The thawed chile and its liquid go into the blender.
I wanted the flavor of fresh pepper in my squash crudo sauce without its heat. In a crudo built around squash, a mellow allium middle and a quiet orange background, the chile’s job is its green, vegetal, fresh-pepper taste, and the salted freeze–thaw chile liquid gave me that. To my taste it had absolutely no heat, with great vegetal, fresh pepper flavor, and in the finished sauce it disappeared into the whole, baked into the flavor instead of standing out. Getting there came down to trimming, salting, freezing and straining, and to tasting at each stage.
Where a chile keeps its heat
The burn of a chile comes from capsaicinoids, a family of compounds that includes capsaicin. They do not spread evenly through the fruit. The placenta, the pale, spongy tissue that holds the seeds and runs along the inside walls as veins, is the main reservoir. Zamljen and colleagues separated chiles from several species and cultivars into placenta, wall and seeds and measured each part. The placenta carried large amounts of capsaicinoids, and the amounts varied a great deal from one cultivar and fruit to another.
That makes trimming the first heat control. Cutting out the veins and seeds removes the placenta and with it the main store of capsaicinoids. Removing the seeds without the placenta leaves that reservoir in place.
The güero trimmed of its veins and seeds: 114 g.
The walls are not always free of heat. In the extremely hot Bhut Jolokia, Sugiyama found cells on the inner surface of the fruit wall producing capsaicinoids. Bhut Jolokia is an extreme case, and it shows that a trimmed wall can still carry some heat, depending on the chile.
The preparation
The chile for this liquid was a güero, a pale yellow chile I picked out at the store.
Güero chiles at the store.
I started with 114 g of chile, veins and seeds removed. I weighed salt at 2% of the chile’s weight, a target of 2.28 g, and measured 2.29 g. I put chile and salt in a bag, vacuum-sealed it at full pressure for 60 seconds, and moved it into the freezer.
The labeled bag records 114 g of chile and a 2.28 g salt target; I measured 2.29 g.
On the day of the sauce I thawed the bag, blended the thawed chile with the liquid in the bag, and strained it through a 120-micron filter bag.
Straining the blended chile.
What salt and freezing do to the walls
The aim of the salt and the freeze is to get the pepper’s flavor out of its walls and into a liquid. A chile wall holds most of its water inside its cells. Freezing turns that water into ice crystals that damage the cell structure, and when the tissue thaws, liquid drains out of it. Schudel and colleagues froze sweet bell-pepper tissue under different conditions, thawed it, and measured the liquid that drained out, the firmness, and the damage to the cells. How much liquid the tissue lost depended on how they froze it. My thawed chile showed the same thing in the bag: before any blending, liquid had already pooled around the softened pieces.
The thawed chile before blending, with liquid already drawn out into the bag.
Salt works on the same tissue from the outside. It dissolves into the pepper’s surface moisture and can draw water and dissolved compounds out of the cut cells. At 2% of the chile’s weight, it also seasons the liquid lightly.
Vacuum-sealing keeps the salt in contact with every cut surface. After thawing, the blender finishes what the ice and salt started, breaking the softened walls apart so the strainer can separate a liquid from the fiber. By the end of the blend, the liquid read 104.1°F, about 40°C, on an infrared thermometer.
Checking the finished blend: 104.1°F, with the strainer ready beside it.
Can heat follow the liquid?
A watery liquid can still carry capsaicinoids. Capsaicin has low solubility in water, and some of it still moves into watery liquids. Hernández and colleagues soaked habanero slices, already stripped of seeds and placenta, in salt brines that varied in pH, temperature and ratio, and measured capsaicinoids moving into the brine, up to a quarter of the chile’s content under one of the conditions they tested. My chile sat in dry salt before freezing, a colder and drier setting than those brines, and the blend reached about 40°C, the lower of the brine temperatures in that study, only for the length of a blend. The study shows that the liquid side of a chile preparation can carry heat. So the mildness I tasted belongs to this chile and this trim. A hotter chile, or one with more placenta left in, could produce a liquid with real heat.
Tasting heat in a sauce
Perceived heat also depends on what surrounds it. Schneider, Seuß-Baum and Schlich compared chemical measurements of pungency with sensory panels across model foods and found that other food components changed how hot the same capsaicinoid content tasted, in ways that depended on the components. In my sauce the chile goes into a sweet, salty, acidic squash liquid at a small dose, which is a gentle setting for any trace of heat. But I tasted the chile liquid neat as well, and it had no heat to me there either.
The practical rule is to taste twice. Taste a piece of the trimmed chile before you salt and freeze it, because chiles vary from fruit to fruit. Taste the strained liquid before it goes into the sauce.
The dose
The strained liquid weighed 43 g, and all of it went into the squash base early, right after the orange essence and before the allium essence and the seasoning rounds. Adding it before the acid, syrup and salt means I taste every later adjustment with its pepper flavor already in place, so the seasoning builds around it.
The chile liquid going into the squash extraction.
At 43 g in a sauce of roughly 3.6 kg, the chile liquid works as a seasoning. In the finished sauce I did not taste it as a separate chile note; it folded into the squash and allium as fresh pepper flavor, baked into the whole.
Method
Salted Freeze–Thaw Chile Liquid
Ingredients
- 150 g güero chile veins and seeds removed
- 3 g salt
Instructions
- Cut the veins and seeds out of the güero chiles, removing all of the pale placenta. Weigh 150 g trimmed chile. Taste a small piece for heat.
- Weigh 3 g salt, 2% of the trimmed chile’s weight. Combine chile and salt in a vacuum bag and seal at full pressure for 60 seconds.
- Freeze. Thaw, then blend the chile with the liquid in the bag. Strain through a 120-micron filter bag.
- Taste the liquid neat.
Notes
- Cut the veins and seeds out of the güero chiles, removing all of the pale placenta. Weigh 150 g of trimmed chile.
- Taste a small piece for heat.
- Weigh 3 g of salt, 2% of the trimmed chile’s weight.
- Combine chile and salt in a vacuum bag and seal at full pressure for 60 seconds.
- Freeze.
- Thaw, then blend the chile with the liquid in the bag.
- Strain through a 120-micron filter bag.
- Taste the liquid neat, then add 1 g to a 100 g batch of squash sauce early, before the allium and the seasoning rounds.
Where it sits in the sauce
The chile liquid is one of five aromatic liquids in the squash crudo sauce. The main sauce article shows how it works alongside the squash saline, the allium essence and the orange essence.
