“Trader Joe’s Chile Spiced Mango”Ingredients: Mango, Paprika, Sugar, Salt, Citric Acid, Cayenne.

I’ve got to give Trader Joe’s a nice round of applause. They are one of the few “main stream” grocery stores that are integrating quality pepper products into their stores. From their Hot Sauce to their Chipotle Salsa, they actually have great flavor and heat. Unlike companies like Doritos that bring out a product that is no where near hot, Trader Joe’s is bringing out products designed with us chili-heads in mind.

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(Great article highlighting other uses of pepper, this time black pepper, in hot & spicy fare. This article published with permission of Tina Brooks from her own blog.)

Every time we introduce a new customer to our Tellicherry Black sauce, we inevitably get asked the same question: “What’s a Tellicherry“.

Tellicherry is not a “what”, it’s a “where”. Located on the South-Western coast of the tip of India, near Cochin, Tellicherry is in the heart of pepper country.

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When we think back to our time at ZestFest, we really rue the fact that we weren’t able to spend time with everyone we wanted to see. Such is the case with the fine folks at My Favorite New Mexico Foods. These fine ladies had a neat-looking booth which always seemed to be packed with people in line to try their stuff. We weren’t able to catch them during the Trade Day to do a ‘formal’ interview, so we just had to eat, chat, and run.

But, oh, what a good taste it was!

We weren’t always into eating chile sauce like this. We took a trip out to Albuquerque in 2001 to attend the National Fiery Foods & BBQ Show and visit Joe’s older brother (who lived there at the time), and he took us out to eat at a restaurant called Garduño’s. We were introduced to their gourmet chile bowls featuring both red and green chile and the rest, as they say, is history. Being the Midwesterners that we are, it’s nearly impossible to get anything that resembles the quality of Hatch chiles (or dishes made with them) where we live. Garduño’s is a regional chain only, so we knew that we weren’t going to be able to find that sorta thing while going out to dinner here either, even at Tex-Mex restaurants. We had sadly consigned ourselves to the fact we’d just have to relish our chile dishes on our all-too-seldom trips out West.

Well thanks to My Favorite New Mexico Foods, we can have those great chile dishes whenever we want it. On our bottle of Red Chile Sauce, we saw this list of ingredients:

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This sauce was gifted to us by none other than Cap’n Bones himself, Tracy Campbell, of the Cape Fear Pepper Company for our devious culinary uses.

Now we’ve tried a lot of habanero sauces to be sure, but that has never dissuaded us from trying a few more. The bottle has some pretty swanky looking label graphics, which stylistically looked a little familiar to us. Of course, it did. Ryan Davis, from Angry Pepper Graphix, cranked out a logo truly worthy of a habanero sauce of this caliber. From the ‘CF’ on the skulls’ headband to the overall feel of the design, you will almost be sorry to have to open this fine-looking bottle.

As we always do, we perused the ingredient list to see what was inside the bottle. We found this:

Ingredients: Red Savina ® Habanero Chiles, Vinegar, Onion, Tomatoes, Lemon Juice, Salt, Garlic.

Short, simple, and fully natural, you can’t go wrong with this list. Of course, the proof lay within the bottle…so a-tastin’ we went!

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Continuing our foray into the world of hot & spicy snack food, we ran across this box of Ass Kickin’ Habanero Popcorn while doing some random grocery shopping the other day, and just couldn’t resist the chance to purchase it…especially since it was on sale.

We’ve only reviewed one other spicy popcorn, the Dave’s Insanity Corn, so we didn’t have many other products by which to measure this one. In fact, we’ve made some pretty good spicy popcorn just by using other spice mixes…but we wanted to give this one a go and will use Dave’s as a measuring stick for now. In many hot shops, you tend to be able to purchase bags of spicy popcorn one at a time rather than 3-in-a-box, so at least we’d get three separate tastings by which to judge this one by its merits.

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Red Bandit Red Bell Pepper Habanero Hot Sauce

Ingredients: filtered water, tomato concentrate, apple cider vinegar, red bell peppers, habanero peppers, honey, carrots, papaya puree, salt, lemon juice concentrate, ginger, garlic powder, xanthan gum.

