You're So Damn Hot

A few months ago CH and I went to our new favorite southside restaurant and ordered a spit-fire-hot garlic soup. The soup was so spicy that they served it with a beer to help you cope. And, the chef even came over to warn us not to drink all the beer because we’d need it for the soup (we were sitting at “the kitchen table”). After the initial shock, the soup was delicious. It made your mouth burn, but the heat said “give me more” and not “kill me now.”

And then, at the beginning of soup season, CH decided to make this garlic soup. It was good, but it’s nothing like the fiery version we’d had. So, the next time we were at the restaurant, we asked about what they did with the soup. We wanted to know if the peppers were roasted, seeded, etc. The chef explained how to do it. And then he gave us these:


...along with a warning to handle them with care.

Having never received ingredients from a restaurant before, we decided to give it a whirl. If I do say so myself, I think we did a decent job of replicating the soup. In terms of special equipment, this soup may not need goggles, but rubber gloves would probably come in handy.



As for the recipe – We followed Smitten Kitchen’s recipe except we got rid of the thyme. We roasted two habaneros at the same time as the garlic, but in a different container. Once they were roasted, we took out the seeds and took off the stems. We thought about taking off the skin, but it was too much work, so we just put them in the pot with everything else and blended them all together with CH’s handy immersion blender.