The months of May & June this year are marked on my gastronomical calendar as the months I ate two bottles of Hot Sauce Extracts.

At work, I kept a bottle of Da’ Bomb that I used each day at lunch. At home, I had a bottle of Stupid Hot that I used for my suppers.

How to eat an Extract

Patience.
Lots of patience, young Jedi.
If a bottle of Tabasco is the 100 yard sprint, then a bottle of extract needs to be viewed as an ultra-marathon. At the rate of a drop a day, you could be looking at almost a year’s worth.

Be sure to disregard what it says on the side of the bottle!!

Serving size 2 Tsp (Servings per container: 10)

Refrigerate.
Having a hot sauce bottle open that long, you’ll want to make sure your sauce stays somewhat fresh. Although I doubt there’s anything in this world or the next that would want to live inside a bottle of extract, I just find it to be helpful to keep my sauces in the fridge. It will also add 0.001 seconds of coolness to your tongue before the burn sets in.

Cleaning the bottle.
About once a week I’ll take a napkin and clean the sauce out of the grooves at the top of the bottle. I’ll wash out the cap and dry it. Tipping the sauce up and down for weeks and months, you’re going to get some build-up at the top. I hate it when it dries out and crusts up at the top like that. Also, if you get too much at the top, you’ll end up having some squeeze out of the cap when you tighten the cap. This sauce will then get on your fingers each time you touch the outside of the bottle. And face it, this isn’t ketchup we’re talking about. This is a potential radiation leakage with a half life of 2000 years. If you’re lucky you’ll accidentally rub it in your eyes and immediately learn a valuable lesson. If you’re unlucky you’ll end up wiping it off on a towel that later gets used by your spouse who then gets a spec on her finger which ends up in THEIR eyes, and suddenly you’re sleeping on the couch for a week while your hot sauce collection gets sold on eBay.

Mixing the sauce.
I’m not Superman, I can’t just spread this sauce out with a butter knife on my sandwich and eat it. And yet at the same time I want to use this sauce every possible chance I can get so that I will finish the bottle before they take me away to an old folks home. For lunch, this is easy for me, because I almost always have soup. I get to pour my 6 to 8 drops in my bowl and stir it up. If I put in a lot of crackers, I can add even more sauce. If I order fries from our chef, then I get to make a batch of my heinous ketchup. A small bowl of ketchup mixed with yet another 6 to 8 drops of sauce.

When at home, if we eat hot dogs, brats, hamburgers - I mix up some up in ketchup. If we have chicken, I’ll mix up some mustard and extract, or maybe BBQ & extract. Macaroni & Cheese… I may be unique in liking ketchup on my Mac & Cheese, but yep… ketchup and extract. Hash browns, tater tots, scalloped potatoes? Ok, I should probably admit that I do buy the 64 oz. ketchup bottles and go through a lot of ketchup. I think I like condiments.

Mashed potatoes? Extract in the gravy! Just zoom in on anything liquid, and whip the extract into it!
Egg omelettes are the all-time cheat food. I have yet to put too much extract in a 5-egg omelette and actually taste any pain. I’m not sure how that works, but it either distributes the extract perfectly so you can’t taste it, or it’s neutralizing it somehow much like milk/cheese/ice cream would. Also, do you like ketchup with your eggs? I do!!! Put some extract in that ketchup! Now that’s double-dipping!

Eating your meal
You’re on your own, wimp! Just kidding. The first few meals you’ll want to warm up to the number of drops you can handle. You may be anxious to rip into your new sauce, but unless you’re willing to rip into your tongue, you’ll have to take it easy. The problem with extracts is that they can range from 50,000 scovilles to over 1.5 million. That’s a huge difference.

In a few days you’ll get into the swing of things and know about the range you can handle without dying. Unfortunately, pouring about “yay much” out of the bottle isn’t very scientific, and if you’re riding the fine line, you’re inevitably going to scorch yourself sometimes. ENJOY!

Quarantine
When I mix extract into my ketchup, I use a fork. When I’m done stirring, I rinse off the fork and put it in the dishwasher. What I don’t do is then use the fork to grab all the hot dogs off the grill. Or set it off to the side so that someone accidentally uses it to stir the Mac & Cheese. What I’m avoiding here is someone half way through their meal screaming out, “Why is my hot dog so hot!”, and then end up sleeping on the couch for a week while my hot sauce collection gets sold on eBay.

You have to pretend that everything you used to prepare your meal accidentally fell into the toilet.

After the meal you should really brush your teeth. Even though the meal is over, and your high is over, your mouth can still be a 7.0 on other people’s Richter scale. I can’t even fetch a kiss on the cheek from my wife until I’ve brushed my teeth. And believe me, there are much worse things than a ‘hot kiss’, too! I’m not going to go into detail here, but let’s just say that there are certain body parts that should NEVER have had to experience this type of tingling.

Couch. Ebay. Nuff said.

