KAYTE YOUNG:  From WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana, I'm Kayte Young, and this is Earth Eats.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  There's a beautiful Hindustani saying, which says [FOREIGN DIALOGUE], which means "every two miles the water changes; every four, the language." So that in fact is the geography of taste and terroir in India.

KAYTE YOUNG:  This week on the show, we talk with sociologist Krishnendu Ray about place, food and caste in India, and how identity can be defined as much by what you don't eat as by what you do eat and we share a recipe for a home-grown hot sauce that cannot be prepared indoors. That's all just ahead. Stay with us.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Thanks for listening to Earth Eats. I'm Kayte Young.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Do you eat with a fork, or your hands, or chopsticks? Do you eat pork? Do you eat beef? Are you a vegetarian? How does what you eat and how you eat connect to your world view, to the way you move through the world, or in some cases, even your safety? We explore these questions and more in our conversation with Krishnendu Ray.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  Hi, Kayte, I'm Krishnendu Ray and I'm a Professor of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University, and my work tends to be on immigrants and food ways: what changes, what stays the same, what difference it makes to the immigrants themselves, and what difference it makes to other Americans. I come from sociology, and from India, and I'm here to present a talk at the Higher Program of Indian Studies. In India there is not that much of a difference between sociology, cultural sociology and cultural anthropology. A lot of my work is anthropological, but I'm trained as a cultural sociologist. I'm part of a department that's called Nutrition and Food Studies. It's an unusual department because usually a nutritional department has nutritional and food science, but in calling something Nutrition and Food Studies, the studies hints towards Social Sciences and Humanities. This was the imagination of the founding chair of the program of the department, Marion Nestle, who is something of a celebrity; she wrote a book called "Food Politics" and dozens of books.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  When she was reconfiguring the department she had a good idea about what we know about nutritional science and what we don't know, but she said that the big gap was understanding the social context of eating: why do people eat certain things? Not eat certain things? Love certain things? I'll give you an example: at what point did Americans say "we are a meat and potatoes culture but we love sushi"? No-one could have predicted that. How did that change happen? She was interested in bringing in some of the social questions, so she hired a historian, Amy Bentley, first; then me, coming out of sociology. I had got my PhD from SUNY Binghamton and had taught for a decade at the Culinary Institute of America. That was a fascinating transition because the Culinary Institute of America hired me as one of the earliest people working on a PhD because they wanted to expand the curriculum.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  The President and Vice President's argument was that we know what it takes to train a great chef, a sommelier and a baker, but in today's world a chef is in fact becoming more like a public intellectual. So the chef needs to know about cultural difference, sustainability, health and public health. I was one of the people they hired to say "could you start the curriculum on food and cultures of Asia, the Americas and Europe?" In some ways my sociological training and anthropological orientation shaped the curriculum at the Culinary Institute of America, happening mostly in the 1990s.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Yes, that is super interesting. I saw that you had been there and I was like, that's unexpected, so thank you for explaining that.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  And that's an unusual trajectory. Usually a scholar doesn't go to the Culinary School and then return, in my case, to NYU. I think in some ways the Culinary Institute was beginning to look at itself as a bit like a music school, like say Juilliard, where you will have musicians but you will also have ethno- musicologists, and that's the kind of role I was hired in to be in some ways an ethnographer, a social historian, and primarily a sociologist of food and food professions and food cultures.

KAYTE YOUNG:  And the chefs are the ones who are practicing.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  Exactly; practicing the art and the craft. They also needed a space to think about bigger, broader issues; in this case, what have immigrants contributed to American styles of eating? We know from research, for instance, that it is the Italian immigrants who taught most Americans how to eat salad and bitter greens. They came from Italy, especially Southern Italy, where those area routine part of everyday eating. I'm now in New York City, the greengrocers were all Italian and were selling the broccoli rabes and the salad greens that the rest of us are going to get to almost 20, 40 years later. It's very interesting how each group of immigrants has taught us new things to eat. Right now, with Mexican migration, we're learning to eat avocados-- everyone has avocado on their toast now-- and also various kinds of chilies: green chilies, smoked chilies. That's the new migration that is reshaping the American palate through, say, making guacamole.

