Spicy Sriracha Green Beans Recipe - Peas and Crayons (2024)

FAQs

What is the best flavor to add to green beans? ›

Huy Fong Foods makes the extremely popular Sriracha brand sauce. They use red-hybrid Jalapeno peppers for their sauce along with other ingredients. Homemade Sriracha sauces will vary in taste but the two main components that resonate with Sriracha sauces are heat and garlic.

Ingredients. Chili, Sugar, Salt, Garlic, Distilled Vinegar, Potassium Sorbate and Sodium Bisulfite as Preservatives, Xanthan Gum.

We love the way sriracha sauce pops on the palate with its unique blend of spicy chilies, pungent garlic, and tangy vinegar. We crave it in all the usual places — as a condiment with kick for Vietnamese recipes like Pho, baguette sandwiches, and noodle dishes, or as a dipping sauce for spring rolls and fried seafood.

Then, I toss the blanched beans with olive oil, lemon juice and zest, garlic, and salt to pep up their flavor. Serve them just like that, or dress them up more with toasted almonds or pine nuts, grated Parmesan cheese, red pepper flakes, or fresh herbs like basil, parsley, or thyme.

As you might have guessed, the Scoville scale is the ideal instrument to settle the sriracha vs Jalapeno debate. Let's take a look. In other words, jalapenos are hotter than sriracha as a general rule. Although it's worth noting that there can be some overlap between the less spicy jalapenos and the hottest sriracha.

How spicy is sriracha? Sriracha brands will vary in their intensity, but as hot sauces go, sriracha is considered to be on the mild side. Depending on the crop of peppers used, sriracha can range from 1,000 to 2,500 Scoville units. To put that into perspective, Tabasco sauce runs anywhere between 2,500 and 5,000.

But fear not, sriracha has an extremely long shelf life, so it's much more likely that you'll use it all before any spoilage occurs. This means that an open bottle of sriracha is totally okay in the fridge for up to three years!

Louisiana-style hot sauces, like Frank's Red Hot or Tabasco, are much thinner (runnier) than sriracha. They also tend to be quite vinegary and spicy, without any sweetness. These differences make it not the best substitute for sriracha.

Origin. The sauce was first produced in the 1940s by a Thai woman named Thanom Chakkapak in the town of Si Racha (or Sriracha), Thailand. The Sriracha sauce itself may be an adaptation of a Cantonese garlic and chili sauce originally from Shunde, China.

Why is sriracha so expensive? ›

“The main culprit here is a shortage of their primary ingredient, the red jalapeño chile pepper,” said David Ortega, a food economist and associate professor at Michigan State University. “And that's due to climate change and the mega drought.”

This is an excellent, spicy, quick-and-easy breakfast.

The obvious choice: other sriracha brands

Big hot sauce companies, like Tabasco and Lee Kum Kee, also make their own versions of sriracha: The Tabasco sauce is thick and garlicky, with subtle sweetness that makes it taste the most similar to Huy Fong.

Lucky for you, there's a Flying Goose Sriracha sauce that pairs with any type of barbequed meat. Sriracha beef and Sriracha chicken recipes are easy to follow and infuse your food with deep, intense flavour.

Add Aromatics (and Some Salt)

We're talking onions, shallots, garlic, and chiles. Or maybe some fresh herbs like rosemary, sage, bay leaves, and thyme. This is where the flavor really starts to build. Salt the liquid again (lightly) after about an hour of simmering.

Pour the green beans and the reserved half of the canning liquid into a skillet. Add butter, onion powder, salt and pepper. Simmer, uncovered and stirring occasionally, until almost all of the cooking liquid has evaporated. Taste and adjust seasonings if necessary.

Blanch Them

Blanching your greens is key to getting that bitterness level down. Because glucosinolates are water-soluble compounds, a lot of them are leached out into the water, allowing for a less bitter green.

Not only are they relatively inexpensive, green beans are rich in vitamin C and beta-carotene, an antioxidant that gives fruits and vegetables their color. The vegetable helps fight inflammation and is a good source of folate and potassium, which helps regulate blood pressure.