We weren’t able to attend the Fiery Foods Show this year out in NM, but lots of people sure did. While there were quite a few new & old chilheads, there were definitely some in attendance who were not. Here’s some excerpts from a cool article about the Show from the azfamily.com site where the self-proclaimed tendermouth had a blast navigating the floor and met up with a few familiar faces/companies to us here at the HZOB….

Tamale time

The Three Hot Tamales company boasts, “We make grown men cry.” Sounds good, but the feminist in me stirs. Who would name a company “Three Hot Tamales?”

Another partnership of three women friends: a blonde, a brunette and a redhead. They hauled their products all the way from … New Jersey? OK, I’ll bite.

The Make Me Moan Mango Hot Sauce, infused with mango and pineapple, begs to be tasted. The first thing I savor is a light wave of fruity sweetness. The flavor lingers so that it overlaps with the back-kick of habanero that follows. I want more!

Kristi Smith, the redhead, says she and her partners work with each sauce “until we get that back-kick of heat.” No capsaicin extracts in these sauces, so it’s about flavor, she says. It’s a line I’ll hear throughout the weekend from other exhibitors.

Three Hot Tamales has been around only since last June. Yet, in the show’s Scovie Awards, named for the Scoville Scale that measures a chile’s heat, the mango sauce took third place in the “Hot Sauce ­ Fruit” category. Its Cry Baby Hot Sauce won first place for “Hot Sauce ­ Habanero.”

“They said it would be a miracle if we won,” Kristi says. “We were up against people who have been in the business for 12 years.”

Reading this makes us really start jonesing to try anything from the Three Hot Tamales. We haven’t had a good mango & habanero sauce in a while…and we’ve definitely tried.

Stupid Hot

Jim is a firefighter and owner of Mild to Wild Pepper & Herb Co. He’s also an Indiana farmer who grows the red savina habanero, the hottest pepper known to chileheads. He uses it in his products.

As I taste one of his barbecue sauces, food writer Gwyneth Doland approaches. She wants to try something hot. When Jim tells her that women tend to be the most tolerant of ultrahot sauces, she agrees that men are “wusses.”

Uh-oh. This could get ugly.

Jim simply says, “Of course, you’ve got to try the Stupid Hot. It’s a slow, creeping kind of heat.” He generously splashes it on a chip and hands it to her. She puts it into her mouth and instantly turns red.

“See, she thinks she’s hot right now,” he says. “Wait a couple of minutes.”

“That’s really hot,” she says. “All right, I’m going back to the beer table.”

A few minutes later she returns, her color back to normal. “That’s really hot,” she repeats. “It doesn’t go away.”

That’s why they call it “culinary bungee jumping,” he says.

I silently thank the chile god for this morning’s T-shirt warning and go in search of a margarita.

We had a similar experience with the Stupid Hot a few years ago when we tried it. We’re convinced that Jim was laughing at us as we went frantically in search of some liquid to drink. Any liquid.

There’s a lot more to read, but we’ll let you go there to read it for yourself. If you didn’t see the link above, you can find the article in its entirety here:

http://www.azfamily.com/sharedcontent/features/food/generalstories2/032906cckkFOODhot.7250d5ef.html

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