KAYTE YOUNG:  So you were on the campus of Indiana University to give a talk with, I think, a pretty provocative title: Indian Food at Home and Abroad: Discriminating Taste, Borrowed Palates and Ethnocentric Violence. Could you tell us more about your talk?

KRISHNENDU RAY:  Yes, that's a big title. Just to give you a sense, India is a place with almost 1.5 billion people-- that is larger than Europe-- It is a place with more than 270 mother tongues, more than 20,000 dialects. So, the first argument is nations do not match to one cuisine, so in some ways Indian food is an abstraction that you can only see from very far away. It's like calling something European food; yes, you can name something; you might say Polish Pierogis or Sicilian pizza, but that will be very unconvincing for an American audience, which has already been exposed to a Polish migration and a Sicilian migration, to understand these are totally different things, and India is multiply that by ten at least, and you'll see. So, the first argument there is how to think of a thing called "Indian food" when you have 20,000 dialects? And my short answer to that question is wherever there is a dialect, there's a cuisine. So, I would say there are at least 20,000 Indian cuisines and a dialect is a good way to think about it because food is what is goes in, language is what comes out.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  Food is very subjective. I don't know how you exactly taste vanilla or you taste chocolate; I know what I taste. I can only begin to approximate towards whether you prefer vanilla over chocolate, what chocolate tastes, whether you like a bitter or a sweet chocolate, only by talking to you. So in fact, taste is totally subjective until we start talking about it, which is how it's linked to language, and that socializes it. That's what I mean by taste and talk are two sides of the same process. I'll finish with a beautiful Hindustani saying which goes like this: [FOREIGN DIALOGUE], which means every two miles the water changes; every four the language. So that, in fact, is the geography of taste and terroir in India, and that is what I'm saying when I say I associate Indian food with at least 20,000 cuisines. That's my first claim.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Okay, and then what next? Discriminating tastes, borrowed palates and ethnocentric violence.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  Okay, so my first argument is multiplicity and variety of India, and I associate that with language. In India, like anywhere else, food is also an important tool of discrimination, in a double sense. Discrimination in the first sense is discriminating taste. How do I know a dhal is a legume/lentil stew? And India is probably one of the regions in the world where you have dozens of legumes, and they're a very important part of a cuisine. How do I discriminate, that is to distinguish, one kind of legume from the other? I'll give you an example: I come originally from a small town in India called Balasore, which is the east coastal peninsula. If you can imagine India in your head it's like a rhombus-- this is going back to your middle or high school geometry-- a large rhombus and a little rhombus. I come from the Eastern end of the rhombus which is Peninsular India, around the city of Kolkata, in the state of Odisha. My mother tongue is Oriya and my father tongue is Bengali. Bengali is to Oriya what Spanish is to Italian, but with a different script.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  So, this is the context in which you have this multiplicity and variety, and what that Hindustani saying is saying is [FOREIGN DIALOGUE]: in fact taste changes in different parts of India, and being able to distinguish and discriminate that taste, that's the first aspect of discriminating taste, making refined commentary and distinctions. My maternal grandmother would cook her pink lentil dhal with onions and some roasted garlic, so it had a very garlicky flavor. My paternal grandmother would cook it with a Bengali five spice called panch puran, which has fenugreek, fennel and mustard in it, so it will have a slightly smoky flavor, different from the garlic onion flavor of my maternal grandmother. They thought they were doing two very different things. Can I make the distinction between these two dhals? They lived less than a kilometer apart from each other in this Oriya town of Balasore in coastal India, they thought they were doing two different things. For someone from outside that might taste quite similar to each other.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  So one part of discriminating taste is being able to make fine judgments; the other part of discriminating taste is in fact discrimination, which in India, a lot of the discrimination happens on histories of caste. Caste is a big, complicated topic, and I would say caste is both ancient and modern. The term itself is Portuguese, and we came to name it in particular ways. It is ancient in terms of ways of organizing a people where different waves of people have come into India from Northwestern India and settled in, and they have often married local women; by the way, that's why in Indian history father and mother tongues are quite distinct. An anthropologist and linguist, Peggy Mohan, is writing a book called "Father Tongue and Motherland", which is a complicated and interesting relationship. This relates to different people were classified as different caste by these people who came into India and settling in, and created a hierarchy. These are not equal differences, but according to the standard theory there are four castes. Brahmins at the top, which is a small percentage of the population; Kshatriyas, the warrior caste; and then Vaishyas, the trade, and Shudras, in some ways the working castes.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  Then there was a fifth category, often given various names, who were called outcasts. Today in Indian history they often self-identify as Dalits. These are the same group of people who Mahatma Gandhi, the great Indian nationalist leader, identified as Harichands, that is God's people, as a way of getting past the discrimination in the naming. More and more activist Harichands have come to see and call themselves Dalits, and constitutionally in India they are called Scheduled castes and Scheduled tribes, and coming back to this question of discrimination, what has been central to at least 2,000 years, if not more, of Indian history, is who you eat with and who you marry, caste determines. In some ways, in the Indian context, I would think the analogy would be... In the West we say and in India also, "you are what you eat," but then there's the other side that's also very important: "you are what you do not eat, and you are who you do not eat with." I think those are the two rules that determine caste.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  I think that's probably a universal principle everywhere in the world, but in India it came to be associated with upper caste vegetarianism, and in fact most people who eat, for instance, beef, can be part of the Hindu world but they're often considered outcast. But in some parts of India, like in Kerala, even Hindus can eat beef because they live in close proximity to old Muslim populations. So anything you say about India, by the way, you have to qualify, and in some ways it tends to be an over-generalization. But what I'm going to talk about is the two dimensions of discriminating taste, which is ability to make fine judgments about what is good taste, and how that in fact is linked to questions of exclusion, hierarchy and discrimination, which has been historically very important and continues to be important in India. There's a recent cookbook that came out in Maharashtra, in the Marathi language, about Dalit kitchens, written by Shahu Patole. It is about how these communities ate and how their food was considered inferior by the rest of the Hindu upper castes. So, that is also part of India's food history, and that's what I mean by discriminating tastes.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Really fascinating, and I think the part that really got my attention was the ethnocentric violence. Is that about contemporary India?

