Q: What’s a good use for horseradish besides cocktail sauce or as a side with roast beef? And what makes it so hot? A: Horseradish is a root, similar to wasabi, and a member of the mustard family. Prepared horseradish is grated horseradish root combined with distilled vinegar. It has almost no taste until grated when the cells are crushed …
The 2011 Disc-It Round Up
As three-year-olds go, the Disc-It Round Up is pretty developed and well-behaved. It’s an event the folks at Disc-It started in 2009 as their way of giving back to UNM Children’s Hospital for all the care that Disc-It front man Nevin Montano’s daughter and nephew received in the past. Round Up year one saw 350 attendees; that number ballooned to …
Don’t Miss the Disc-It Round Up!
Nevin and the other nice folks at Disc-It are feverishly planning the 3rd Annual Disc-It Round Up in Albuquerque, New Mexico (home of the Disc-It Company). The cookoff will benefit the UNM Hospital Children’s Miracle Network. On Saturday, July 16 from noon to five, a group of specially-selected Disc-It Chefs will compete for top honors. Attendees try the food and …
Fiery Foods Bookazine by Dave DeWitt Now Available!
My latest publication, entitled “Popular Plates: Fiery Foods” is now available on all the major newsstands in the U.S., including Barnes & Noble, Home Depot, Borders, Costco–all the big box stores. The publisher, Source Interlink Media has printed 200,000 copies, which is by far the largest print run of any of my publications. Essentially, this is a book in magazine …
Ask Chef Mike: Why Heatless Jalapeños?
Q: I heard about some guy who has developed a jalapeño pepper with no heat. Why would anybody do that? A: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Some manufacturers of hot products prefer to use heatless chile varieties and add heat later during processing through the addition of concentrated capsaicin oleoresin. This provides a measurable, more …
For Carnivores Only: The Meating Place of Smoke & Spice
By Dave DeWitt and Nancy Gerlach The first outdoor cook to use chile peppers during a barbecue was Jaguar Claw, a somewhat hen-pecked paleo-Native American who lived in the Amazon Basin about 20,000 years ago. He had dispatched his prey with his spear, had butchered the world’s largest rodent with his new flint carving knife into chunks, and was contemplating …
Battle for the World’s Hottest Record Continues
Whenever someone tries to lay claim to the biggest, best, or most intense record for pretty much anything, they run the risk of being challenged. When the subject is the world’s hottest pepper, the stakes are high, both monetarily and in terms of publicity. If you’ve ever dealt with chileheads, they can be every bit as fanatical and obsessed about …
