Green Mangoes, Aleppo Peppers, Yellow Cherry Tomatoes, Spring Water, Kosher Salt, Scotch Bonnet Peppers, White Soy Sauce, Yellow Bell Peppers, Carrots, Fenugreek Seeds, Georgia Sweet Onions, Mustard Seeds, Butternut Squash, Shallots, Turmeric, Garlic, Lemon, Sumac, Cumin, Coriander, Citric Acid, Black Pepper, Ascorbic Acid, Xanthan Gum

Green mangoes simply won’t grow in Tim’s garden in Maryland or in any garden or farm in the mid-Atlantic, so the ones we used in this sauce came from Mexico and were purchased at Wegman’s, a local grocery store.

The Aleppo and Scotch Bonnet peppers were grown in Tim’s garden, and many of the other ingredients came from nearby farms. For example, the yellow cherry tomatoes and butternut squash came from Albright Farms in Baltimore County and the carrots and garlic came from Martin Farms located about ten miles southeast of Albright. The fresh turmeric came from Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the sweet onions from Georgia and the spices from Israel, India and southeast Asia.

The commercial amba sauces on the market seem excessively sour and to lack freshness and complexity, so our goal was to really focus on those things and offer something balanced and nuanced… but, we have to admit, WE HAD NO IDEA WHAT WE WERE DOING.

Quite literally, this sauce was made by intuition and feel and somehow it worked out.

Our approach began with one of essential hot sauce techniques: preparing the same ingredients in several different ways, so some of the green mangoes we oven roasted, some we simply chopped up, and we cold smoked one or two, though there is only a whisper of hickory smoke flavor in this sauce. We kept the peppers fresh, oven roasted the root vegetables and alliums and used whole spices that we toasted and ground ourselves.

This sauce was made from two batches one started in late August and the other in early October. Both fermented for an average of about sixty days at 55°F. At that point the batches were combined and allowed to very slow ferment at 41°F until blending.

Very few blending table adjustments were made; just a little more salt, a little citric acid and a touch more sumac, fenugreek and cumin were added. The sauce was bottled without pasteurization so as to preserve its fresh flavors and allow it to slowly evolve for the next one to three years.

So when we were first thinking of this sauce our mind went right to Aleppo Peppers since they were first bred just north of Israel in Syria. And while they are delicious, the one thing we didn’t think about - until it was too late was how all of these red peppers would affect the color of an otherwise yellow sauce. So next year, perhaps no Aleppos and instead one or two peppers we will grow just for this sauce.

There are very few other changes we would like to make. In an almost miraculous way, this sauce just came together as if it was one we had been making for years.