As it is an essential ingredient to the Paleo Pad Thai, at long last I had a reason to make the Sunshine Sauce from Melissa Joulwan's Well Fed: Paleo Recipes for People Who Love to Eat. I've seen many people on other blogs rave about this sauce. Perhaps because I don't include nuts in my regular diet, I have avoided this recipe knowing it could only lead to trouble if I liked it.
I'm including this recipe with my mega Paleo Pad Thai post as well, but as its a recipe to be reviewed in its own right, I thought it would be good to give it its own post as well.
Now its time to throw caution to the wind; whip up a batch of Sunshine Sauce; and see what all the talk is about.
First, I gathered all of my ingredients.
I decided to use my mini-chopper for this recipe. I added all of the ingredients except for the coconut milk to the chopper bowl. I decided to add the optional dash of cayenne pepper.
I gave the sauce an initial whirl in the chopper and stopped to scrape down the bowl; added the coconut milk; and processed the sauce some more until it looked smooth.
Here is my fully processed sauce. As my coconut milk and sunflower seed butter were both room temperature, the sauce was pretty runny. I'd expect that it would set up if I refrigerated it.
In case you were curious, the recipe yields just under 2/3 cup of Sunshine Sauce.
Accessibility and Cost of Ingredients: Melissa recommends Sunbutter brand sugar free sunflower seed butter. The day I shopped for this recipe, I was at Sprouts, a more health food oriented grocery store. I haven't checked to see if my big box has any sunflower seed butter, but I'll check the next time I go and update the post.
Sprouts did have some varieties of Sunbutter brand, but none were sugar free. The MaraNatha brand I got was sugar free and seemed to work just fine. It is a little on the expensive side at $4.99 a jar. There were other brands, but most contained either sugar or soy. The Sunbutter brand wasn't much cheaper. You should be able to find the rest of the ingredients, with the exception of the coconut aminos and/or coconut milk at your big box grocery store.
Preparation Time: The stated preparation time for the recipe is 5 minutes. You're preparation time will depend on the speed at which you can get the ingredients accurately measured and processed. It took me 10 minutes.
Clean Up: I pre-soaked my chopper bowl to make sure it came out clean in the dishwasher. Otherwise, everything I used to make the sauce went into the dishwasher.
The Paleo Review: Thumbs Up! Before using this batch in my Paleo Pad Thai, I stuck my finger in and tasted it. My first thought was that it tasted like what I expect Thai food to taste. This bode well for Pad Thai! It has a nutty flavor with a spicy tanginess that is quite tasty. I think it would have been lacking something without the dash of cayenne.
Luckily, for me, while the sauce is good, its not something that I'm going to feel driven to make or have on hand for anything other than making a batch of Pad Thai. Perhaps my brain is tempering my like of this recipe as I know I simply cannot have it on a routine basis.
If you can tolerate more nuts in your diet, perhaps it would be good enough to you to do so!