Fell In Love With a Guac: Making Jack White’s Guacamole Recipe
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A couple of months ago, emo band Michael Cera Palin made a jokey post about Pavement's hospitality rider on Twitter, and the internet rightfully couldn’t put it down. Between the quantity and the specificity of the items listed, the jokes practically wrote themselves. “forty-eight cold bottles of premium domestic beer,” hell yeah, brother. A couple of entries later, they list “two bottles of premium red wine” with a parenthetical that specifies “(nothing under $10.00 retail, PLEASE).” These guys know their stuff.
Something else I love about Pavement’s rider is that there’s an abundance of emphasis, with some words in bold and others in ALL CAPS, lending the whole list a sort of manic Christopher Walken tone. You can practically envision the band members bouncing ideas off each other as they had a stoned brainstorm, throwing “5 cups assorted yogurt” next to “one jar chunky natural peanut butter.” The whole document is a rich text that you could spend hours parsing through and picking out individually hilarious items. Spicy V8? Why? “Authentic” pita bread? What’s the alternative? Four nine-volt batteries (Energizer)? I guess it’s nice to know where their brand affinity lies.
This came hot on the heels of a wider discussion about how bands eat on tour, sparked by a snippy comment leveled at indie rockers Thank You, I’m Sorry. For days on end, internet commentators and armchair analysts filled my feed with criticisms, jokes, and accusations, all levied at bands with less than 100k monthly listeners on Spotify. The whole thing reeked of the (surprisingly pervasive) anti-artist stance that musicians should expect to be miserable on the road if they expect to break even on a tour.
However, one good thing to come from this was a rider posted by Charly Bliss containing Jack White’s tour rider. The list even starts out funny, with its first entry being “6 x cans of Coke Zero.” Okay, skinnyyyy. The second entry moves from beverages to food as they ask for “1 dozen chicken wings” with a fun note specifying “(buffalo, teriyaki, surprise us).” Alright, these guys know how to have fun. One line later, we get to the main event, “1 bowl FRESH HOME-MADE GUACAMOLE,” with a note that there’s a recipe below. The recipe, which I’ll transcribe here in full, is a seven-ingredient, multi-step process that I can only imagine a put-upon venue employee begrudgingly whipping up. I knew I had to try it.
Jack White's Guacamole Recipe
Ingredients
8 x large, ripe Haas avocados (cut in half the long way, remove the pit–SAVE THE PITS THOUGH–, and dice into large cubes with a butter knife. 3 or 4 slits down, 3 or 4 across. You’ll scoop out the chunks with a spoon, careful to maintain the avocado in fairly large chunks.
4 x vine-ripened tomatoes (diced)
½ yellow onion (finely chopped)
1 x full bunch cilantro (chopped)
4 x Serrano peppers (de-veined and chopped)
1 x lime
Salt & pepper to taste
Steps
Mix all ingredients in a large bowl, careful not to mush the avocados too much. We want it chunky. Once properly mixed and tested, add the pits into the guacamole and even out the top with a spoon or spatula. Add ½ lime to the top layer so you cover most of the surface with the juice. (The pits and lime will keep it from browning prematurely.) Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until served. Please don’t make it too early before it’s served. We’d love to have it around 5 pm.
Sunday, May 26th, 2024.
It’s Memorial Day weekend, and I have four days off work. Summer is right around the corner, and love is in the air… wait, that’s just a combination of Tecate and tequila. It’s already been hot enough in North Carolina that it’s felt like summer to my Pacific Northwest ass for months; even still, I’m not one to look a gift horse (long weekend) in the mouth. After a few days of kicking back and celebrating, spirits were high, and I was getting tired of BBQ food, so I decided it was finally time to pull the trigger on Jack White’s Guacamole Recipe.
My girlfriend and I hit up our local Harris Teeter to acquire all the fresh produce necessary to feed the man who wrote “Seven Nation Army.” Turns out eight Haas avocados are more expensive than I expected. As I was staring down the 30-ish dollar total, my girlfriend joked, “This is why Millennials will never be homeowners,” and I couldn’t disagree.
It also turns out that eight Haas avocados make a lot of guacamole. I realized this as I was rinsing the tomatoes and peppers in the sink and looked over to see my girlfriend cutting each avocado in half, seemingly doubling the amount instantaneously. She suggested halving the recipe at one point, but I was determined to make this guac in Jack White’s image, to a tee, exactly as he instructed on the rider. I would have nothing less than perfection.
Believe it or not, I’ve actually written my fair share of recipes for my job. I don’t talk about my profession here often, but it’s wild how much of 2020 and 2021 I spent wordsmithing recipes for Starbucks while everyone was trapped at home and craving their cafe fix. If you ever wanted to know how to make a Cereal Milk Coffee or a Caffè Mocha, I got you. As such, I feel like I am uniquely qualified to comment on this recipe.
As we dug into the instructions, this mostly seemed like prep, which was a relief. Whenever a recipe says, “Mix all ingredients in a large bowl,” it’s like skipping straight to the fun part. So we got cleaning and cutting and started dumping everything into a large bowl.
In terms of the actual recipe and instructions, it’s entertaining how much personality comes through the writing here. The line “SAVE THE PITS THOUGH,” typed in all-caps, is very urgent and funny. That phrase became a bit of a verbal tick as we were prepping the guac, akin to “save the whales” or a motto that an armpit fetishist would champion. Elsewhere, specifying to slice the avocado in “3 or 4 slits” seems like a funny detail, though it seems to be in service of consistency. The band specifies at multiple points that “We want it chunky,” which reads pretty sassy, and I have no choice but to respect it.
I deveined the serrano peppers, diced the tomatoes, and quickly started to note the mounting pounds of guacamole filling up our bowl. I asked my girlfriend to invite some friends over because I could quickly tell that we would not make so much as a dent in this guacamole if it were just the two of us. I did the same, and we soon had a group of six ready to dig into Jack White’s recipe.
The final touch was “salt & pepper to taste,” to which my girlfriend questioned, “to who’s taste?” and quickly decided that the answer was Jack White himself. We tried our best to channel our inner pale Detroiter, imagining what the palate of the man who wrote Blunderbuss could possibly entail. We salted, peppered, and made a round of margs to accompany the main event. We set everything on the table and dug in.
So, at this point, I bet you’re wondering how it was. What did Jack White’s Guacamole taste like? Turns out… kinda bland. We were eating with a group of people mainly from the south, but even to my Pacific Northwestern ass, the guac tasted pretty unremarkable. If I’m making guac, I usually use Jalapeno peppers, so the serranos were a nice twist but not enough.
Ultimately, the group deemed the guac “easy to fix,” and we improvised a bit by adding some more lime juice, additional salt, and four or five cloves of chopped-up garlic. We wondered why this recipe didn’t call for any garlic at all, which feels like a pretty standard ingredient for most guacs, and collectively agreed that Jack White is not beating the vampire allegations. After incorporating all of those additions, we were cooking with gas and everyone happily chowed down on our new and improved Jack White Guac.
It felt a little bad to permute Mr. White’s recipe in such a direct way; after all, you wouldn’t go in and add another guitar to “Salute Your Solution,” would you? But the way I see it, we technically made it faithfully first before perverting it into something that tasted better, so I felt like we still achieved our initial goal.
All in all, Jack White’s Guacamole was a hit once we added a bit more zap to it. The recipe makes a lot, but it’s also for a touring group of musicians, so that makes sense. Does his culinary instincts match up to his musical brilliance? Not quite, but that’s okay; I’ll take Elephant over a middle-of-the-road guacamole any day.
