Ingredients: Red Savina Habanero Chiles, Vinegar, Onions, Garlic, Black Pepper, Chile Caribe and a select blend of dehydrated vegetables.

Joe and Linda were benevolent enough to bring me this hot sauce to have and to hold until hunger does us part. I must now officially say I’ve found my new favorite hot sauce and it’s name is CaJohn’s Fiery Food’s Ace Hot Sauce. This little ditty is one of the best overall hot sauces that I’ve ever had from taste all the way down to the printing of the label. I really can’t say enough good things about this product, but for you the readers, I’ll give it my best shot.

First thing I noticed is the quality of the packaging. The label is a nice, high gloss label (possibly due to an aqueous coating). Most of the time when you take a sauce out of the fridge, condensation forms and gets sucked up buy the label. This causes it to deform and look oh so not pretty. But not with this high gloss label! The condensation refuses to be absorbed!

Then there is the graphic design. This isn’t some middle of the road, 72 dpi jpg that was printed out and slapped on the product. Oh no, this is a high res, non-pixelated, professionally designed (probably in Adobe Illustrator) logo and text. From the description of the product on the side down to the flaming spade logo, this are all top of the line! If that wasn’t enough, it actually comes with a bar code as well (something that most independent hot sauces leave out)!

Enough with the packaging, onward to the real important stuff…how does it taste? I’ll tell you in one really long word, “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”. This sauce is amazingly good! Ace is made primarily from Red Savina peppers, which is the current Guinness Book record holder for the hottest pepper with a Scoville Heat Unit of 577,000 (but is not the hottest pepper ever, that would be the Naga Morich at 1,047,000 SHU) so right away you know this is going to be hot. At first sampeling, you’ll get a nice, sweet taste reminiscent of a Bell Pepper and then the heat kicks in. It a burn that makes your tongue feel like it has been stung by a bee and knocks the wind out of you a little. This lasts only a few seconds and leaves you with a little pain, that’s when the taste returns.

The overall taste really is amazing. I have been using this sauce on everything and have yet to find something it does not go well with. From eggs, to hamburgers, to dipping sauce, this product will kick the heat and taste up 10 notches. So, in closing, buy this product! No self-respecting chili-head should be without an Ace in the hole, and this Ace is sure to make you a winner every time. Walk, don’t run (because you may trip and I don’t want to be liable for that) to your nearest web terminal and buy this product!

Taste: 10, Heat: 8.76237

[This is the first in a series of “mini-reviews” of sauces by Peppermaster. I call these “mini” because the bottles I have are sample-sized…only 45mL, to be precise. It’s enough for a good tasting once or twice, then maybe use on one meal before they’re gone. Definitely enough, though, to get a good idea on what to say about each of them.]

I have been reading the merits of the Hurricane Mash for quite a while, usually on the Hot Pepper Discussion forum. Consistently, the word “hot” is a running theme. Very hot. Habanero-ish hot. Inferno-like hot. Non-extract inferno hot and the like. Does it live up to its reputation? Seeing the 10+/10 flames indicator and with jar in hand, I set out to find out for myself.

Ingredients: Scotch bonnets and habaneros, fresh persian lime juice, fresh key lime juice, sea salt, citric acid

Taste: The disclaimer on the website says, “you can’t get any hotter than this without using additives!” Just one whiff will tell you that this sauce is one to be reckoned with, as the freshness of the capsicum almost assaults your nasal hairs. Just trying a dab on the tip of my finger lights up my heat sensors, but not before getting a really good taste of the habanero/scotch bonnet mixture. For a sauce which has this upper-limit sorta heat, you can really appreciate the taste of the peppers…particularly how fresh they seem. I tried this as an addition to some chili and as a condiment for grilled chicken, and both were made fiery good using this sauce. The heat level is actually a bit insidious, and builds the more you eat. After a while, it more than matches its 10/10 heat level.

Recommendation: There’s a lot to like about this sauce. It’s has great taste of pure chinense peppers, mammoth amounts of heat, and no frilly additives or preservatives. I might wish for it to be a tad bit thicker, but no matter how you slice it…this sauce just rocks. If you like it mega-hot, then this is one sauce that you should have in your stable of home sauces. 45mL of it probably isn’t enough.

Admittedly, it can be tough to find snacks that a chilehead can truly enjoy. Trust us, we know! Well thanks to Dave’s Gourmet, those of us who want a heaping pile o’ capsaicin in our snacky foods can be pretty happy. About one year ago, we reviewed Dave’s Burning Nuts as part of our Featured Products page for Dave’s Gourmet, so we knew all too well that Dave can make some fabulously spiced peanuts. Our mission was to see what he did with the Dave’s Smokin’ Nuts, so this endeavour was one we relished doing.

Ingredients: peanuts, chipotle pepper, salt, monosodium glutamate, dextrose, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, paprika, spice, garlic powder, onion powder, natural flavor (smoke flavor), corn syrup solids, modified food starch, soy protein isolate, malic acid, not more than 2% silicon dioxide (added to prevent caking), peanut oil

Taste: Make no mistake, these don’t pack the heat that the Burning Nuts do. In fact, they’re not that close at all. What they have is great flavor with just a smidge of chipotle heat, probably no more than 4/10. Although the we didn’t smell too much chipotle from the can, it really shows up in the taste. Another online review mentioned that the BBQ taste was more prevalent than the chipotle, but we felt it was alot more balanced than that. Linda, our resident chipotle fanatic, made yummy noises through a mouthful of peanuts when asked about how good the chipotle flavor was! I liked them as well, but almost felt like I was cheating on the Burning Nuts with this new addiction. (Don’t worry sweetie, these are just a phase I’m going through…really!) There aren’t nearly enough snacks with chipotle BBQ, so this one fills a void just nicely.

