The Halal Guys is a casual fast-food restaurant chain that specializes in Halal safe food. This chain was founded back in 1990 by Mohamed Abouelenein back when it was just a food cart located on a street corner in Manhattan.
Since then, food carts and storefronts have opened across New York and around the world. The franchise is most notable for its platter of chicken or Gyro meat with rice, which can also be served in a wrap.
One of the novelties of The Halal Guys is their famous hot sauce, which claims to register at about 100,000 – 130,000 on the Scoville scale (a scale that tells you hot spicy something’s going to be).
To put that into perspective, sriracha only comes in at about 3,000 on the scale. Whether it’s actually that hot or not, there’s no denying that the Halal Guy’s hot sauce packs a serious punch.
And now you can buy the sauce to keep at home! You can only purchase it in-store at the moment, but it does mean that you can take the great-tasting flavor home with you to enjoy it multiple times.
If you’re wanting to try these delicious recipes, but don’t have a location anywhere near you, then you might want to try some of these 10 Halal Guys Hot sauce recipes.
Hot Sauce Dupe
If you’re unable to get to a Halal Guys store where you might be able to purchase a bottle of their hot sauce, then you might want to try and make your own. On that note here is a couple of recipes for making your own version of this hot sauce at home.
This recipe gets its heat from the 24 China red chiles and caraway that it asks for. You should be able to make a decent amount of hot sauce using this recipe, and it will go fantastically with almost any dish that you’d normally add hot sauce to.
It might not be as spicy as the official Halal Guy’s sauce, but it still packs a might punch.
Well-known internet food guru Chef John has a great recipe for Harissa hot sauce, which is very similar to the Halal Guy’s sauce. This particular recipe calls for Fresno chile peppers and habanero peppers to give it that signature spice.
Chicken Recipes
After deciding that hot dogs weren’t a satisfying enough mean, Halal Guy’s founder Mohamed Abouelenein decided to improve his menu by including chicken and gyro meat, an act that would lead the food cart to critical acclaim.
These chicken recipes are very similar to the ones that you can find at the Halal Guy’s restaurants and pair great with their signature hot sauce, or with the homemade stuff you’ve made from the previous recipes.
If you’re going to create a copycat recipe, you want to include all the elements to ensure that it tastes just like what you’d get at the restaurant.
And after main trials and errors, this recipe is able to bring you the right steps and ingredients to get you as close as possible, if you’re not able to get to the actual storefront or food cart.
Making use of both the Halal Guy’s famous red hot sauce and their white sauce, this chicken and rice dish should make you feel as though you’re right there at the corner of 53rd and 6th (which is where the original Halal Guys’ food cart was/is located).
If you find yourself craving some authentic NYC food, then you’ll do well to try out this chicken and rice dish, guaranteed to bring the taste of the city to your own home.
This recipe will demonstrate how to make some lovely yellow rice, fantastic chicken shawarma, as well as the signature white sauce. Add a couple of drops of Halal Guys’ hot sauce (or a lot) and feel how this recipe brings the Halal Guys to your own home.
This is a totally faithful recipe that manages to perfectly recreate this New York City halal cart classic. The chicken is marinated with herbs, lemon, and spices; the rice is perfectly golden; the sauce is as creamy as ever.
Top this with some salad and pita bread, and don’t forget the hot sauce, and you’ve got yourself a fantastic meal.
This recipe is similar to the previous ones, with a slightly different marinade for the chicken and topped with some flavorful fried eggs. If you’ve ever tried fried eggs with hot sauce then you know that this recipe is an automatic winner.
Other Recipes
There are loads of different dishes that you can pick up from the Halal Guy’s food carts or their storefronts, but also once you know their primary ingredients, you’ll easily be able to create dishes and foods that taste as though they’ve come straight from the Halal Guy’s kitchen.
These recipes are dishes like that, either as dishes you can get at the restaurant or might as well be.
This is a recreation of the Halal Guys’ beef bowl, which uses beautifully spiced beef to achieve a wonderful flavor festival right in your own kitchen.
This recipe also shows you how to make the signature white sauce, and can be topped with as much hot sauce as you can manage.
Although a lot of these recipes include a section on how to make the Halal Guys’ white sauce, if you’re just looking to make the sauce on its own to add to any dish you feel like, then here is a standalone Halal Guys-inspired white sauce recipe.
This sauce goes great with most meat dishes, and pairs perfectly with the Halal Guys hot sauce.
Final Thoughts
Have fun cooking and be sure to experiment with the different flavor combinations that you can think of.
Keep an eye out for a Halal Guys restaurant coming to a city near you, they’re expanding very quickly and are fast becoming a world-renowned casual food restaurant.
