My love of spicy food goes back a long way, to when I was a child. My parents had friends, Ted and Freida Roland, who grew acres and acres of hot peppers on their farm in Muncie, Indiana. We drove out to visit them one summer, and I earned the nickname “Hot Pepper” after completing a careful comparison of all the various types laid out for me on the kitchen counter by Ted.
A few years ago I came home to discover a container of hot peppers of various interesting shapes and sizes. Believe it or not, it was the first time I decided to try cooking with them. I selected a smooth, green jalapeño, chopped it into tiny bits, and added it to a stir fry. Another day, I sliced a 4-inch long, thin, bright red pepper into 1/2 inch segments, marinated it in some olive oil for an hour or so, and then poured the oil over roasted eggplant sprinkled with curly parsley. That gave the sweet eggplant a very pleasant bite.
No further inspirations were forthcoming, and so the remaining hot peppers sat on the second shelf in the refrigerator, moving closer to the back with each passing day.
Then I received another container of hot peppers. Now what? What was I going to do with all these peppers? It seemed such a shame to let them grow moldy, only to toss them into the compost. Despite my longstanding love of heat, I was not sure what to do with them. I did know, however, that I did not want to waste those beautiful peppers.
Then I remembered s’hoog, a fiery condiment that we had tasted many years earlier in Israel.* S’hoog is a wondrous specialty of the Middle East. Everyone makes their own version, and everyone’s version is unquestionably the best. When we lived on a kibbutz in the south one year, a Yemenite friend of ours would occasionally stop by to share a taste of s’hoog from his small, precious jar, inevitably given to him just that afternoon by his mother. A taste, by the way, is all you need.
A bit of s’hoog makes cheese and crackers very exciting. A spoonful stirred into a pot of soup will make your tastebuds sing and dance. It is a very good addition to hummus, baba ganoush, scrambled eggs, or tomato sauce. That day, I made, for the very first time, my own s’hoog. It came out more like a paste, slightly thicker than the versions I remembered having eaten before, but I was pleased nevertheless.
Wearing rubber gloves, I sliced the stems from all the hot peppers and then placed them, seeds and all, in the oven at 450F. I shook the pan occasionally, and turned off the heat when the peppers got dusky and began to develop some brown spots. Then I slid all the peppers into a food processor.
I added one teaspoon of salt, 2 teaspoons of white vinegar, and 1/4 cup of olive oil to the peppers, and pulsed the processor a few times until the peppers were pulverized. Then I spooned small amounts (one-half to one teaspoonful) of the resulting spicy paste onto a small baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Finally, I stuck the sheet in the freezer. A few hours later, I collected all the frozen lumps and put them into a glass jar, which I returned to the freezer.
I had created flavor in a jar. Flavor, by the way, is a great way to satisfy your tastebuds. The more flavorful food is, the more satisfying. And the more satisfying your food is, the more satisfied you’ll feel after you finish eating it. Through the coming weeks and months, any time I wanted to turn a soup, stew or other dish into something more powerful, all I had to do was turn to the freezer and shake out a lump or two of s’hoog. Or more, depending how adventurous I feel.
If you’d like to learn more about hot peppers and capsaicin, the chemical that confers the burn, check out this interesting article.
One last thing. The ‘h’ in s’hoog is pronounced as a guttural, like the ‘ch’ in Chanukah. If your mouth can’t make that sound, try calling it skoog. I’ve seen it spelled zhug, too. Zhug is the name of Doug Katz’s wonderful Mediterranean restaurant in Cleveland Heights, and it is pronounced the same.