{"id":3031,"date":"2025-01-18T16:25:10","date_gmt":"2025-01-18T16:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/3-delicious-ways-to-pair-cheese-and-hot-sauce\/"},"modified":"2025-01-18T16:25:10","modified_gmt":"2025-01-18T16:25:10","slug":"3-delicious-ways-to-pair-cheese-and-hot-sauce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/3-delicious-ways-to-pair-cheese-and-hot-sauce\/","title":{"rendered":"3 Delicious Ways to Pair Cheese and Hot Sauce"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“Tony Gemignani’s International School of Pizza<\/a>” by\u00a0dalecruse<\/a>is licensed under\u00a0CC BY 2.0<\/a>. with linked credit<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\u201cI have been using Cholula hot sauce on my pizzas for nearly 30 years,\u201d says Tony Gemignani, award-winning pizzaiolo of San Francisco\u2019s Tony\u2019s Pizza Napoletana<\/a> and author of \u201cThe Pizza Bible<\/a>.\u201d \u201cCholula has a combination of \u00e1rbol and piqu\u00edn peppers that brings a deliciously distinct and memorable flavor. It beautifully pairs with cheeses such as mozzarella, Parmigiano Reggiano, asiago, aged Cheddar, and smoked provolone, which are go-to cheeses in the pizza industry.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Listen, if it\u2019s good enough for a 13-time world pizza title winner, there must be something to it. If you can relate to the impulse for putting hot sauce on pizza, or if you\u2019ve ever similarly doused mac and cheese with Sriracha or dunked a spicy buffalo wing in an ample amount of blue cheese, or a quesadilla in a more-than-mild salsa, then you already understand that cheese and hot sauce can play very nicely together. But should they only be limited to coming together when there\u2019s a base of chicken, pasta, or dough? Perhaps hot sauce can have a place on your cheese board like any other cheese enhancing condiment such as jam or honey.<\/p>\n

As an instructor at NYC\u2019s Murray\u2019s Cheese<\/a>, we often discuss cheese and its beverage or accoutrement pairings in terms of how they fit into 3 different \u201cpairing principle\u201d categories: contrasting elements or \u201copposites attract,\u201d like with like elements, or terroir-driven pairings, where the cheese and its accompaniment share a regional pedigree. To establish some guidelines for how to approach pairing cheese and hot sauce, I queried a number of cheese professionals and enthusiasts for their favorite cheese and hot sauce combos, and sorted them according to these traditional pairing principles.<\/p>\n

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Hot Sauce for Contrast <\/h2>\n
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With cheese being a rich dairy product, and hot sauce typically made with ground chili peppers with varying doses of vinegar, it would follow that most cheese and hot sauce pairings fit nicely into the contrast category.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The contrasting characteristics of cheese and hot sauce, however, need not only end with sweet versus savory, and fat versus vinegar. Jessica Fern\u00e1ndez, Head Cheesemonger at Mexico City\u2019s Lactography<\/a> and founder of Mexican Mongers<\/a>, points out that, \u201chot sauce can develop really nice layers of flavor and texture depending on the pepper used and the technique for extracting the spiciness,\u201d as well as other elements that may be included in the sauce such as garlic, herbs, or other flavoring elements, all of which can provide contrasting, (or mirroring, in the following case,) elements to the salient characteristics of various cheeses.<\/p>\n

Beth Welsh, Cheesemonger at Greensboro NC\u2019s Lewis & Elm<\/a> offers a pairing that contrasts both flavors and textures: Mt Tam<\/a> and Fly by Jing Sichuan Chili Crisp<\/a>. Mt Tam is a cow\u2019s milk triple cr\u00e8me by Cowgirl Creamery, whose subtly sweet and buttery paste, due to curd washing to lower its acidity, is a perfect canvas to soften the sichuan pepper bite of Chili Crisp. In addition to the contrasting flavors of\u00a0 this inspired pairing, the supple fudginess of Mt Tam also creates an appealing contrast texturally, providing the perfect counterpoint for the eponymous \u201ccrisp\u201d of the hot sauce.<\/p>\n

