g fresh Thai green chiles (Bird’s Eye or similar, fairly hot)
115 g fresh red or green chiles (e.g. Jalepeno or Goat Horn, medium hot)
50 g peeled garlic cloves
85 g yellow or white onion, peeled and rough chopped
156 ml (5.5 ounces) tomato paste (typically one small tin)
35 g apple cider vinegar (note: measure this carefully – It’s a delicate balance)
6 g sea salt, (sel gris preferred)
*note: all chile weights are – after – removing stems & seeds
For milder sauce, substitute red bell pepper for any or all hotter chiles to taste.
Yield: 800g (roughly 28 ounces)
Conveniently, that just about fills a one-litre mason jar so if you have a long spoon for taco day, parking one of those in the fridge with a plastic screw top is ideal. Clever taco makers can also use fine tipped sauce bottles or re-purposed sriracha sauce bottles for precise taco application. Avoid metal lids as the acid will leech unpleasant metallic flavours into your precious essence of all things chile, Tex-Mex, and Californian sun.
Wash all chiles (including the dried versions) under cold running water taking special care with the hotter varieties not to touch your eyes or mouth. Remove all stems, seeds, and veins. Place dried chiles in the container of a high-power blender and cover with boiling water to 400 ml. Pulse-blend briefly just to chop the chiles enough so they sit below the waterline. Allow to soak for 20 minutes.
Prep all remaining ingredients and add to the blender. Blend on low speed until mostly smooth and then slowly increase the speed over thirty seconds to high and blend very completely, about two additional minutes once on maximum speed. The sauce will be warm from both the earlier soaking liquid and the speed of the blender blades. Depending on your chiles and sauce consistency preference, you might want to add additional boiling water but do so in small increments.
Transfer to non-metallic containers, cover loosely, and refrigerate for at least a day before use. Cover tightly once completely cool.
And as if that wasn’t enough taco sauce info for you, here’s a demo video from my YouTube channel showing the whole process. Go blend up a batch and fire up the grill for some tacos al carbon as soon as you can.