KRISHNENDU RAY:  Two kinds of ethnocentric violence that are very disheartening in India: one is anti-Muslim violence. India has one of the largest Muslim populations in the world, but it's a minority population, about the same as say the African-American population in the United States, but remember, you take 12 percent of the population out of 1.5 billion, you get in fact a country with a very substantial Muslim population. What unfortunately is happening in India is physical violence, including lynching, killing of two kinds of people by Hindu mobs, and one target is Muslims, the other is often Dalits, the very people I talked about, who are in fact the people who dispose of dead animals and consume what historically was carrion; it was not even butchered specifically, but carrion. An animal dies and the food is consumed by the lower caste because remember in India upper castes tend to be vegetarian, so that's a very interesting and peculiar inversion in terms of global and regional histories.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  And in India, over the last two decades now, we have seen increasing violence on allegations and rumors of meat-eating, specifically beef eating, largely targeted against Muslim and Dalit populations, and that has come to be identified strongly with Hindu nationalism and vegetarianism as kind of a force in Indian politics, and over the last I would say decade that has become an important instance of disciplining people about what they should eat and what is good to eat, and where there is no sense of limits of questions of privacy. So, in some ways what you eat becomes a loud, political, public argument rather than staying in the household as something private, a question of privacy. What you eat at your home should not matter to the state, should not matter to the public, but it has come to matter, and it has become A, terrifying, B, disheartening for someone like me, who was born into a Hindu family and my parents are practicing, believing Hindus, to see this kind of intolerance and violence spread in India, which is linked to forms of religious fundamentalism, with pressure on what people should eat.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  This links back to my previous comment, about "you are what you do not eat" in the Indian context.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Yes, I have definitely been hearing about the violence and Hindu nationalism, but I did not understand this piece about how it's connected to food, and how it's connected to meat eating.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  Yeah, it's totally, astonishingly connected to meat eating.

