With great pleasure, we welcome Chuk Hell into the fold here at the HZOB. You can see some of Chuk’s musings at thehotpepper.com, and we’re happy to have him contribute his take on hot sauces and all things in the world of spicy fare. Linda is a former Texan herself (and an Austin-ite to boot), so we at least share that much in common. Welcome aboard, Chuk!

Please allow me to introduce myself:

I’ve lived in Texas for almost 20 years now after arriving from parts unknown. It was in Texas that I tasted my first fresh jalapeno. I knew I was finally home.

I’ve been making my own fresh salsas for over 15 years. I’ve never entered the commercial field but I have not ruled it out. I’ve entered the Austin Hot Sauce Festival a couple times and while I did not place I did get honorable mentions.

I spend a huge amount of time grilling and smoking meats in my backyard. Barbeque is a way of life here.

I also grow my own chile peppers. The plants seem to really love the climate here!

I love love love hot and spicy cuisine. Mexican, Thai, Indian…I say bring it on! I spend a lot of time cooking and reading about cooking. Mexican and Asian are two of the areas I focus on. I also have a really soft spot for good ole southern down home cooking/soul food.

Oh yeah, I also make my living in the culinary arts. I’m a baker by trade. Maybe one day I can make hot sauce for a living…who knows? That sounds like heaven to me!

We became familiar with Pam from LBTC from Thehotpepper.com discussion forum, and it’s a darn lucky thing we did. Had we not, then it’s possible that we might not have known just how great their sauces are. Thanks to Pam & Curt for sharing some of these with us!!

One doesn’t need to have a whole line of products to be successful in the hot & spicy food biz. The Longbranch Trading Company takes this to heart…and then some. Judging by some succes at the Zesty Best food show, we fully expect to see these sauces show up someday on a list of the Scovie award winners. Yes, their sauces are just that good. As relative newbies, we wanted to get the braintrust at LBTC a chance to sound off about their products, so here they are….

Your hot sauces use some more unusual ingredients, such as pumpkin seeds. Is this a California thing or how did you come up with using those types of spices & nuts?

Curt:
Pumpkin seeds are used in sauces in Northern Mexico and Sesame Seeds in Asian sauces, so there is that kind of influence going on. We both enjoy trying new and different things. We love to experiment. When we go out to eat we like to go somewhere we haven?t gone before and try something totally new.

Pam:
We have around 200 cookbooks in our collection, which include just about every taste and style you could imagine. We both love to play around with the recipes, take an element from one that you like and add it too another. Take out what you don?t like and put your own spin on it.

Aside from commercial success, are there any specific aspirations that you have for your sauces/products?

Curt:
We plan to enter our sauces in more contests. So far we have just entered one event, The Zesty Best in Costa Mesa California. The result was 4 awards for our sauces. We met a lot of fellow sauce makers and had a great time. We plan on entering the Scovies and the Fiery Food Challenge next time around to see how we measure up against the big boys.

Pam:
But our dream is to open our own Co-pack facilities. We have been doing research and have even looked at a couple of buildings. Nothing would make Curt happier than spending the entire day in the kitchen playing mad sauce scientist.

How has your experience been going from making your sauces at home to moving into commercial production?

Curt:
It was definitely a learning experience, trial and error all the way. The most difficult part was finding a local Co-Pack facility that would let me be as hands on as I?d like to be. We were going to go with a Florida facility at first, but then a friend told us about a place less than two hours away in Santa Paula California.

Pam:
We buy all our own ingredients. (Curt is very picky about the quality of our ingredients and doesn?t trust that to anyone else) Basically we drive up and use the Co-Packers kitchen. These are Curt?s babies and he wanted to be as actively involved in the process as possible. Plus these sauces are somewhat complex and include many steps. We try and get the color, texture and even more importantly, the taste just right.

What has been the most challenging aspect of your foray into the world of hot sauce?

