Burning Desires

The El Paso Chile Company is aptly titled. They make chili sauces, salsa, dips, margarita mixes and hot stuff of all kinds. Burning Desires is a cookbook by company founder, W. Park Kerr, that puts all those chili concoctions together to highlight barbecue.

A lot of the recipes are for smoked meat, and if you have never smoked dinner on a barbecue before, the instructions are quite good. As might be expected, this book shines with its recipes for sauces, rubs and even drinks.

I am surprised at how much sauces and rubs cost. A friend of mine paid a premium to get a piece salmon with a special “rub.” The rub consisted of a 1/4 cup of brown sugar and some red pepper. Almost anyone would have had those two ingredients in the larder. The total cost of that rub would have been about 35 cents. The cost it added to the salmon was over $4.

Next time you pick up a jar of rub, give a quick look at the ingredients. You might just be surprised at how many of those ingredients you might have sitting on the shelf.

Kerr tells us that this sauce puts to good use for that “homemade” whiskey you might get from your moonshiner friends.

Moonshine Mop

1 cup hot, thick, smokey tomato-based commercial barbecue sauce
1 cup ketchup
1/2 cup bourbon
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1 tablespoon hot pepper sauce, such as Tabasco

In a storage , stir together the barbecue sauce, ketchup, bourbon, vinegar and hot pepper sauce. Cover and refrigerate, keeps indefinitely.

Alas, I have no moonshiner friends. I need to start hanging out with a better crowd.