KAYTE YOUNG:  I had no idea.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  In some ways it's not trivial; what you eat is not a trivial question in India any more.

KAYTE YOUNG:  I'm speaking with Krishnendu Ray. He's a Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. He's the author of "The Migrant's Table", and "The Ethnic Restaurateur". He visited the campus of Indiana University through the Dhar India Studies Program at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. After a short break we'll theorize about touching food in the digital age. Stay with us.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Kayte Young here, this is Earth Eats. If you're just joining us my guest today is Krishnendu Ray, Food Studies Professor at NYU. He published an article about touching food in the journal "Anthropology of Consciousness", and in "Cultural Anthropology2 for their series "Hands On: Touching the Digital Planet". I wanted to hear more about that.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  This piece came out in the "Anthropology of Consciousness" journal, and I forget the exact title; I think it's something "Touching Food..." What is it called?

KAYTE YOUNG:  It is "Touching Food: On Finding the Tech-Tile".

KRISHNENDU RAY:  Tech-Tile, exactly. It's very clever, right? [LAUGHS] In fact I was struggling with the title. I wanted to find a neologism that engages with this question of tactile, which is touch, but also touch in the digital age; that's what the framing of this piece was. In fact it was my doctoral student, Natasha Bernstein Bunzl, who suggested "maybe you should invent a word called Tech-Tile," which is T- E-C-H hyphen T-I-L-E. Anyway, let me illustrate to you; this piece is about touching, and one of the things that distinguishes Indian food culture is that we eat with our hands, so you are touching the food directly; quite distinct from what happens in Southeast Asia, and especially in East Asia you're going to chopsticks; in South East Asia you're often using spoons. When you go to the Mediterranean world-- think about the map of Asia in your head. Think about the Mediterranean world European world you're moving to forks; by the way, that happened relatively recently; the18th and 19th centuries most Europeans moved to using the fork, people would also use their hands. And America, because so many Americans came from Europe, became a culture of fork usage.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  So, this piece is about food in the Indian Ocean world, and it's India, but I also give an example of cooking and touching in Zanzibar because I observed it there, and also in the Malaya Peninsula, in Penang. So, it's all across the Indian Ocean world. I would say what connects Indian food and Indian Ocean food is in fact eating with our hands, and not eating with chopsticks or the fork. So in the first instance it's about touching food directly, and I would say if my first argument is Indian food is say 20,000 foods according to dialects, my second argument is if there is anything that unites Indian food it's that we eat it with our hands; from chapatis and rotis in Northern India, to rice and porridge, also with your hands, which is kind of distinctive in some ways, along with dhal. It takes a certain kind of body technique. So this piece is in someways about that, but it's also about what makes Indian food distinctive is the use of hands. It's what connects it to something bigger than India, which is the Indian Ocean world, in some ways.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  In this piece I also talk about... I'll give you another specific example. My mother lives in Delhi with my brother, and I try to call her; she has the toughest time in doing the sliding motion on a smart phone because she's always tempted to press, and the press function works very differently than the sliding function that is so crucial. So when I call my Mom and say "Mom, how did you make that goat meat curry? Or that eggplant in yogurt sauce?" she has a difficult time picking up the phone because she cannot do the sliding motion. So that is what focused me into this question of Indians are obviously good at touching and manipulating touch because they're doing these subtle movements with their rice, their dhal and various kinds of vegetables, but certain movements of the hand is generationally determined. Compared to her, my son is a master of the smart phone move; he's good at the sliding touch; but if you ask him to write, he has never written in his life, more or less seriously, hand-written, it's always digital, it's always touch.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  So if you see an infant now with an iPad, the infant almost knows what touch is and what tactility is of a particular kind. So in some ways you can say my son generationally has lost the capacity for calligraphy, which is very important culturally in different parts of the world, including India: writing in Urdu, writing in Devanagari for Hindi script or Bengali Oriya, or writing in the East Asian world. So, he's very digital and very proficient at it. Very unskilled in writing with the hand, but he constantly works with ceramics, he throws and makes ceramics so he's obviously using touch in subtle and complicated way. He also builds his own computers. So, he's not just using the computer but also putting together various components. This made me think about, by gender and by generation, how our different skills of touch and tactility is linked to context infrastructure. So, this is basically an argument about the relationship between infrastructure and culture.