Texas Roadhouse Hot Sauce

Home reconstruction

The thing people are usually looking for when they search this is the dipping sauce that comes with the Cactus Blossom — the fried onion starter. It is not a hot sauce in the Tabasco sense. It is a creamy, pink-orange dip with a horseradish kick, closer to a remoulade than to anything you would shake onto eggs.

Knowing that saves you a lot of wasted chilli.

What it actually is

Working from what the dish is served with and how it tastes, it is a mayonnaise base with three things doing the work:

Horseradish. This is the heat, and it is why the burn sits in your nose rather than on your tongue. Chilli heat and horseradish heat are different sensations and this is unmistakably the second one.

Ketchup or tomato. Where the colour comes from, and a little sweetness.

Cayenne and paprika. A background warmth and more colour.

Everything else — Worcestershire, a little garlic — is seasoning around those three.

What you need

• 240 ml mayonnaise
• 2 tbsp ketchup
• 2 tsp prepared horseradish, or more to taste
• 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
• 1/4 tsp garlic powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• a squeeze of lemon

Use prepared horseradish from a jar, not fresh grated and not creamed horseradish sauce. Fresh is far stronger and creamed is already diluted with cream, which throws the whole balance.

Method

1. 1. Put everything in a bowl and whisk until completely smooth.
2. 2. Taste. Add horseradish a teaspoon at a time until the burn is where you want it — this is the only ingredient worth adjusting.
3. 3. Refrigerate for at least an hour before serving. This matters more than it sounds: the horseradish and garlic need time to move through the mayonnaise, and straight from the bowl it tastes flat and separate.

That is the whole recipe. There is no cooking.

Getting it closer

Chill it properly. An hour minimum, two is better. This is the single biggest difference between a home version and the restaurant one.

Do not over-cayenne it. The instinct is to add chilli because it is called a hot sauce. The heat is horseradish. Cayenne past about a teaspoon starts fighting it rather than helping.

Full-fat mayonnaise. Low-fat mayo goes thin and slightly sweet when you thin it further with ketchup.

What to serve it with

Onion rings and fried onion, obviously — that is its native habitat. It also works on a burger, with chips, and as a dip for cold prawns, where the horseradish does the job a prawn cocktail sauce normally would.

Storing

A week in the fridge in a sealed jar. It gets slightly hotter over the first two days as the horseradish infuses, then holds.

Do not freeze it. Mayonnaise splits.