Alleged Halal-cart style white sauce following Kenji’s recipe
I’m calling shenanigans on the conspirators putting up silly versions of the white sauce served at Halal Guys and similar food carts, including the beloved Kenji Lopez-Alt.
As discussed back in January, 2018 will be the year we achieve a copycat recipe for this cousin of Greek tsadziki sauce. We know, at least at Halal Guys, the sauce contains something equivalent to mayo because of the ingredient list that includes oil, vinegar and eggs. We know it does not include any dairy or it would say so on the package of sauce which is provided at the stand. Even so, most knockoffs recommend Greek yogurt or sour cream (sometimes both) as essential for achieving the desired creamy texture at home. (Presumably the Halal Guys can achieve the same effect without dairy because they use a commercial processing facility.)
Well, last night I went the full nine yards and replicated Kenji’s white sauce recipe along with the chicken and rice it’s served with. I faithfully copied the sauce recipe except that I substituted Walmart’s version of Miracle Whip for the mayo. (More on that in a moment.) To say it tasted nothing like the Halal Guys sauce would be an understatement. It wasn’t even particularly good. But the chicken recipe was where I realized Kenji was messing with us because he left a couple of hints in the directions. First of all, you’re supposed to marinate the chicken (boneless thighs) in half the marinade, then cut it into smaller pieces and add the rest of the marinade before cooking. Say what? Second, there’s a mystery tablespoon of vegetable oil in the ingredient list and you finally add it to the pan when cooking. That’s not the way Serious Eats, a resource for serious cooks, writes its recipes. They assume if you sauté something, you will have the sense to add oil to the pan. Take a look at a few other recipes and you will see I’m right.
Packets of authentic sauce from Halal Guys
So Kenji joins the cabal that also includes this recipe, which claims to have been reverse engineered with tacit cooperation from the Halal Guys themselves. It includes ground caraway (does that even exist?), ground sumac, turmeric and cardamom, plus xanthan gum to reconstitute the mayo after she’s diluted it with lemon juice. It also contains black pepper “to taste” which is (to use a poker term) this recipe’s own “tell”; if it’s an exact copy we would be told precisely how much to add.
I’m not so much outraged as amused that the doyens of food artistry would go to the trouble to deceive us in this way. For one thing, without my research I would not have uncovered this amazing Reddit in which a citizen asks for help and a food scientist gives an elaborate explanation of how he copycats recipes, then Kenji himself makes a surprise appearance (of course he does!) and defends his alleged Halal cart white sauce except for saying the oil, vinegar and egg should probably come from Miracle Whip and further that you should use a generic salad dressing because Miracle Whip probably has additional flavor enhancers to make it unique. Yes, and the first draft of the recipe probably included powdered unicorn horn, right Kenji?
I have a secret weapon which is my own packet of actual Halal Guys white sauce, purchased at their establishment as “extra sauce” and squirreled away in an undisclosed location. I am going to crack the code and will let you know when I have done so. Stay tuned.
Here’s a crazy question.
Instead of trying to duplicate the official cheap sauce used at the cart and produced in some industrial facility somewhere with industrial ingredients, why not try to make a better version of the sauce with real, perishable ingredients?
I’m scratching my head at why anyone would invest the time to figure out the right seasoning blend for sweetened, watered down, generic mayonnaise substitute.
I get the feeling you don’t like the sauce at the Halal carts. But others obviously do, judging from the passion to recreate the recipe. I like it ok, but mainly I like the challenge. BTW the copycat recipes for Vincent’s Cole Slaw and KFC Bean Salad are among the most popular recipes on this blog.
Actually, I quite enjoy Halal cart white sauce. Just recently, I made a riff off halal cart flavors for dinner at home. And I made my own version of white sauce, capturing the creamy, zesty, herbaceous flavors that I love, and leaving out the cheap dreck I know they usually contain.
I guess there are two paths people can go down.
You can have love the big mac and try to recreate it faithfully at home, or you can recognize the flavors and textures that make it special, and try to make an improved version of it like they do at Lost & Found in Albany.
Actually, that last part is pure conjecture, since I’ve yet to have their pig mac, but it’s on my list.
I wonder if Kenji’s recipe is based on the original Halal Guys cart in NYC before it ended up becoming a wide franchise. They didn’t have sauce packets back then and just used a squirt bottle of white sauce and a squirt bottle of hot sauce. I imagine fermented dairy like yogurt might not keep well in a shelf stable room temp sauce packet, so perhaps they changed the recipe as they expanded. I’ve tried food at the Halal Guys storefront, and it doesn’t really taste like the original cart. (I used to work near the cart by 5th Ave before they branched out)
I’ve only eaten at the original cart a few times so will defer to your experience. I immediately distrusted Kenji’s recipe because the white sauce includes a substantial amount of chopped parsley, which I definitely don’t remember in the product I ate at the cart. (Plus it’s impractical because the bits of parsley would clog up the squeeze bottle.) But a mix of mayo and Greek yogurt, later modified to all-mayo for a shelf stable product, is plausible. Thanks for your boots-on-the-ground perspective.