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  Usually when we think about culture we rarely directly link it to infrastructure and bodily habits generationally. This anthropologist, Marcel Mauss, first articulated the argument that the way the body moves through a material world and a social world is strongly shaped by gender and generation. The way you walk, the way you run, the way you swim. For instance, I know how to swim, but my swimming is totally ugly, rather than the trained swimming most Americans do. If you put me in a swimming pool I'm an embarrassment, but I can swim to save my life if you throw me in the sea or a lake. That is body technique: you learn how to do these things, you learn how to walk, and often you can distinguish an American from the style of walking, even if you run into them anywhere else in the world, compared to an Indian, for instance. So this whole piece is about gender, generation, infrastructure and body technique, and how our sense of touch is changing and being redistributed differently, and what is its relationship is to consciousness and what we think, because so much of our bodily activity is in fact unthinking habit.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  So at the end of it, it's a way to think about habit and conscious activity, and in some ways my mother's habit of pressing, she cannot retrain her body past the pressing, which comes in the way of sliding. Take my son's example: in some ways he has an amazing digital touch and ceramic touch but he cannot transform that into writing. I was really pissed off when I saw his signature on his passport; I said, "What is this thing?" My Dad would be very disappointed because he had this elaborate, calligraphic writing that he took great pride in. His writing was much better than mine; my son's writing is much worse than mine, and that is generationally related to the architecture of the infrastructural world that we live in. So this whole piece is about touch and infrastructure.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Well, could we go back just a little to the idea of touching food and thinking about your mother and her habit, practice or tradition of eating with her hands, but also I would imagine preparing food with her hands, and probably lots of intricate and specific kinds of actions with her fingers and her hands, and maybe none of them include sliding across a very smooth surface. There's probably a sliding motion in something, but not so slick as a piece of glass.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  Excellent point about it. Typically when she cooks, for instance, she will taste. Most Indian food is saucy; she'll take some sauce out on a ladle with her right hand, blow on it, and drip it on her left palm and then lick it to taste for salt. All those are this complex relationship between twisting, turning, pouring, touching, flicking, which is a very important part of this technical skill of cooking. She does it very well. Also in this piece I talk about, not my Mom exactly, but we've come a culture in which I would say over three generations we have moved from a squatting civilization to sitting and standing. I'll use my Mom here as an example, though I don't use it in the article itself. When my Mom moved to my brother's household in Delhi, she basically moved from a squatting place in Balasore, the small town in coastal India, to where your cooking is done standing up in some ways, and where in my Mom's home the water for dish-washing was coming at a height of about three feet from the ground, not primarily in a sink.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  Both my grandmothers were totally squatting; they never sat at a table. My parents' generation is the generation that moves to a sitting civilization, and chairs and dining tables. My brother and I remember exactly the date in which we got our first dining table, because that was a sign of urbanism, cosmopolitanism, being part of a global urban culture. For the first ten, 15 years of my life was all squatting on the floor, including, by the way, the toilet, which was a squatting toilet. Which creates a different kind of strength in your biceps and glutes in terms of balance too. Then my parents' generation moved to the chair, and then standing and cooking. It used to be squatting and cooking; both my grandmothers cooked in a chula wood, coal fire at ground level, dish-washing at the ground level. So they had to do a lot of sitting and standing, sitting and standing, so their legs were fantastically strong. I noticed it because after six months of my mother moving from her home into my brother's home, she was much more unstable in terms of squatting, sitting and standing up.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  My sister-in-law pointed it out to me; she said, "We have to give her the tools so that she squats and stands up, she retains those muscles and the strength." One of the things we did was... there's a knife that is used in Eastern India. It is not a knife with a hand, but it's called a boti. A boti has a wooden base and an S-shaped knife, and you squat on the floor and use it to cut and shred vegetables or finely dice cucumbers. It is your body weight against the knife and you're squatting and balancing. So we bought one of those things in Delhi so that she could use it and she would not lose her capacity of in some ways squatting, standing. That transition and the strength of some of her muscles, which, of course, also reminded us body, and body technique and use of the body. She's 86 years old and we would like her to be able to sit, stand, squat and go back and forth, and it's very good for her balance. So anyway, this is an example of the relationship between infrastructure, built environment, body techniques, skills and ways of cooking, prepping and eating, and this article is an attempt to connect those things.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Yes, just hearing you talking about that is making my knees hurt. I do not have that strength. Also in the article you had described that knife, you talked about using it and I could not picture it, but just now when you explained it I...

