Burnt My Fingers

SPOILER ALERT: this post is going to reveal exactly what is in the Halal Guys White Sauce. If you aren’t ready to know that, continue reading all the fanciful hoo-hah on the internet. You have been warned.

We assembled quite an arsenal of ingredients in anticipation of a vigorous assault on the never-before-revealed recipe for the white sauce served at the Halal Guys carts in NYC and, more recently, in packets at their strip mall restaurants. Mayo was at the ready, of course, but also “salad dressing” (a generic version of Miracle Whip, suggested by Kenji on this reddit), full fat Greek yogurt and sour cream… plus olive oil, white vinegar and lemon juice. The spices? We’ll get to those in a minute.

A fellow food blogger for whom I have the profoundest respect insists that the butterfat of sour cream is a valuable component in a Halal Guys-type sauce, but a single taste (in a flavorful but off-target recipe we tried initially) proved its richness was inappropriate. Greek yogurt we’d keep in our back pocket, on the theory that it’s not in the Halal Guys original but perhaps it’s needed to get the same effect without professional food processing equipment.

As to the spices, we figured we should focus on spices that might be common in a halal kitchen. We considered baharat, a multi-spice mixture that literally translates as “spice”, but its warm notes of cinnamon and clove were obviously out of place. More promising was ground sumac, which lends a desirable tart note. We noted that some copycat recipes use dill weed, which would go well with the yogurt-based tsadziki that inspired this sauce, but it’s easy to identify dill weed in sauce and we knew it wasn’t there.

How, exactly, did we know? Because we had a packet of official Halal Guys white sauce from one of the Guys’ strip mall locations. With trembling hands, we now slit the packet open and squeezed a small amount into a dish for sampling.

The first taste cut right to the chase for us: this is mayonnaise! Yes, it’s got some add-ins, but it’s unquestionably a mayo base and very little else. We opened the jar of Hellmans/Best Foods and tasted the sauce and the mayo repeatedly. No question. In a blindfold test, the average person would probably say they were the same. The Halal Guys sauce did have just a bit more tartness, so we added a little white vinegar. Nailed it. (Other brands of mayo might require more vinegar, or less.)

We still had to account for the spices in the Halal Guys, which didn’t contribute a lot to taste but showed up as tiny specks. We added small amounts of ground sumac and black pepper until our distribution of specks was similar to the original. We also added a little water, noting that the original was looser than our mix (to make it easier to squirt from a dispenser bottle). And then we waited.

An hour of aging disqualified sumac, which had been our insider pick as the secret ingredient. Here’s why: it turns the sauce pink. So we repeated the mix with the same amount of spice, using all pepper this time.

Halal Guys White Sauce, smeared on a paper towel so spices are visible

Ground black pepper in our copycat sauce.

The two photos above were taken with an AMIR macro lens on an iPhone 6. TAKE A LOOK. The upper image is the original Halal Guys sauce, spread out on a paper towel so we can see the individual flecks of spice. The other image? It’s just ground black pepper, in our copycat sauce. Notice any similarity? Both have irregular shaped pieces, dots or not, due to the grinding process. (Our grind is coarser because that’s what we had on hand.) The specks are mostly black, but with some orange-y bits that are probably from the husk of the pepper berry. And NO other components such as flecks of another color (sorry, dill and sumac) or uniformly shaped tiny seeds (which might be nigella).

Is it possible there is something else beyond the ground pepper seasoning the mayo? Perhaps, but it’s so inconsequential it does not register either for taste or appearance. We’re calling this, so our testers can get back to their families.

I can see the Halal Guys stifling a chortle as seekers repeatedly asked for their “secret recipe” which is nothing more than mayo with a dash of black pepper. Anthony Bourdain would have loved (and probably was in on) this conspiracy of food elites and street smart entrepreneurs which have bedeviled earnest home bloggers for so long. It’s almost sad to see the movie come to an end.

P.S. The exact proportions of ingredients in our copycat sauce will be revealed in an upcoming post can be found right here.