Hockey is not the only great commodity in Canada. From our good friends in the Great White North comes Peppermaster, owned by Greg and Tina Brooks. Whatever label you want to give them…media moguls, entrepreneurs, poets laureate, raconteurs, they make some amazing sauces. Graciously, the Dept. of Homeland Security let their gift of sauces slip through to us for our culinary experimentation.

Most of the time, the products or hot sauces we come across are ones from store shelves. Fortunately, we came across the Peppermaster website and the rest, as they say, is history. One look at the bottles, the ingredients, and even the consistency of the sauces themselves, and we knew that we were in for a real treat. When asked about their products, Tina Brooks has a lot to say. Fortunately, it’s all worth hearing. Here’s a short conversation with Tina from Peppermaster:

Tell us a little how you both got started making your products.

Greg made his first hot sauce at the age of 8 in Nassau, where he grew up. He had started cooking and baking back then too. You don’t want to know about his first batch of brownies! After several years running a restaurant, Greg started canning the sauces that he was serving in his restaurant. He began with his dessert sauces and quickly moved up to canning his hot sauces; which quickly became the most popular. He ran his restaurant and sauce business simultaneously for another five years, until he realized that the sauces were selling better than the meals. That was when he sold the restaurant and focused on the sauce line. In 2003, Greg found himself in need of work and began canning the hot sauces again, this time under the name Pepperfire. Unfortunately, the partnership that grew out of Pepperfire was not to be and by Christmas of that year, the partnership dissolved. Then in mid-January, our house burned down, and suddenly there was a whole new ball game. We like to joke that the house burned down because the pepper sauces are so hot. Anyway, the fire caused all of our belongings and the equity in our home to suddenly be liquidated to cash; God bless insurance. So when we went looking for our new home, we looked for one that would be suitable for housing a certified kitchen as well as our living space. We incorporated in March 2004 and in July, changed the trade name of the premium line of hot sauces to Peppermaster. In addition to it being Greg’s title, we think it’s more descriptive of what Greg is doing with the peppers. With Peppermaster, we discovered that there is a niche in the hot sauce market that is relatively unfilled; and that is one for really good gourmet cooking sauces and hot sauces with lots of flavour that take advantage of the real heat of the peppers. We are discovering that when a chili-head tastes our sauces, they’re absolutely blown away; and so they should be. These sauces are made just for them.

Where do you get your ideas/motivation for your sauces?

Our biggest motivation for the sauces is the need to have heat in our flavour and flavour in our heat. We got so tired of asking for hot sauces in restaurants and getting that little bottle of vinegar labelled “Tabasco” that we realized somebody had to do something about it. There had to be a way to put hot sauce on a table, not vinegar pretending to be hot. But then, isn’t that every hot sauce maker’s motivation? When you’re a kid, Tabasco is a good place to start, but once you’re really a chilihead, you grow out of Tabasco so fast, it’s not funny. Of course, it’s more than that, too, once you outgrow Tabasco, you start looking for hotter, and there’s about 10,000 different names on the market and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that half of them are rollovers; what I mean by that are hot sauces that the maker changes the label on so that it will start selling again. You know the ones I’m talking about, the ones with the cool labels and the funky names. Once you’ve tried maybe a couple of dozen or so of them, you’ve pretty much tried them all. For us, it’s all about the reactions of the chiliheads when they taste our sauces. We know they’re good, we eat them all the time ourselves, so we know that when the chilihead tastes them, he or she is going to have the same reaction we do. It’s that chiliheads’ reaction that is our motivation.

It’s so much fun meeting the different kinds of chiliheads too. For example, I’m an ear ringer and my nose runs; keep a Kleenex handy… Greg is a sweater; so he needs a towel; he breaks out in a sweat at the slightest hint of capsaicin; for him it doesn’t even have to be hot; jalapenos make him sweat. There are coughers and sneezers too. Some people blush; they turn the most wonderful shades of red. But the one thing that all chiliheads have in common is that their eyes light up like Christmas trees after eating the sauces. Now I know that ‘look’ is a direct result of the capsaicin rush, but I do like to attribute some of it to how fabulous Greg’s sauces taste.