KRISHNENDU RAY:  I can show it to you right now and squat and show, in a sense. You sit at the wooden base and you put the weight of the body against it.

KAYTE YOUNG:  So the knife is stable, and it's your body that's moving.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  Knife is stable, the body is kind of rhythmically moving, and she can do the finest dice of a cucumber with it. It's a very sharp, large S-shaped knife, and you use your body weight and balance to do that. Of course, I don't have the technical skill to do that, my son has no technical skill to that. He's much more proficient with knives standing on a cutting board.

KAYTE YOUNG:  I was going to ask about your son and eating with his hands. Is that something that--?

KRISHNENDU RAY:  He's not very proficient. He can use his hands a little more for breads and stuff, but that technique that goes into rice and dhal, a legume, right.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Yes, those are two that you don't think of eating with your hands.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  Right, you don't think of. With your spoon, etc, and I'm slowly losing the capacity, as I, in an American world, increasingly use the fork and the spoon. But his skill is nowhere near the technical skill my mother, brother, sister-in-law and I have. It's runny; you make a mound of the rice, almost like a little ball, and you add the dhal to it and you take it in one motion into your mouth, not like a mess all over your face, but in a very delicate, dignified way of eating and that's body technique, and my son does not have those techniques. Even as a little child he would say "Dad, can I eat Indian-style today?" So, he would do that, he would try that. But mine was a mixed American and Indian family; my wife was American, I have two stepchildren who were already socialized in the American world, and remember, it takes us almost a decade to master the fork. It's a complicated tool and it becomes naturalized, just as using the hands in a particular way has. This is where almost two kinds of social infrastructure came into play in my household; one lost, the other won.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Well, I have kept you a little longer than I said, so thank you so much, this has been a really fascinating conversation. I could keep going for another hour, but I know we both need to go, so thank you so much.

KRISHNENDU RAY:  Thank you for having me.

