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Sauce

Another Chile Sauce

A spicy sauce made from roasted peppers, tomatoes, onion, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and tomato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,923 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Another Chile Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peppers and tomatoes

  1. Toast the ripe peppers over the fire until golden.

  2. While warm, remove the outer skin, veins, and seeds.

  3. Toast an equal number of tomatoes in the same way and let them cool.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the tomato juice, a little coarse sea salt, and chopped onion to the peppers.

  2. Crush all together with a little water.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Ripe peppers
Provide the main chile flavour and body of the sauce once toasted and crushed.
Tomatoes
Add moisture and mild acidity, rounding out the heat of the peppers.
Onion
Adds sharp, aromatic flavour and some texture to the crushed sauce.

The step that matters

Toast the peppers until golden. Toasting browns the peppers and develops deeper, smoky flavour. Under-toasting leaves a raw, grassy taste, while over-toasting turns them bitter.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, tomato):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Eggplantfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, tomato. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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