Pam:
Getting the word out about our sauces. Thank goodness for sites like yours in which a new company is given a chance to get their products seen and reviewed. With all the products out there it?s difficult to get a product noticed on a small advertising budget.

Any new products on the horizon for LBTC?

Curt:
I?m working on a BBQ sauce as we speak. I am also playing around with ideas for a couple of mustards.

Pam:
I am leaning more towards glazes and I have a little sweet and spicy snack in the works that Curt doesn?t even know about.

Curt:
That?s the best part of this business, the creative end. Coming up with products that are your creations and making them the best that they can be.

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

Longbranch Original: Apple cider vinegar, water, de Arbol peppers, roasted pumpkin seeds, garlic, roasted pine nuts, sea salt, spices, Habanero peppers, Chipotle morita peppers, xantham gum

Salsa Rio Verde: Apple cider vinegar, water, tomatillos, Jalapeno peppers, Serrano peppers, Roasted green peppers, Habanero peppers, Mexican green onion, toasted pumpkin seeds, lime juice, roasted sesame seeds, garlic, cilantro, Serrano peppers, sea salt, spices, xantham gum

Hot Blonde: Manzano peppers, Apple cider vinegar, water, Mango, Habanero peppers, garlic, roasted pine nuts, Mexican green onion, red Thai peppers, sea salt, spices, xantham gum

Dorsey?s Reserve: Manzano peppers, apple cider vinegar, water, Jalapeno peppers, Mexican green onion, red Serrano peppers, garlic, roasted sesame seeds, roasted pumpkin seeds, Habanero peppers, Serrano peppers, de Arbol peppers, sea salt, spices, Chipotle morita peppers, roasted pine nuts, xantham gum

Joe’s $0.02

Longbranch Original: It would be tough to use the word perfect for this sauce, but this would definitely make my short list of ones that I’d like to have if I was stranded on a desert island. Heat level aside, it’s one of the best tasting sauces I’ve tried in recent memory. It adds great flavor without too much of vinegary tartness. De Arbol peppers are not a commonly used pepper these days and I’ve often seen it used for more of a heat effect, but it’s balanced by just enough habanero and chipotle. Quite simply, it was great on or in everything I tried it with, and you can’t go wrong by having a bottle. Pam from LBTC, if you’re listening out there…PLEASE SEND MORE! Awesome stuff!

Salsa Rio Verde: Tomatillas can be a very strong, sometimes dominating, flavor in sauces, but this sauce manages to blend well with Jalapeno for a very green tasting sauce with medium heat. Actually, the heat really tastes like its from the Serrano peppers, but it doesn’t overwhelm the yummy taste. I thought this sauce went best with Mexican food, and was a delight to pour over enchiladas. It was also good with meat, but it seemed to favor the lighter meats as opposed to darker (red) meats. Solid effort.

Hot Blonde: This sauce avoids one pitful of fruit-based hot sauces in that it’s not too fruity. I wasn’t exactly sure what a Manzano pepper was before I tried this sauce, but I think I’ll now be tempted to taste this pepper in other concoctions. A little spicier to me than the Original sauce above, I liked this best spread over spareribs or as a dip with chicken dishes. A very versatile and tasty sauce.

Dorsey?s Reserve: This is the ‘hottest’ of the sauces from LBTC…at least you’d think so from the list of peppers that are used. I liked the heat level, but there is an earthiness (for lack of a better word) to the taste that limited how often I wanted to use this sauce. This sauce made an excellent accompaniment for dishes where chipotle-ish flavor works best, and I liked it with Mexican food and soups/stews. I’d still reach for the Longbranch Original sauce first, but you get your HEAT from this one. Arriba!

Linda’s $0.02

Longbranch Original: Without a doubt, this is one of the best sauces I’ve ever tried. I can’t imagine our cupboard being without this bad boy. I believe the first words out of my mouth, and Joe’s, was “Wow…that’s great.” When they say original, they don’t mean first either. They mean ORIGINAL, as in there’s really nothing like it. The de Arbol peppers are a great paring with the remaining ingredients, many of which are roasted. So, you can expect a really rich taste that you will want again, and again, and again.

