What Is It: Just Hawaiian chili paste in brine for preservation.
Spotted: Uwajimaya Asian Food & Gift Market, Seattle, WA
Cost: $2.99
Attraction: Generic, yellow label. Anything this ugly has got to be good.
Where to find: Specialty food stores, diverse groceries, and Hawaii (order online at Sure Save)
Hundreds of hot sauces clog the shelves of hundreds of specialty food stores, decked out with colorful labels and cheeky names. This bottle of Hawaiian chili water stood out from halfway down the aisle. Its generic label and the red-orange liquid all separated inside may not exactly tantalize, but this utilitarian bottle may just become your next condiment staple.
This bottle is pure heat — no extra-special secret recipe to tout. Hawaiian chilis have intensity and flavor with a low burn rate. Every palate reacts to the heat of hot chili peppers differently because we each have a certain tolerance for the capsaicin they contain. Your tongue perceives the substance capsaicin as heat, literally. Capsaicin triggers a pain alert in the brain, which responds by producing endorphins, and this confirms my theory that hot sauce freaks are all closet masochists.
Popular in its eponymous home, Parks Brand Chili Water burns hot and fast, leaving your mouth numb for only a few seconds, a bonus for people who actually like to taste their food. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being zingy (Chaputila) and 10 being police grade pepper spray (Dave's Insanity Sauce), I'd give Parks a solid 4+. Parks also feels less hot because, unlike almost every other hot sauce, it contains no vinegar. Sour always makes hot taste hotter.
Popular in Hawaii, I first tried Parks with spam musubi and rice. I've since whipped up my own spicy tuna rolls with it and mixed it with ponzu to sprinkle over stir fry or sautéed onions, like they do in Hawaii (chili water on onions). I like Parks best diluted with mirin or sparkling apple cider and sprinkled over oysters. Fine oysters like those in the Pacific Northwest should never be defiled by the taste of vinegar in my opinion. Hawaiian chili water, toasted sesame oil, and minced garlic tossed with cold soba noodles and fresh herbs can go with chicken, veggies, or tofu, or nothing at all.
Can you never decide how hot to make a dish? Add a few drops of chili water to a bowl of chili to turn up the heat for those who can handle it. Mix with take-out noodles to turn a 2-star dish into 3-star or more. Adding it drop by drop to mashed avocado really brings out the sweetness in the fruit. The chili water adds heat without drastically changing flavor, and more importantly, lets you taste the food. It is the spicy equalizer.
Maggie Savarino Dutton is an industry veteran who has played bartender, sommelier and line cook and who now consults. She writes "Search & Distill," which appears every Wednesday in the Seattle Weekly, and The Wine Offensive, a blog about wine, food, and anything else.
Photograph by Maggie Savarino Dutton, "Point of Purchase" photograph by Roadsidepictures via Flickr (Creative Commons), "Pantry" photograph by Áslaug Snorradóttir.