KAYTE YOUNG:  I've been speaking with Krishnendu Ray. He's a Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. He's the author of "The Migrant's Table" and "The Ethnic Restaurateur", and he's an editor of the food studies journal, "Gastronomica". He visited the campus of Indiana University through the Dhar India Studies Program at the Hamilton Lugar School for Global and International Studies. We have links to his work on our website: Earth Eats dot Org. Next up: fire up your camp stoves, we're making my favorite hot sauce.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Welcome back to Earth Eats, I'm Kayte Young. The time has come to make the hot sauce.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Every year, for I don't know how many years, I have been making habanero hot sauce. One of the reasons I love doing this is because the peppers are so easy to grow. The plants are beautiful, nothing ever seems to bother them, there's never any pests or disease, they do fine with a lot of water or not much water; they're just gorgeous in the garden, especially once the peppers start turning color. I have two varieties this year: orange and red. They're so gorgeous and so productive. I've got hundreds of peppers already off these and there's more coming. I also happen to have a lot of friends who like hot sauce. I get a big kick out of making a huge batch of hot sauce and then bottling it up and giving it away to my friends. The past couple of years I have learned that it is best to do this outside. I borrowed a camp stove from a friend and it was so great to not have all the fumes from these habaneros in my kitchen. It really can get very intense, the air is just thick with it, people are crying as they walk through the kitchen, so doing it outside is much better.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Today it is a gorgeous day in early September. It's sunny, breezy, cool, it's 67 degrees out here. I am on my front porch because I wanted to have the shade of the porch. I've got a table set up, I've got all my stuff. We're going to make the hot sauce outside on the camp stove. But first, we have got to prepare all of the ingredients.

KAYTE YOUNG:  I'm going to make eight batches in one pot. My ingredient list is four onions, two quarts of apple cider vinegar, eight teaspoons of honey, 40 garlic cloves, eight carrots, two quarts of water, 16 teaspoons of salt and 96 habaneros.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Of course, if you're just making a single batch, you only need 12 peppers. One of the things I love about this recipe is it's really simple. You just combine all of the ingredients into the pot, you bring it to boil and let it simmer until everything softens, and then you blend it, and I always run it through a food mill because I like to get all the seeds and everything out and make a nice smooth sauce. So let's get started. You don't have to cut the peppers up, you just take the stems off and drop them in the pot.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Next I'm going to work on the garlic. All I really need to do with the garlic is get them peeled, and I need 40 cloves. Because I'm doing a mass amount I'm going to use the trick where you put the garlic in a metal bowl and you put another metal bowl on top of it and you just slam it around to get the peels off. I've done it before, it works really well. So I'm going to get 40 cloves of garlic into this bowl.

KAYTE YOUNG:  I've got all these garlic cloves in one bowl. I'm going to put another bowl on top and I'm going to shake it like crazy.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Worked pretty good. Some of these are fully peeled, and with some of them the peel is just so loosened that it just slips right off. It's a really great method for when you need to peel a bunch of garlic, probably not worth it for just two or three. Alright, that's it, the garlic is peeled. Now I can use this bowl to put all the stems and everything in: carrot peels, onion peels. It's perfect. Alright.

KAYTE YOUNG:  I think next we're going to work on the carrots. Many people I know would not peel the carrots, but I find that the peels lend a slight bitterness to the sauce and so I like to go ahead and peel them.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Alright, so that's eight carrots. You want to cut the carrots up quite small because they're going to take the longest to cook, so the smaller they are, the faster they're going to cook and we want everything in the pot to reach a nice level of softness before we go to blend, so just try to cut them quite small; they don't need to be pretty or uniform or anything like that.

KAYTE YOUNG:  The carrots are going to lend a lot of body to the sauce and also a note of sweetness, but they are really going to help with the texture of the sauce and will thicken it up. Next, we're going to get the onions chopped up. Same thing with these: just fairly rough chopped, doesn't have to be pretty or uniform, they're all going to get blended up into a sauce.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Alright, we've got our four onions and our eight carrots all peeled, chopped up and into the pot. Now it's just a matter of measuring the rest of the ingredients and cooking sauce down.

KAYTE YOUNG:  So we need two quarts of apple cider vinegar and equal parts water, so two quarts of water.