Salsa Rio Verde: Chicken fajitas are screaming for this sauce. Very, very green taste. I’m not big on tomatillos, so seeing that as the second ingredient made me skeptical. The tomatillos are NOT overpowering. In fact, they almost take a back seat to the fantastic pepper taste. Oh, and don’t think that the habanero is all wimpy because it’s on the lower rung of peppers. This one has some heat.

Hot Blonde: Admittedly, one thing I’ve done with all these sauces, as I do with most, is look at the ingredients first. I usually have a pretty good idea about what I will be tasting. I’ve been wrong on every one of their sauces. This one, for example, I was expecting to be much sweeter than it is. I have to believe that they have found the perfect balance in all of their sauces, because you can’t pick an ingredient out by a singled out taste. Above all, they don’t use boring peppers. This one has Manzano peppers and there is a subtle, but distinctive difference between them and their pepper peer the habanero.

Dorsey?s Reserve: The hottest of the bunch and still full of flavor. I mean, really, I’m so glad we had the chance to try all of these fabulous sauces. This one is so bold, spicy and yet still great on EVERYTHING. How do they do it?

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

HSB review for Salsa Rio Verde
Dorsey’s Reserve review
Hot Blonde review
Longbranch Original review
Salsa Rio Verde review
Saucerater

Give these reviewers a shout and ask them to review Longbranch Trading Company’s products as well.

Carl’s Big List of Reviews
Alien Zombie
Virtual Hot Sauce Museum
The Hot Sauce Guide

Want to review Longbranch Trading Company’s products for yourself? Go here and leave your own opinion:

www.rateitall.com
www.thehotpepper.com/viewforum.php?f=3

Recipes

You can find several tantalizing recipes through the Longbranch Trading Company’s website. Their list o’ recipes can be found HERE.

Dave’s starting to get the hang of this whole reviewing thang. Here are some more ruminations from his mind….

As a follow-up to our taste of Kato’s Productions….

Katos’s Meaner Greener:

This sauce has good heat but not as overpowering as some Habeneros can be. The lime and cider vinegar flavor help cool it down and give it a very fresh finish. I could see this going great with fish or anything else you want some citrus heat.

Kato’s Island Sauce:

Man this sauce brought back some memories. My father used to make Curried chicken kabobs and this tastes damn close to that. Great flavor if you love curry….I do, the wife doesn’t……don’t eat if you are trying to get any….nevermind. Anyways, I created a cream based pasta sauce with sauted chicken and fettucine, added a little Island Sauce….life was good, all by my lonesome.

Here are some notes following our feature on Torchbearer Sauces….

Torchbearer Sauces
#1 Every Day Sauce:

Think of a ground carrot sauce with a hint of spice. A fresh sauce that really can be paired with anything. I found that Cheeze It’s go great with this stuff, or anything else for that matter.

Torchbearer Sauces
#11 Sugar Fire

Joe said it best…..baby food with a kick. One of the most unique sauces I have tried yet. It’s just about the perfect dessert, if you like pumpkin pie with whipped cream. I think this would go great with fish or chicken…..in the meantime I will keep eating off a spoon.

Torchbearer Sauces Super Fancy #4, Tingly Sauce:

As the name suggests, it is tingly. Good heat that really sticks with you and a nice smoky finish. I don’t know if it’s the great marketing in the labels, or the uniqueness of the babyfood texture, but I do like this stuff. I’ve had this with plain old chips, in pasta, and on chicken. Every way I’ve tried it I like it.

Torchbearer Sauces Super Fancy #23, Fever Sauce:

A word of warning, do not each this stuff off a spoon like I just did. The fever sauce is causing me to sweat so bad I had to break out a towel. Despite the torture I love this stuff. It has a sweet initial taste from the shredded carrot base then the heat builds, and builds……………ok I just got back from a glass of milk. Another great one from torchbearer.