It’s a bit unusual to associate hot sauces with Canada, at least for some of us. What additional challenges do you face in a predominantly American hot & spicy food market?

Export, of course. Our biggest challenge was figuring out how to get across the border. The chilihead market in the States is so much more mature, so we had to go South. We ended up at the FDA who informed us we needed to have an Agent. At first I thought they meant we needed a distributor to carry our stuff, so we started looking for one of those, but the distributors didn’t want to talk to us until they’d seen and tasted our sauces; but we couldn’t send our sauces into the states unless we had an Agent. It seemed like an insurmountable catch-22. The Agent is simply the American that the Government will hang in the event that Peppermaster turns out to be a bio-terrorist. Imagine. So my friend, Jerrilynn Thomas, who runs the International Virtual Women’s Chamber of Commerce, in her gorgeous Atlanta Southern Belle accent said “You can use me for your agent.” And suddenly, we were across the border.
Another one of our challenges is kind of funny to resolve because, being Canadian, we already have bilingual labels; French and English. In addition to having all that wording on our jars twice, we need to have the nutritional information as well as a bar code to ship to the US; even if we’re not going into grocery stores. There just isn’t room for all that stuff. So that in and of itself is a challenge. One would say, just drop the French, and we’ve considered it, but we’ve built up such a following here in Canada, it’s rather silly to kill that.

Ultimately the most important challenge we face is getting the peppers. We have a much shorter growing season up here, and there is only one, so we get peppers only in the Fall. So, 10 months out of the year, we have to import our peppers. Our signature pepper is from the Bahamas, and that’s tricky enough to get in a good year. Sometimes we end up having to go to unheard of places for our peppers. Indeed one of the peppers we used last fall was a scotch bonnet imported from Holland.

What’s one thing about you, your company, or your products that is not common knowledge that you would like people to know about?

The most important thing I want people to know is that there are NO preservatives or chemicals in our sauces. They are all-natural. We only use real fresh peppers, even in the sauces that require a pepper extract and that is key. Other companies use the words “pepper extract” to describe the oleoresin or capsaicin extract that they use to heat up their sauce. We take fresh peppers and naturally extract the heat from the peppers, hence pepper extract. It’s all natural and it’s all fresh and the difference tells in the taste.

Are there any new products in store from the mad geniuses at Peppermaster? If so, what?

I can tell you about our latest creation to hit the market. It’s called Raspberries in Heat. Greg wanted to subtitle it “For the Bitch Within” so it could go on the shelves beside “Woman Scorned” and “Ass Birin” but I didn’t think the name suited what we are doing here. We created it for the National Women’s show that debuted here in Montreal and I wanted something sweet and delicate but strong and in your face at the same time. It’s a sweet raspberry liqueur infused with Asian finger peppers, scotch bonnets and raspberries. I would have liked it much hotter, but then I want them all really hot. And truth be told, it’s got a teeny nip to it. It is absolutely decadent. We’ve since used it as a marinade for chicken and as a salad dressing.

We’ve got new products coming out regularly. We’ve currently got at least three very special sauces in the pipeline, but if I told you what they were, I’d have to kill you. We have so many plans, I can’t obviously share them all with you, but suffice it to say, we’re going to be very busy over the coming year and we’re really looking forward to it.

So what’s in all this stuff? An Ingredient List!

Bite Me! Special Reserve BBQ: Scotch bonnet peppers, Bite Me! Gently(apple cider, birdseye peppers, garlic, sweet peppers, fresh ginger, tomato paste, cane sugar, molasses, tamarind, fresh persian lime juice, hot mustard, honey, balsamic vinegar, sea salt, modified cornstarch, mustard seeds, thyme, fresh sweet basil, fresh parsley, clove, cinnamon, five spice, cardamom, bay leaf, dill, celery leaf), scotch whiskey

Fusion Fire: Fresh scotch bonnet peppers, fresh jalapenos, fresh goat peppers, fresh cayenne, birdseye peppers, habanero chipotle, Tellicherry black, fresh roast espresso, chili powder, cider vinegar, modified cornstarch, sea salt, honey, mustard, guar, thyme, bay leaf, allspice

