If you work in downtown Columbus, you hopefully already know and frequently visit El Arepazo for lunch in Pearl Alley, the Venezuelan restaurant that puts out really good Arepas, as well as other Latin food. One of the things that ijt seems so many of us know about the place is that anything they make is good covered in their cilantro hot sauce. The sauce comes with everything in a little side cup and is pale green in color and is so good I could drink it (seriously).
Last night I grilled up in advance some skirt steak and chicken for a little taco night I am hosting tonight at my place. I decided to whip up my own stab at this sauce. While I didn’t really know what was in it, my guess was that it had some mayo or sour-cream as its base, or maybe both. So just throwing some stuff in I came up with a recipe that I thought was really good and was from my memory at least really similar to the sauce they have at El Arepazo (don’t worry I’ll still be going for lunch, even with the sauce now at home!)
In my Cuisinart mini-prep I put in a whole bunch of cilantro (well actually not the whole bunch, but almost an entire large bunch of cilantro, this sauce uses much more then I expected) then I put in a clove of smashed garlic, salt, pepper, Tabasco jalapeno sauce (their green version) a little lime juice, mayonnaise and sour cream in about equal proportions and then, while possibly not in theirs I threw in some basil from my front porch (there is so much out there now I gotta put it in everything). I ran the chopper for a while to get it all nicely blended and presto, a pretty good cilantro sauce ready for tacos (or drinking).
For more on El Arepazo if your interested (and some photos of Arepas, mmm) check out a blog post on Restaurant Widow: El Arepazo.
[...] the completely non-Paleo cornmeal sandwiches called arepas. Well, that, and their ridiculously good cilantro sauce. My favorite offering is called patacon, which consists of a plantain smashed flat and fried, [...]