I’m Dave……from good ol’ Troy, Ohia as we call it. Been living with my sugarmama Danielle in Columbus, Ohio for about ten years. I am a novice hot sauce fan. In college, I grew quite fond of Franks Red Hot and consumed it with anything I could, as long as it cost less than $2 a meal. Pasta’s (mac and cheese), burritos (frozen, bought in bulk), etc…..

I was fortunate enough to meet true hot sauce aficionados, Joe and Linda Levinson in the last year and they have turned me on to so much more. Now it is not uncommon for my wife to look over at me halfway through a meal and notice that I am profusely sweating, and pounding water like it’s my job.

I look forward to sampling much more goodies, so long as it is never a teaspoon of Baboon Ass Gone Rabid. Oh yes, there will be paybacks, Joe.

We just recently ordered & received the new LeMillion Reserve done by Blair Lazar (of extremefood.com fame) for the LeGourmet Chef company. It’s obvious that they were clueless about the fanaticism of Blair’s fans (us Chileheads) who like low numbered bottles for collecting purposes. Below is an email exhange about what happened:

Dear LeGourmet Chef,

I recently ordered a LeMillion reserve from you and had a question. When ordering from Blair himself, the low numbers in the series go out to those who order sooner than later. Is this the case with you?

Joseph,

I’m sorry but I haven’t checked the numbers. They come to me with packing peanuts in the acrylic case and I haven’t opened that case. I’ve just repack them to ship straight out. I only received 24 initially and those have sold out. I’m in the process of getting more shipped to me.

Thank you - Sandey Bond
Le Gourmet Chef #34 - Esales

Sandey,

You are doing a great disservice to those loyal fans of Blair (you know, the Chileheads) who order early & often to get low numbered bottles as part of collecting. I consider myself one of those, and was disappointed to get bottle #854 after ordering 3 hours after ordering went online. I guess I can’t truly be upset because my bottle arrived safe & sound…but I would gladly pay the shipping back to get a low #. Call me crazy if you will…but there are more out there like me who feel the same way.

Joe,

I’m really sorry about that but we are a retail store and not just a distributor for Blair’s. If that was all I had to take care of, I would have opened every container to check the numbers. Unfortunately, I get my cases from our warehouse who in turn received them from Blairs. Some of these also went out to the stores and I don’t know what they received as far as numbers go. Blair did not mark the cases or the individual containers on the outside so I could check to see what was available. I do apologize for that but since we receive only a limited supply (I only initially received 24 bottles) I sent it out as soon as received. I still have about 80 outstanding orders to fill so you can see the time it would take to go through each and every container to check on the numbers. Maybe you can contact others to see about a trade????? I’m not sure how many Chileheads there are out there but judging by my orders there are plenty.

Once again, I do apologize and wich there was a way to check the numbers without taking each container apart to see them.

I will send an email to my buying department to see if we do this again for Blair to somehow mark the outside of each case of hot sauce with the numbers contained within. Maybe that would help some.

Suffice to say, LGC should have seriously had a debriefing about what to expect from us Chileheads and our collectibles. Anyone else who had a problem with this is welcome to leave a comment and tell your story as well.

TorchBearer Sauces Wins Three Prizes at the 2006 Scovie Awards

November 8, 2005
Mechanicsburg, PA

Already a six time national award-winner, the #7 Sultry sauce has taken yet another prize at the 2006 Scovie Awards, taking third place in the Best Red Sauce category. TorchBearer Sauces also took two more awards, a 3rd place in Best Desert Sauce category, and a 2nd place for Best Website. Please check out this award winning site at www.torchbearersauces.com.

We will be accepting the awards at a ceremony in New Mexico at the Fiery Foods and Barbeque Show in March, and hope to see you there.

