Yesterday I wrote about making harissa from red bell peppers. You might have seen in those images that I also roasted up some yellow peppers at the same time. When I was researching harissa, it occurred to me that I could make up three different pepper sauces using the three big traffic-light colors in which bell peppers are most commonly sold.
So today, I put together the yellow sauce. These were my starting ingredients:
Roasted peppers, raw cashews, cumin, turmeric, saffron, coriander, curry, ginger, tomatoes, onion, lemon juice, garlic, and olive oil.
It was a little thin and a dominated by onion, so I added a variety of other things, mixing and tasting as I went. This included: marmalade, mustard powder, balti mix, lemon zest, white pepper, toasted garlic powder, sesame oil, etc. Add, mix, taste...add, mix, taste.
Eventually, the onion was mellowed, or at least had competition from other flavors. It's a very complex melange now -- quite interesting. If you wanted to do this, you could use literally any ingredients. When I was making the harissa last night, I felt at least a little obliged by the Moroccan (etc) traditions to sort of keep things in that ballpark. But with this, I just wanted something interesting and was able to iterate upon the base. It's a fun exercise and now I have a lot of sauce that I can figure out how to use.