“Ha. Looking for my brother Green eh. Well he’s tied up right now. Red here. Stole this bottle from Mr. Big Shot himself. To give you a taste of what I’m cooking. Red bell peppers, carrots and papaya with a habanero kick. Be creative and try it on everything.” –Red Bandit

That’s one great hook printed on the side of this bottle. The sauce contained within, is even better. I was at Heather’s Heat and Flavor back in August when owner Brian Marx pointed out a new company to me. It was Green Bandit Hot Sauces, so naturally I picked up their hottest flavor, Red Bandit Red Bell Pepper Habanero Hot Sauce. After consuming well over half the bottle, the verdicts in…thanks for the suggestion Brian!

Oddly enough, the lemon juice is right up front upon first taste. But where this sauce really shines is the nice, mellow sweetness. The sweet hits your tongue in the following order; Papaya, then honey, and finally the Red Bell. Its really hard to tell them apart because they magically blend together just right.

I’ve eating this sauce on everything from eggs and bacon for breakfast to Ostrich tacos for dinner. When mixed with various foods, the honey and apple cider vinegar really start to stand out. Unfortunately, I had a very hard time trying to locate the oh so familiar fruity habanero flavor so I’m going to conclude that it was just added for a little bit of heat.

As I sit here, staring at the bottle, I can’t help but think, “I know that Bandit from somewhere”. Then it hits me! The Red Bandit IS our own Chuk Hell!

I know your secret Chuk, I’m telling your brother, Green!

Taste: 7, Heat: 6

Ingredients: Habanero pepper, vinegar, tomato, salt, spices and 0.1% of sodium benzoate as preservative.

A few weeks ago I went downtown to the Los Angeles Grand Central Market where I picked up a 4 ounce bottle of El Yucateco Salsa Kutbil-ik-de Chile Habanero (XXXtra Hot Sauce) for a grand $1.75! Usually for that amount of money, I get a sauce along the lines of Frank’s Red Hot (aka flavored vinegar). I walked over to the Taco Shop, ordered a beef burrito and slapped some of the sauce on it.

WOW! To my surprise this sauce was great! Since then I have gone through this faster than any sauce I’ve owned, and sadly, it is all gone. For a sauce that uses unripe green habaneros, it has an amazing hab flavor and heat. After applying it way too liberally to a burrito in a drunken stupor one night, I ended up watery eyed and running for more beer (which didn’t help the drunken stupor part and just spread the heat more evenly). This thing has quite a bite to it which hits you very quickly.

The taste is out of this world. Like I said above, it has a nice habanero flavor and the spices they use are spot on. I detect quite a bit of garlic, which combines nicely with the tomato. An added bonus is that you don’t have to refrigerate this one, leaving you much more room for other sauces!

Taste:9, Heat:7 and then it builds to a 9

Yowza! Our first road trip since ZestFest 2006, and this one will be with the kiddies! We’re venturing down to the Cincy area for the upcoming weekend to spend some time with some friends, and will certainly head up to Jungle Jim’s with them to do a little shopping.

A little hot sauce shopping, to be sure. Gotta get some more hot sauces for the collection and more hot & spicy stuff to try. Pictures to follow. Stay tuned!!!

We’ve been chatting off and on with Dave DeWitt from Fiery-Foods.com, which has made us spend some more time at his wonderful website. For those who may not have been there, it truly is a one-stop experience for so many great resources about hot & spicy fare, peppers, and other related topics. Being Thanksgiving Day and everything, we’re going to link you to some great recipes on Dave’s site courtesy of Nancy Gerlach. She pens these recipes:

*Curry Pumpkin Bisque

*Winter Harvest Salad

*Serrano Ginger Cranberry Chutney

*Spicy Green Beans

*Glazed and Roasted Onions

To check these out, visit Nancy’s page HERE.

Perhaps you might want some deep-fried Cajun turkey, but don’t want to take the risk of burning your house down in the process. It’s a bit pricy, but you can always get one of these from Cajun-shop.com.

Whatever you do, remember to enjoy the food and be thankful today…regardless of what you eat. Bon appetit!

This is 8-methyl-N-vanillyl-6-nonenamide, an alkaloid which is hydrophobic, colorless, odorless, and is a crystalline to waxy compound.

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