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Fighting Fire with Fire: Like-with-Like Cheese and Hot Sauce Pairings <\/h2>\n
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Blue cheese doesn\u2019t so much cool the heat from buffalo wings as amplify it, demonstrating a like-with-like pairing when it comes to cheese and hot sauce. What is blue cheese, if not sweet and spicy, with its rich, nutty paste streaked with piquant, peppery blue mold? The magical combination of butter and hot sauce offers the same notes in the wings themselves; they echo each other, and so both components sing a little louder in the presence of the other.<\/p>\n

Aptly, Michelle Stevens, owner of Buffalo Cheese Traders<\/a>, flips the script of wings with blue cheese by suggesting blue cheese, specifically Cambozola Black Label<\/a>, with Frank\u2019s RedHot<\/a>, the hot sauce employed in the making of Buffalo\u2019s original wings. \u201cI also regularly serve Mike\u2019s Hot Honey<\/a> with an assortment of cheeses, especially blues,\u201d she says, for another play on the winning sweet\/spicy combo. For real heat seekers, try Savannah Bee\u2019s Hot Honey<\/a>, which brings both habanero and Scotch bonnet peppers into the mix, with an especially peppery blue such as Valde\u00f3n.<\/p>\n

Consider also that pairings with similar notes can be built by matching add-ons within the cheeses and hot sauces themselves: Beehive\u2019s Barely Buzzed<\/a> with Se\u00f1or Lechuga\u2019s<\/a> similarly coffee-spiked .507 hot sauce<\/a>, Barnacle Food\u2019s Bullwhip Kelp Hot Sauce<\/a> with Lakin\u2019s Gorge seaweed-striped Rockweed<\/a>, or a smoky, chipotle-driven hot sauce with Grafton Village Maple Smoked Cheddar<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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What Grows Together\u2026Geography-Driven Cheese and Hot Sauce Pairings <\/h2>\n
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Terroir-based pairings in cheese and wine are driven by the idea that the same soil used to grow the grass that feeds the herd, as well as grow the grapes that made the wine, results in some DNA embedded in both products that make for a harmonious pairing. Burgundy wine with Burgundy-based \u00c9poisses, for example.<\/p>\n

While the peppers that make hot sauce don\u2019t always grow in climates where grazing animals typically thrive, there are nonetheless ways to employ terroir-based principles in a hot sauce and cheese pairing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tina McGarry Mooney, of Fort Collins\u2019 The Fox and the Crow<\/a>, says, \u201cWe just did an insane hot sauce pairing with coconut gouda<\/a> and a Thai-inspired hot sauce,<\/a>\u201d with both the cheese and hot sauce emphasizing flavors that would be common to Thai cuisine. Jeff Kampa, a Midwest-based cheese enthusiast, offers some local Minnesota love with a marriage between Redhead Creamery\u2019s Lucky Linda Clothbound Garlic Cheddar<\/a> and Cry Baby Craig\u2019s Gourmet Hot Sauce<\/a> both of which contain garlic. Even France has a version of hot sauce with rouille<\/a>, and Italy has Firelli<\/a>, made with Calabrian chilies, which should probably make its way to your pizza sooner than later.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 “Tony Gemignani’s International School of Pizza” by\u00a0dalecruseis licensed under\u00a0CC BY 2.0. with linked credit \u201cI have been using Cholula hot sauce on my pizzas for nearly 30 years,\u201d says Tony Gemignani, award-winning pizzaiolo of San Francisco\u2019s Tony\u2019s Pizza Napoletana and author of \u201cThe Pizza Bible.\u201d \u201cCholula has a combination of \u00e1rbol and piqu\u00edn peppers … Okumaya devam et “3 Delicious Ways to Pair Cheese and Hot Sauce”<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1271,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[395],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-milk-and-diary"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1271"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3031\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sutyo.com\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}