Jerk Curry: Fresh scotch bonnet peppers, fresh scallions, fresh onions, fresh garlic, fresh leeks, fresh ginger, coconut cream, cider vinegar, tellicherry peppercorns, honey, modified cornstarch, sea salt, turmeric, clove, cardamom, mustard seeds, coriander, nutmeg, cumin, cinnamon chips, star anise, cayenne, fennel, fenugreek, celery seed, mace

Joe’s $0.02 Dig it…

Bite Me! Special Reserve BBQ: As an American, it’s easy to become accustomed to the crap BBQ sauce that you get at your average grocery store. Have no fear, Peppermaster will save you from that ketchup & sugar-laced nightmare ever again. To me, the spices are what set this a notch above any other BBQ/hot sauce. No less than a dozen spices accentuate the taste, and work so syngergistically well together. Please invade Canada and buy some.

Fusion Fire: On the side of the bottle, there is a Flame rating for heat and this sauce rated 10 out of 10 on the scale. Being the closet skeptic, I slathered some onto my finger and shoved some in my mouth. PAIN. MISERY. SUFFERING. After recovery from the grievous error of my ways, I realized that, while VERY hot, the sauce is just damn good. I’ve put this sauce on nearly everything but breakfast cereal, and it adds wonderful chile taste to food. What really gets you is how FRESH it tastes. Great when you can pump up the heat level and not lose anything from the taste.

Jerk Curry: I love Jerk. I’d eat it at nearly every meal if I could. That being said, I’m also a bit of a snob about it, too, in that I’m hard to please. Curry and jerk was a combination of tastes that was hard to imagine…but now that I’ve tried it, I’ll be its biggest advocate. It shares the FRESH taste of all the Peppermaster sauces but with a little less heat to make it palatable on a wider ranger of dishes. The only thing that I don’t like about it is that we’re using it up so fast!! Hmmm, Quebec can’t be that far from here…ROAD TRIP!

Linda’s $0.02 Far out…

Bite Me! Special Reserve BBQ: Boy does this have bite! I’ll say this right off, though. All of the sauces we tried from Peppermaster were incredibly hot, but also included incredible flavor. The barbeque sauce was great as a marinade for veggies out on the grill. They had flavor and kick and were a great addition to the meal.

Fusion Fire: I really loved the ingredient list on this puppy. I couldn’t wait to try it. Since trying it, we have used it in and on just about anything you can imagine. Most recently was in chili. This is an incredible all-purpose sauce. I found this to be a good sauce to add to casseroles that you’re watching to punch up. Just make sure if you have guests for dinner, that they can handle the heat.

Jerk Curry: I’m not a fan of Jerk. Ironically, I kept focusing in on that word in the title and seemed to forget all about the “Curry.” Before I opened it I was thinking, “How am I going to write something about this when I obviously don’t like Jerk?” Well, I opened it and tried it. Let me tell you, that bottle is more empty than the rest. Hot damn, this stuff is good. It ended up being my favorite of all three. I think it definitely balances more on the curry side, but you can definitely taste the Jerk and for once, I liked it. Marinade and continue to brush this sauce on grilled chicken and watch the chicken come to life. Wonderful stuff!

Don’t just take our word for it! Here are some online reviews of these sauces:

http://www.nettally.com/saints/hotstuff.html (Fusion Fire)
http://www.thehotpepper.com/viewtopic.php?t=172
Sauce Rater

Want to review Peppermaster’s products for yourself? Go to one of these sites and leave your own opinion:

www.rateitall.com/t-1125-hot-sauces.aspx
http://www.thehotpepper.com/viewforum.php?f=3
http://www.pepperfire.ca/pepperstore/

Recipe Ideas
At last check, Peppermaster had a great list of recipe ideas on their website. Go HERE to find them.

As a suggestion take some chopped veggies (onions work well), mix some butter and Jerk Curry sauce, wrap it in aluminum foil, and leave it on the grill as you make some burgers (or other meat). Give it 30 minutes, and you have some yummy Jerk veggies to use on/with the meat that is delectable.

This site is a member of The Ring Of Fire - a linked list of Chile websites
Next | Skip Next | Next 5 | Prev | Skip Prev | Random Site

Join the ring or browse a complete list of The Ring of Fire Members
If you discover problems with any of The Ring Of Fire site
please notify the RingMaster