More Patience
You might think it takes a long time to see the hot sauce level go down the first 20%, but wait until you’ve only got 20% left! Psychologically, this will take forever. It is also inevitably the time you try to be a cowboy and speed things up by eating too much. Not going to happen. The only consolation at this point is that you’re tolerance has gone up and instead of 1 drop a meal, you might be up to 6 drops a meal.

Finishing the Bottle
You’re probably going to have about 5 “last days”. That’s the point where there is so little sauce left at the bottom, you tell yourself, “Tomorrow I get to finish this sauce”. Then tomorrow comes and you pour out a few drops and see that you still have more left for the next day.

Eventually though, you truly do run out. And much like Bluto from the movie, Animal House, smashing the empty can of beer against his forehead, I like to put the VERY last few drops of hot sauce on a spoon and eat it straight. This way, you get to enjoy the heat and flavor in its pure, undiluted form. I don’t know if it’s because capsaicin tends to float, or if the tolerance has been built up, but never fear, it never seems quite so hot on these last few drops. With the flavor lingering in your mouth, and the heat scorching your tongue, now is the time to write your review of the sauce.

If you wish to keep your bottle for your collection after you finish it, you’ll have to wash it out. Be prepared for the biggest ball of flaming gas to burn your nose hairs, especially if you use hot water. Be careful of the label, some of the cheaper paper ones might not survive too much water soaking into them.

Congratulations!

Hot Sauce Reviews

The time you spend with your extract hot sauce is kind of like moving in with someone you’ve been dating. You really get to know them intimately. You see them on their good days, and bad days. And they get to see you on your good days and bad days. Pour a little too much on your food, and suddenly your eyes are welling up with tears, snot running down your face, and your mouth locked open as you try to vent cool air in.

Here are the two sauces I started in May and finished in June:

Da Bomb: Beyond Insanity

Each drop is a bomb to the mouth!

In this city, Da Bomb is quite well known thanks to a local Mexican restaurant that carries all 3 varieties. When you ask the server for the hot sauces, they bring over a huge wicker basket full of different hot sauces. Many you can taste. Others, like Da Bomb, you eat one drop at a time at the dares & heckling from your friends.

Da Bomb series is unique in the fact of its exact & odd scoville unit rating. 119,700 for Beyond Insanity. I wish more hot sauce makers would do the same. It’s a good warning system, not to mention the question on most people’s mind when eating something hot. The only downside I can think of about this series is that it’s almost impossible to remember which is which. Beyond Insanity and Ground Zero look almost the same, but one is twice as hot.

The ingredients on this bottle says it has orange juice in it. I’m sorry, but with something this hot, I think maybe orange juice might not have been enough. Maybe some powdered Tang. Maybe even some orange extract! Fight extract against extract!

The sauce is slightly chunky, and almost black in color. When taking the final teaspoon test on this sauce, I couldn’t really taste that much. There was a hint of smoky flavor, probably from the chipotle peppers, followed by a small amount of chemical taste from the pepper extract (Which for some reason is NOT listed in the ingredients). Then 2 seconds later it’s a moot point as the heat kicks in.

Due to the mild taste, it mixed well with soups and ketchup, packing a lot of heat without changing the flavor too much. Lunch was always Russian Roulette with this sauce. A few drops too few, and you’d want to add more. Too drops too many, and suddenly it took twice as long to eat lunch!

One of the joys of finishing a sauce is getting to clean it up before setting it on the shelf. At the restaurants, I had always thought that Da Bomb hot sauces came in a smoked colored bottles. Turns out I’ve just never seen an empty container until now! I guess the sauces at the restaurant last a long, long time. Only a drop or two by the occasional brave soul. Here, it lasted a month of lunches.

Stupid Hot

Every day this month, you can see me standing on the corner of Sucker Street and Moron Lane sticking my tongue on a frozen pole.

There’s something diabolical about a simple, white, innocent label that simply has 1 cartoon figure with his tongue stuck to a pole. The words “Stupid Hot” couldn’t describe the activity any better. This stuff is hot, and more than once I put too many drops in my soup, ketchup, or other foods.

When I finished the bottle last night, I put a large amount on my fork and tried it straight. I really couldn’t put my finger on any particular flavors before the burn came. I then read the ingredients, and thought yes, maybe I could taste the onions. It’s probably all in my head though. The burn itself is a nice, full & strong burn. None of this tip of the tongue stuff, and very very little chemical taste. Definitely a great sauce to use to spice things up and not ruin the flavor. The sauce itself is a nice smooth brown color, with no chunks. Just a thicker than runny paste.

As a collector I notice strange, pointless things. One is that an almost all-white label is easy to get markings on. Actually using this sauce for the last month, it was hard to keep this label in mint shape. It got a few dings, and a few stains. I did a good job considering. If you want to put this sauce in your collection, try to go for an unmarred label, and keep it that way.

Where to next?

At work I have a bottle of Blair’s newest sauce: Jersey Heat.

At home, I’m slowly working on CaJohn’s: Z…Nothing Beyond

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