COVER STORY
restaurant (Editor’s note: We think it may rhyme with ‘Rolive Rarden’). This was far before it was available in grocery stores. I think I wound up pretty close, and the most surprising part was that adding a bit of pectin replicated the mouthfeel—that was the last thing I had struggled to achieve.” Looking into the future, Grilli is keeping an eye on Calabrian chiles, which he’s noticed are having a moment, “so if I was starting from scratch I would be working with them! Also, anything Korean is also trending right now, and those sauces also add umami, which is sadly underappreciated in Western cooking.” To summarize, coming up with a signature sauce can yield results as unique as every chef’s fingerprint, and that’s a very good thing. In trying to replicate a sauce, ADC’s Chef Pye says, “you just can never get it 100% though, and I like that. If it was that easy to rip off someone else’s sauce then they wouldn’t be as craveable and unique.”
pepper flakes each time, and had his helpful co-workers taste and evaluate until hot honey perfection was at hand. The hot honey, Rammy’s Red-Hot Honey, became the new signature hot honey sauce for pizza, named for the Pennsylvania school’s mascot, Rammy the Ram. Students immediately took to it, and now Grilli says although the honey is found at the pizza station only, he’s seen it drizzled on stir fry, French fries, chicken sandwiches “and even burgers,” he says. His advice for creating your own signature sauce: “Write everything down each time you make a batch in both volume and weight. When you are tasting, try to taste each ingredient, and add if you can’t,” he says. “It takes a lot of time (and tasting) to develop a new sauce, and it has to be perfectly replicable. I am obsessive, so I enjoy this process.” Over the years, Grilli has tried to replicate sauces from out in the world. “When I was younger, my wife loved the salad dressing at a popular Italian chain
TREND DÉJÀ VU: HOT HONEY HARKENS BACK TO A CLASSIC FRENCH GASTRIQUE West Chester University Dining Services were hearing requests at the residential dining hall for Mike’s Hot Honey, a pioneering hot honey brand known for its collabs with food and restaurant brands and found on grocery store shelves. At that point, Aramark Executive Chef Justin Grilli saw his chance at sauce fame and grabbed it. “Our client wanted Mike’s Hot Honey for our pizza station, so I saw it as an easy opportunity to develop signature product,” Grilli says. “The ingredients are listed, and as it’s based on a French gastrique, I played with the ratio of honey to apple cider vinegar first until it had the right balance of sweetness to sour.” The best way to think of a gastrique, as Sue Veed writes on Serious Eats, is “a tart, slightly thickened syrup with endless flavor variations—as the simplest version of sweet and sour sauce.” To refine his recipe, Grilli made a few batches, varying the amounts of red
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PHOTO COURTESY OF ARAMARK
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