Inspired Match-Makery

Girl Scout cookies & Sriracha Sauce: a match made in heaven!

Since our pal Randy Clemens published The Sriracha Cookbook earlier this year, Himself has gotten quite Sriracha-happy. In fact, he has taken to bringing the bottle of “rooster sauce” to the table at every meal.

It was sitting out after lunch yesterday when we reached for the Girl Scout cookies for dessert. As I picked up a peanut butter sandwich cookie (a.k.a. the Do-Si-Do) I noticed the bottle sitting there. Of course peanuts and hot sauce are a great combo–Thai cuisine pairs these two quite often, and so does West African. I figured why not give it a try?

I squirted a little of that famous and fabulous hot sauce on my peanut butter cookie and took a bite. And another. Dang, that was good! Then I tried it on a Tagalong, which contains peanut butter and chocolate. That was good, too. It figures, since peppers, chocolate and nuts are a classic combo in Mexican mole. Not so much with the Thin Mint, though. You really need the contrast of the richness of the peanut butter to temper the heat of the sauce. Combining mint and pepper without that contrast is a bit too biting, at least for my taste. (Those were the only types of Girl Scout cookies we had on hand, so I leave it to someone else to report on eating Sriracha Sauce on the others.)

Whoever develops and bakes cookies for the Girl Scouts has done an amazing job over the decades of cranking out some of the most satisfying treats anywhere. I sold my share of cookies in my younger years, and it made me happy to know I was hawking a good product, one that was actually worth what people paid for it. Not so when we sold all sorts of mostly-useless things to pay for band uniforms in high school–including styrofoam bulletin boards that looked like giant psychedelic butterflies, boxes of stale candy and waste baskets with our school logo on them (I later discovered in college, when I tried to throw out my Kenton Warriors waste basket, just how difficult it is to discard a waste basket. The maid in our dorm kept bringing it back to me. After the fourth or fifth time I walked into my room and found it returned, I finally had to explain to her that I really didn’t want it anymore).

Back to the subject at hand: Girl Scout cookies and Sriracha Sauce are two works of art. I think their combination makes a third. It’s certainly a pleasure to have a cookie that is so entrenched in American culture and our individual pasts. But to zazz it up with a few drops of Sriracha somehow makes it seem more grown-up. Certainly more worldly. At least it does to me.