A Touch of Spice in the Mediterranean

Mediterranean cuisine has found widespread popularity due to its healthful connotations and fresh flavors. TABASCO® brand Habanero Sauce can add bold, flavorful accents to many Mediterranean dishes.

“The Indian date, also known as a tamarind, regularly surfaces in Mediterranean cooking,” says Jason Gronlund, executive corporate chef. “The tree-grown fruit contains a sour-sweet pulp that, when dried, becomes extremely sour. TABASCO brand Habanero Sauce, with its own use of sweetness, blends well with tamarind to give a pleasant and bold flavor note.” He suggests the sauce for a chutney of tamarind, dates, roasted cumin seeds, salt and jaggery (unrefined sugar), substituting for the typically used mirchi powder, a product similar to chili powder. In a tamarind chickpea dish of nigella and fennel seeds, onion, tomato, muscovado (unrefined brown sugar), paprika, turmeric, chickpeas, tamarind paste, coriander, and spinach, served with yogurt and chapattis, the sauce can substitute for the typically used regional green chiles. He notes the sauce, “with its consistent heat and flavorful fruit background, will blend well with either of these traditional dishes.” Mirchi powder and the green chiles typically used in these recipes, he notes, can be inconsistent and lack the depth of flavor delivered by the Habanero Sauce, with its complex, fermented notes.

Habanero Sauce adds punch to a spicy North African chermoula—a marinade for seafood, as well as poultry and lamb, in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. “This sauce is as ubiquitous to the region as mole is to Mexico,” says Gronlund. “The staple ingredients that are common are acid (lemon juice or vinegar); aromatics like onions, garlic leeks and ramps; and herbs such as broadleaf parsley, thyme and cilantro.” Adding the Habanero Sauce to the recipe instead of ordinary chiles, he notes, brightens the flavor of the cinnamon and nutmeg, “while adding a fruity balance that is not achievable by adding simple chiles.”

Gronlund suggests other possible uses of the Habanero sauce in Mediterranean cuisine, including: curries; shawarma pita sandwiches with chicken and tahini; in the spicy tomato sauce of kushari, a traditional Egyptian noodle dish made with lentils; in Spanish paella, where the sauce enhances the sweetness of the seafood and saffron; and in the traditional dolma of Greece, in either the dolma itself or in the yogurt dip typically served as an accompaniment.