So ever since my brother and his friends dared me to cover my entire slice of pizza with red pepper flakes and eat it when I was a kid, I’ve had a lust for spicy hot foods. This love multiplied and really exploded after moving to Buffalo, NY where I was introduced to Buffalo Wings (or just ‘wings’ as we call them here). Not just the wings, but the steady diet of Frank’s Red Hot sauce that everyone seemed to be on. The old lady who says ‘I put that S*** on everything’? that’s a real person out here. There are numerous people like that out here. I had never even heard of Frank’s growing up in New Hampshire, Tabasco was the only hot sauce that people seemed to eat, and it was just collecting dust on the shelf – it was a weird brown color, and wasn’t that bright red, deliciousness. Do NOT get me wrong, I like Tobasco too – I like tons of different hot sauces. My refrigerator door IS the hot sauce section at a supermarket basically.

Anyways, I’ve been slowly whacking away at a dozen pasteles that a woman I work with made for me. For those who don’t know, it’s basically a tamale in theory, but it uses green bananas, plantains and root veggies instead of a cornmeal masa. The filling is also pretty specific – tender pork, olives, peppers, onions, garbanzo beans, sometimes raisins and of course, love. Well, I’ve been trying different toppings, different hot sauces (as recommended by her husband), and I’ve been getting more adventurous by adding, diced jalapeños, pico de gallo, or eating the pasteles with chips. Well, the other day, I decided to try my Blazin’ Hot Sour Cream Sauce. The core to this sauce is my home-made habanero relish. Maybe I’ll post that recipe some day, but I’d rather wait until I can take pictures and show some of the process. Basically, when I make my home made hot sauce, I strain the pulp out of the batch, and add some back in, and leave some out, and put it in a container. This is a very potent devil relish, in fact, that’s a good name for it! Devil Relish – kind of generic sounding, but it will blow your mouth up if you think you’re just going to snack on it.

The Devil Relish works great, in the same way that if you were to make horseradish cream sauce, you want to strain all the liquid out of your horseradish first – this makes sure the sauce doesn’t get too runny. Here’s my recipe, and you could substitute a pure hot sauce with a few drops of extract sauce if you wanted to get the same effect, but the relish is really where it’s at.

1/2 cup of sour cream

1 heaping tablespoon of Devil Relish

1 teaspoon of taco seasoning

salt

cumin

paprika

fresh cracked (coarse) pepper

Ideally, you want to let this sit overnight if you’re going to use it, but I usually improvise a lot of my meals, so I don’t think that far ahead. I used to keep this in a squeeze bottle that I got from a restaurant supply store, but I lost it. Maybe I should get a new one –

Well, that’s all there is to it – simple, effective, and HOT!

yes, I know the pasteles seem a little dark – I left them in the freezer at work for a month (I’m such a bad person) I kept forgetting them! They still taste amazing though!!