TorchBearer Sauces is quickly becoming known because of our focus on taste. It is a condiment that tastes great (in or on anything) for people with any heat preference, up to and including the World’s Hottest Natural Sauce.
All of our sauces are all natural non-extract, with very little vinegar and no preservatives. The #42 Slaughter sauce, our hottest, is a dastardly concoction that has an all natural slow burn; sometimes it takes five minutes for the heat to build. Our award-winning desert sauce, #11 Sugar Fire is our sweetest blend, good for the impending holiday season. It is a mixture of mango, papaya, mandarin orange and habanero. Sugar Fire is great on or in Ice Cream or in your mixed drink/beer, and it will be a great glaze on the main course (even if it is tofurkey). Not only that it makes the worlds best apple pie, the recipe for that will be coming in a few weeks for the Christmas season on the website.

Do you have a love for hot sauce & other spicy fare?

Do you write passably well and have some creativity?

Do want to see your writing posted for people to read on this blog?

If the answer to all of these are YES, then drop us a line at:

thehotzone ‘at’ gmail dot com

We trying to increase the number of posts we are doing by bringing more writers into the fold. You don’t need to be a hot sauce collector, but we would welcome those as well. The more opinions we have, the better and more well-rounded our writing can be.

Nick Lindauer’s Hot Sauce Blog really is the shizznit. It’s a daily read for us, and we can certainly admit to having a little blog envy when it comes to how well his board is set up. Since Nick efforts to highlight good stuff in the world of hot & spicy fare, we thought it would be nice to highlight his blog and ask him to talk a little bit about his business, love of hot sauce, and all things blog-licious.

Background:
Sweat ‘N Spice started in 2001 as a college project - a website built out of the pure love of hot sauce. Back then there were only a select handful of places to buy hot sauces online and even fewer places for hot sauce related information. Subscribing to Chile Pepper Magazine and Fiery-Foods Magazine was the primary source of information for most chile heads, especially those in states like Oregon or Washington, locations not known for a ‘hot’ food culture.

Then, one year, the wife ran into a customer service issue with an online hot sauce retailer. The site will remain unnamed, but needless to say the customer service was so bad that it caused me to take a step back and think. I loved hot sauce enough and already had a huge collection of my own, why not try selling some online?

Shortly thereafter, Sweat ‘N Spice was transformed from an information portal to an ecommerce site. Our starting inventory was a mere 30 bottles that I picked out based on my own sauce preferences but quite quickly our inventory doubled, then tripled and today we now have over 1,000 different hot products.

The mission for Sweat ‘N Spice was quite clear: sell only GOOD hot sauces & related products and go above and beyond the customer service expectations.

We’ve since moved from our starting location in Oregon to New York, NY and may shortly be opening up a store here in Manhattan. Making the transition from online to brick & mortar is a large step and one we want to do well with. Our store plans are top-secret for now, but we’ve toured many hot shops (often incognito) to better understand what works and what doesn’t.

Back to the questions at hand….

Best Selling Products (in order):

• Frostbite Hot Sauce
• Blair’s 3AM
• Magma Hot Sauce
• Dave’s Ultimate Insanity Sauce
• 357 Mad Dog Hot Sauce Collectors Edition w/Bullet

Any dry Spells?

We don’t. Sweat ‘N Spice is not about making profit. Without sounding schmaltzy we’d rather take a loss and still deliver the best hot sauces we can find then count pennies.

Products not selling?

With every new product brought on, there is a worry that it won’t sell, especially with smaller manufacturers that don’t have the marketing or customer base that the larger guys have. And let’s face it, some products don’t sell – but that’s where the Hot Sauce Blog comes in. If we’re faced with a product that’s not selling, we’ll give it away to reviewers and readers. We’ll often throw in extra bottles with customer orders as well.

Older then 2 years?

Goodness no! Well, unless your talking about collector’s bottles like Blair’s Caldera or other items along those lines. Our product life cycle is never more then 6-8 months, once a bottle has been around longer then that it is rotated off the shelf and earmarked for the big hot sauce bottle heaven in the sky.

Inventory growth?

More please! Our initial inventory was only 30 different types of hot sauce and has now grown to well over 1,000 & we’re constantly adding new products.

