Brazilian · Sauce
Molho de Pimenta e Limão
- Easy
- 10 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, a warm current of chile, fading in warm spice.
Ingredients
- 40 g pimenta malagueta chillies, stems removed
- 80 ml lime juice
- 60 ml white wine vinegar
- 80 g onion, very finely diced
- 2 garlic cloves
- 20 ml dendê or olive oil
- 6 g salt
- 20 g coriander leaf, chopped
The skills inside
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Split the malaguetas lengthways and scrape out as much pith as you want heat removed; the pith holds more of it than the seeds do.
- Pound the chillies with the garlic and salt to a rough paste, coarse enough that you can still see flecks of skin.
- Stir in the onion, lime juice, vinegar and oil until the salt has dissolved.
- Fold in the coriander last and taste: it should be aggressively sour on its own, because it will be met by beans, pork fat and farofa.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Pounding a curry paste 23 recipes
- Smeared thin across a pale surface it reads as one substance, edge to edge: no pale gritty specks standing proud of the smear, no shard that drags a line through it as the smear is pulled. Flecks mean something hard went in after something wet and skated instead of shattering.
- Rubbed between finger and thumb it feels like wet clay, dense and smooth, and takes the print of the thumb. Anything that rolls into a hard grain or grits like sand has not been broken down, and the order of work was wrong.
- The fibrous aromatics have surrendered: pinch a little and pull, and nothing draws out as a thread or a hair. Listen to the last minutes of work as well, which should be a dull wet slap in the mortar; a dry knock or rattle still present means hard pieces are being chased around rather than crushed.
- One even colour throughout when it is turned under the light, deep and saturated, with no marbling and no streak in which a single component can still be read. A dull grey cast over the surface says it was worked long past its point.
- Heaped up and left alone it stands in a soft peak and holds the mark of the pestle for a full minute: no clear or coloured liquid creeps out at the base, no oily film separates on top. It should also come to the pass cool, no warmer than about 25 C (77 F); a mortar warm to the back of the hand means friction has driven off the top aroma and the paste will smell flat.
Where it goes wrong Everything went into the mortar together, or the wet ingredients arrived before the hard, dry ones had been reduced to dust, so the moisture cushioned every blow and the hard pieces slid rather than broke. What comes to the pass is a wet mince rather than a paste: hard flecks and fibrous threads through a loose slurry, liquid weeping out of the heap within a minute, colour marbled instead of single, and on the plate it reads as separate raw items sitting next to each other rather than one flavour.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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