KAYTE YOUNG:  I need two tablespoons plus two teaspoons of honey. Alright, we've got the honey in there; the only thing left is the salt, which is going to be five tablespoons plus one teaspoon. Okay, we are all set with the ingredients, everything is in the pot, now just to get it on the heat. I need to set up the camp stove and we're ready to roll.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Okay, I've got the camp stove set up. Now it is time to light it and get the hot sauce going. I have all the ingredients in one big stock pot and I'm just going to bring it to boil, and then once it comes to a boil I'm going to turn the heat down a little bit and let it simmer until all the vegetables are softened, especially the carrots. The carrots, like I said before, are going to take the longest so we'll just keep testing those and once they get soft enough then we'll be ready to blend it.

KAYTE YOUNG:  So the habanero hot sauce has been cooking for about 30 or 40 minutes, everything is beginning to soften, the carrots are totally done. I'm not quite sure about the peppers yet but I think they're getting close, and I am going to go ahead and begin to blend the sauce.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Alright, so what I'm going to be using to blend this is a stick blender, also sometimes called an emulsion blender. This works really well in a hot pot like this. You can just blend it directly in the pot, no transferring it to anything, so I'm going to go ahead and start that. First though I'm going to turn off the heat.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Hoo-ey! And this is the place where the fumes get really intense. If we were doing this indoors the kitchen would be on fire right now, just all of that heat coming from those peppers is just right in your face when you're over this, blending it.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Whooh, it's really getting to me. Right, it's looking pretty smooth, it's also looking pretty thin so I'm going to cook it for a little bit longer just to reduce it before I pass it through the food mill.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Okay, we have been cooking this for a little bit, trying to reduce it down so it's not quite so thin. Oh! [COUGHS] Oh, wow. [COUGHS] Ohh, the steam just hit me. Ah yes, they are some serious fumes. Okay, this is why we make the hot sauce outside. This is why I got the camp stove. So now it's time to put it through the food mill, and if you don't know what a food mill is, there's a famous, classic brand called Foley Food Mill, you might have heard of it. The one I have is not a Foley but it does the same thing. It's just a device that you can push things through and it will filter out all of the skins, seeds and stuff that you might not want in there and the nice, velvety sauce is what's left. So I'm going to go ahead and turn this off and then I'm going to put it all through this food mill and see what we've got. Alright, let's go.

KAYTE YOUNG:  The way that a food mill works is there's a circular blade or paddle that, when you rotate it around with the hand crank, pushes the food through a sieve.

KAYTE YOUNG:  And then at the end what you're left with is this really nice, smooth sauce, and all of the skins and the seeds from the peppers have been filtered out; it's just all really nice and smooth. I'm going to cook it down just a tiny bit more to get it a little less thin, and then we'll be all done and ready to bottle.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Unlike most things that I make, tasting a hot sauce is not something you can just really do as you're making it as it's not something that you just eat by the spoonful. I guess some people do, but I do not. Today I have a simple cheese quesadilla and I'm going to try my habanero hot sauce. Shake it up.

KAYTE YOUNG:  And for me, a little bit goes a long way. Whooh. Okay, yeah, it's very hot; the edges of my tongue are really burning and tingling right now, but it has such a great flavor. I love the fruitiness of the habanero; it's there in the aroma too. It's so delicious, I love it, I do really enjoy this hot sauce; just a couple of drops on a quesadilla, a few drops in some eggs or some other dish that didn't quite spicy enough. Enjoy it at your own discretion.

KAYTE YOUNG:  This piece was produced by Alexis Carvajal.

KAYTE YOUNG:  That's it for our show this week. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. The Earth Eats team includes Eoban Binder, Alexis Carvajal, Alex Chambers, Toby Foster, Leo Paz, Daniella Richardson, Samantha Schemenaur, Payton Whaley, and we partner with Harvest Public Media. Special thanks this week to Krishnendu Ray. Earth Eats is produced and edited by me, Kayte Young. Our theme music is composed by Erin Tobey and performed by Erin and Matt Tobey. Additional music on the show comes to us from Universal Production Music. Our executive producer is Eric Bolstridge.