Posted on 01/19/2019 1:14:48 PM PST by Zhang Fei
Sriracha sauce. It's everywhere. Even beer and donuts. The fiery chili paste concocted by Vietnamese-American immigrant David Tran has conquered the American market and imagination in the past decade.
But the original Sriracha is actually Thai — and comes from the seaside city of Si Racha, where most residents haven't even heard of the U.S. brand, which is now being exported to Thailand.
I decided to go to the source to get the dirt on the sauce, and sat down with 71-year-old Saowanit Trikityanukul. Her grandmother was making Sriracha sauce when David Tran was still a baby, in what was then South Vietnam.
"If my grandmother was still alive today, she'd be 127 years old," Saowanit says, sitting in her garden in Si Racha, (the preferred anglicized spelling of the city's name) overlooking the Gulf of Thailand. She remembers helping her grandmother in the kitchen as an impatient 9-year-old.
"My job was to mix all the ingredients together. But I wasn't very happy doing it and I didn't really pay attention. I regret that now," she says. "Because I could have learned a lot."
Her grandmother is widely credited with being the first to make and sell the sauce. But Saowanit says it was really her great-grandfather, Gimsua Timkrajang, who made it first. Family lore says he traveled a lot on business to neighboring Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos and noticed they all had different sauces — sweet, salty, sour — but nothing that combined all three.
"So, my great-grandfather got an idea that he wanted to make one sauce that went along with all Thai foods," she says, "very creamy and different from other sauces."
And he got it. Not that it was easy making it. Saowanit remembers one batch that took weeks, even months, to prepare.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
Rooster Sauce is my favorite...on almost all foods.
OOps, link didn’t work.
I didn’t post a link.
Look at #37.
Bkmk.
When you post a photo from tinypic their default is to put a link to their website in the html code for the photo. It doesn’t take you to the actual photo, just their website. I take that link out so it doesn’t work. You aren’t supposed to go anywhere, it’s just a photo.
“Tabasco, Red Devil and La Victoria Salsa Brava are the gold standards.”
I enjoy Louisiana because of the cayenne pepper. I use Tabasco as well, and I grow Tabasco peppers. I prefer Tabasco peppers off the bush better. I will have to try the Red Devil and the La Victoria Salsa Bravo.
Yum. I have nuoc mam, Sriracha, and Kikkoman shoyu on my table. Those are the three condiments I use the most.
In fact, just realized that I’m wearing a sriracha T-shirt as I type this comment... :)
Having been to the coastal town of Sri Racha many times and enjoying many nice seafood meal ( and pad thai) meal slathered the original stuff , at it’s point of origin ; and then being here in America and consuming untold volumes of the Rooster brand , I have to say I enjoy the original Thai Sri Racha much more . It’s a treasure whenever I can find it . Unfortunately the delicious ‘hoi lai pad ‘ and so many other distinctly Thai regional cuisine specialties are also not available her either .
Ah, it finally did work. Who knows why.
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