Competitor Comparison?

We try not to compare ourselves to anyone, so that we can remain different and unique in our own right. We don’t have the nifty custom wooden crates that MoHotta does, nor do we have our own hot sauces like FireGirl does. What we have though is an intense love for hot sauces and we do carry more of the ‘smaller’ manufacturers then other sites. Often Sweat ‘N Spice serves as a stepping stone for the little guys before the major distributors pick them up. And we handle the products & orders ourselves, unlike some of the other online sites out there.

Eat the profits?

Of course! If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be in this business. In fact, that is the reason I started the Hot Sauce Blog. The blog originally started on the Sweat ‘N Spice website but soon took on it’s own personality and I made the decision to separate the two. That decision allows the separation of business and pleasure. Also, with the addition of the reviewers, the blog now serves as a testing platform for products to be added to Sweat ‘N Spice.

Vital Stats:
Nick Lindauer
nick@sweatnspice.com
______________________________

Sweat ‘N Spice Hot Sauces®
www.sweatnspice.com
300 West 55th Street
Unit 14-Y
New York, NY 10019
toll free. 866.99.SWEAT

The Hot Sauce Blog
www.hotsauceblog.com
If it’s not here, it’s not hot enough!

This is a first for the HZOB in that we are revisiting some products for a manufacturer whose products we adore. Back in May of 2005, we did a Feature on some of the Peppermaster sauces, which we truly enjoyed tasting. After sharing some tasting notes on tequila online with Tina Brooks of Peppermaster, she offered to send us a couple more items to try. Yay!

Raspberries in Heat: Raspberries, Spring Water, Dark Maple Syrup, Lemons, Scotch Bonnet Peppers, Finger Peppers, Cornstarch

Molten Maple: Pure Dark Maple Syrup, Heavy cream, Corn syrup, Scotch bonnet peppers

Our combined take:

Raspberries in Heat: See the above picture? You can just imagine those peppers working their sinister heat into those poor, defenseless raspberries. First impression is that the sauce is thin. Very thin…even with some added maple syrup in the recipe. Unlike the other Peppermaster sauces we’ve tried, it pours from the bottle like juice. Tina had a great suggestion about using it in mixed drinks, particularly with good tequila. A half tablespoon in a jigger of tequila for sipping is nice, or we particularly liked a jigger of it mixed into margaritas to gives them a nice spicy framboise twang. (We didn’t experiment with this idea, but we speculate it would be good in other mixed drinks using vodka as well.) For foods, it’s a pretty distinct raspberry flavor, so plan for that accordingly as you use it. Still, it’s pretty versatile. Joe tried it on ice cream before tasting the Molten Maple, and had good things to say about its mix of heat & sweet.

Molten Maple: It was a little ominous seeing those scotch bonnet peppers lurking in the moderately thick mass of maple goodness. Any notion that the heat would adversely affect the taste were quickly dispersed, however. The maple sauce is actually fairly creamy, and pours from the jar a lot quicker than expected. (In an almost very un-brilliant move, Joe almost emptied the jar’s contents out on the carpet. After a severe browbeating by Linda, Joe recovered just nicely.) The most challenging thing about this sauce was finding uses for it. After tasting, Linda’s first inclination was to use it as a glaze on meat, particularly ham. Being the glutton for punishment, Joe thought you could use it with ice cream…particularly to liven up plain ol’ vanilla or any other bland flavor. Aside from that, trial & error is they key. Any recipe which uses maple flavoring could benefit from the sauce, but you may want to try the Maple Cream Coulis if you want to avoid the added heat.

“The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!”

If any of you have seen the great movie “The Jerk” with Steve Martin, then you understand that feeling of excitement when you get something cool in the mail. For us, it looks like this:

We are now proud owners of bottle #176 of the 2005 Blair’s Halloween Reserve. It can now take its place amongst the other of Blair’s Reserves that we have in our collection.

Woot!!

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