Haitian · Sauce
Sos Ti Malis
- Easy
- 25 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with aromatics blooming from the first bite, real fire that builds and stays, fading in warm spice.
Ingredients
- 200g onions, sliced thin
- 60g shallots, sliced thin
- 60g green bell pepper, cut in fine strips
- 20g garlic, sliced
- 2 scotch bonnets, seeded and slivered
- 40g tomato paste
- 45ml neutral oil
- 3 sprigs thyme
- 4 whole cloves
- 120ml water
- 100ml sour orange juice, or 60ml lime juice plus 40ml orange juice
- 6g salt
The skills inside
Deglazing & pan saucesSweating aromatics: soft, never brownedSautéing & the shallow fryFrying the paste until the oil splits
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
- Sweat the onion, shallot and bell pepper in the oil over medium heat until slack and translucent with no colour at all, about 8 minutes; browning here makes the sauce sweet and muddy. 8 min
- Add the garlic, chilli, thyme and cloves and cook only until the garlic smells toasted while still pale.
- Stir in the tomato paste and keep it moving until it darkens from red to brick and leaves a dry film on the pan floor.
- Deglaze with the water and half the sour orange juice, then simmer until the onions are silky and the sauce falls off a spoon in a thin sheet, 8 to 10 minutes. 10 min
- Off the heat, stir in the remaining juice and the salt. Taste it warm: it should read sharper than you think you want, because it is going onto fried pork.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Deglazing & pan sauces 49 recipes
- The pan still holds its fond. Nothing has been rinsed, wiped, or soaked, and the browned layer is intact on the floor.
- Excess fat was poured off first and the browned layer left behind; the fat is not the flavour and a sauce carrying all of it will not come together.
- The liquid went into a still-hot pan and the floor came clean: scraped while it bubbles, the base goes from stuck brown to bare metal and the sauce darkens as it takes it up.
- The fond was brown and not black. A burnt floor dissolves into bitterness that cannot be seasoned out, and is better washed away than deglazed.
- Reduced first and seasoned afterwards, tasted at the consistency it will be served at rather than at the start.
Where it goes wrong The pan was left to stand and go cold before anybody came back to it. Cold fond will not dissolve, so the scraping lifts nothing, and the sauce arrives thin and pale with the flavour it was supposed to carry still welded to the metal.
Sautéing & the shallow fry 80 recipes
- Everything sits in a single layer with visible space between the pieces: nothing stacked, nothing touching, or the pan is too small for the quantity.
- The pieces move freely and keep moving, sliding across the pan rather than sticking and tearing when the pan is worked.
- Light even browning arrived at quickly: colour on most faces, not the deep crust of a sear and not grey.
- A thin film of fat with the food glossed by it: no pool left in the pan at the end, and nothing greasy on the fingers or the plate.
- Cooked through but still firm, having spent only a few minutes in the pan: anything that has gone soft has been in there too long.
Where it goes wrong Too much went in at once, the pan cooled, and the food released its water: what was meant to brown in three minutes stews for ten and comes out grey, slack and wet.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Off-dry Riesling (Mosel Kabinett)
- Also Right
- Gewürztraminer or off-dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Crisp lager or pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Agua fresca or iced jasmine tea
Sugar, cold, and low alcohol are the fire code: sweetness tames capsaicin while acid resets the palate; tannin would fan the flames.
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