Harrief: Some Seriously Funky Red Pepper Paste

When you meet a fellow preserver, one thing generally leads to another…and you end up talking about fermented pepper sauces. It’s almost inevitable.

So when I met the chef of Lapin Pressé, a very cute sandwich shop on Laurier Ave. and he found out I give canning classes, conversation eventually turned to fermentation. Did you know you can ferment tomatoe skins? Because he does. you won’t find it on the menu of gourmet grilled sandwiches and soups at Le Lapin Pressé, but you will find it in his Plateau kitchen, along with boxes of exotic herbs, cookbooks, shelves of dried chili peppers and a pickling cupboard. But what really piqued my interest were bottles of a spicy-looking red sauce. Lover of homemade chili pastes that I am, I had to know what it was. Harrief. A Moroccan hot sauce. It’s a very simple sauce, and you don’t even need to can it in a waterbath canner. You also don’t need to put it in bottles, but it’s obviously the cool thing to do, say, if you have a bottler lying around… What do you eat this with? Well, it’s not too spicy depending on the peppers you use. It’s sweet at first from sweet red peppers, but then there’s a sourness that comes in the aftertaste and a funkiness from the garlic. It ends with a soft burn, like an addictive tickle that you never want to stop. So you don’t. You pour on more and more. …On anything. Grilled or roasted meat, vegetables, rice, couscous, tajines…But also duck confit and potatoes. And especially roasted carrots, where the sweetness balances the bitter heat. And when it comes to picking, there’s often a trade involved. Sauerkraut or vanilla-plum jam in exchange for Harrief. And the best part is that everyone feels they got the better deal. I know I did.