Overall recommendation: Addictive. Terribly addictive. There was a moment of sadness as we reached the end of the container’s contents…so it was great that Dave sent us three! Perhaps these should come in a larger package. 16 ounces? Two quarts? A 55-gallon drum? Anything to keep ‘em in your house in an acceptable quantity. These won’t erode your tastebuds off with heat, but who cares? You’ll be happy enough with their BBQ-ish taste and manageable heat that you may not even notice how many times you reach for another handful before realizing how many you have eaten. A great snack option for your resident chilehead. Remember, everyone’s grabbing Dave’s nuts…why don’t you?

These are the Twelve Steps of Chiliheads Anonymous.

1. We admitted we were powerless over chili peppers — and that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity; or at least make it stop burning!

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Dave DeWitt as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless inventory of our hot sauce fridge.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being that we really did like the taste of scotch bonnets.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all the Tobasco from restaurant tables everywhere and replace it with REAL hot sauce.

7. Humbly asked Him to not remove our seeds.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to try even harder in the future to turn them all into chiliheads.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would keep them from really enjoying the burn.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were deficient promptly bought another bottle of hot sauce.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with capsaicin, as we understood it, praying only for knowledge of the fact that there are only 15,000,000 SHUS in pure cap and the power to carry that message to the rest of the world.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of eating peppers, we tried to carry this message to chiliheads, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

This will likely be one of our last big posts about our trip to Hollywood for the hot sauce movie. Our trip was such a blur that we weren’t able to take as many pics as we would have liked, but here are a few that we have:

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From our California hot sauce shopping trip, here are a few gems we brought back to OH with us:

We really strove to find some quality sauces or ones with unique ingredients. These are more likely to get opened & used rather than just sit on the display shelf. We picked up:

Marie Sharp’s Fiery Hot Habanero pepper sauce
Marie Sharp’s Grapefruit Pulp Habanero pepper sauce
Ashman’s Curry Scotch Bonnet Hot Pepper sauce
Ay Que! Salsa Cacahuate Hot Sauce
Mama Africa’s Zulu Sauce, Sweet & Hot Kiwi Chilli

Marie Sharp’s has been one brand we’ve wanted to try for a while, so we’ll look forward to opening those. The Ashman’s is a Jamaican brand, and this sauce looks to be a fascinating combination of curry & scotch bonnet peppers. Mama Africa’s Zulu Sweet & Hot looks like it might be more sweet than hot, but we hadn’t seen too many hot sauces made with kiwi fruit so it was worth a few bucks to try it out. Cacahuate is peanut in Spanish, and this peanut hot sauce is made with chipotle and japone peppers. Not sure how that will taste, but it looked good enough for now. Stay tuned for our tasting notes on these.

Not to be confused with hot sauce, this one just looked great for cooking. The Thai Green Coconut Cooking Sauce by New World Flavors also looked amazingly good, if you believe their combo of ingredients. This is a product made by our friends at RoJo’s Gourmet Foods, so we know their stuff is pretty damn good overall. We’ll have to find out what food we like this sauce used on best.

Shhhh! Be vewy vewy quiet! I’m hunting wabbits! Errr, hot sauce that is!

Ingredients: Tomato paste, water, pepper extract, vinegar, sugar, molasses, soy sauce.

Back when Joe and Linda were in town, we headed over to the local hot sauce shop, Light My Fire. I couldn’t help picking up a bottle of Endorphin Rush Beyond Hot Sauce. I must admit, I was tricked by the name and psychedelic label…darn marketing ploys playing on my common sense….

As always, the first test I do is the finger taste. This allows me to sample the heat and taste to determine how much to use and on what foods to use it on. As you can see in the picture below, the first taste feels like a brick to the face (please note the bulging neck tendons and scrunched up face)!

One soon realizes that the brick that hit your face was only made out of cheap styrofoam. The heat dies back within a few seconds (as confirmed by a low-medium heat tolerant roommate, Dave Reed). So what was the surprise, face scrunching taste if not the heat? It’s the pepper extract! Some of you are now saying, “But isn’t that the heat?” and those people are right. When you extract capsaicin, generally you use ketones, which leave as bitter, metallic taste behind and that is what’s going on with this little sauce.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this is a really interesting hot sauce. The taste, extract bitterness aside, is very intriguing. The ingredients blend really well and the molasses and tomato paste stand out as the major flavors. It will leave you tongue in pain and tears in you eyes if you eat a lot of it at once (ie: copious amounts on a burrito). Unfortunately, no endorphin rush occurred.

Taste: 7, Heat: 8.7267

Occasionally we run across a media article which really delves into the psyche of the average chilehead. This article is a good one for that. Click the link at the bottom to see the rest of it.

Forget the mild life — pepper fans can’t get enough of hot chilies

Gwen Schoen
The Sacramento Bee
Jul. 21, 2006 12:00 AM

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Chili-heads have no sympathy for those of us who live in fear of the hot pepper.

While blinking back tears, mopping sweaty brows and reaching for tissues to dab at their noses, they croak their insults and boast of their conquests.

Click here to see the rest of this cool article!

Words from the DEFCON Creator himself….

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On nearly every long trip we make, a quest to a hot sauce shop is sure to be somewhere on our agenda. Our trip to Hollywood was no different in this regard. Thanks to the inestimable Mr. Passow, who was our guide to the streets of Tinseltown itself. After our evening repast, accompanied by some really good tequila, we ambled off to the L.A. Farmer’s Market in search of the hot shop known as Light My Fire. Peering within the shop, we saw this sight which is all-too-common to chileheads who have found a slice of hot sauce nirvana:

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