It’s funny how an average day can turn into an extraordinary day when you have met a new chilehead in the most unexpected places.

For those of you who don’t know, we own a very rare breed of dog called the South African Boerboel. That link, you will find, leads to a blog I have begun for them. They are the ultimate family protector. It’s not a breed for everyone, though. It’s a dominant breed that requires a dominant owner who is used to very large dogs. Our latest addition to the family, Marinda, is almost 8 months old and about 90 lbs. She will grow to be about 120 – 140 lbs. She is awesome and we spend tons of time training her so that she doesn’t rule our house. But I digress.

Every month on the blog I have a photo contest. Nothing is awarded except the notoriety of being the Boerboel for which everyone voted. It’s a lot of fun and you get the chance to see lots of different Boerboels of different colors, sizes and from all over the world. Well, for Halloween I decided to have an actual contest. The winner would win a $20 USD gift certificate to the online store of their choice (had to do this because of entries all over the world). I had a deadline set up and received an email from an owner in Sweden who asked me to extend the deadline because she had just received a witch hat to place on her female Boerboel, Chili, which she would be using for an upcoming party. I extended the deadline like she asked and it turned out that Chili won. I was excited for her and wrote an email back. In that email I included a “by the way” statement that Joe and I run a hot and spicy website. I didn’t know why she had named her dog Chili, but if there was any hot and spicy food connection, I was reaching out. Through a return email, and with much excitement, not only did I find out that she was a chilehead too, but that she was growing Naga Morich’s in Sweden and that she had been to our site before and had it bookmarked. A new friendship had begun.

Ewa, the Swedish chilehead, will be a new writer here on the HZOB. We believe she will bring a unique perspective to the blog as she writes about hot stuff sent to her, but mostly about what she finds overseas and what she makes with her own resources. I’d have to say you can’t really go wrong with Naga Morich as a resource. In fact, today, Ewa & her husband Goran are making a turkey that will be glazed with the first BBQ glaze they’ve ever made, full of dried apricots, passion fruit and Habanero. Maybe we’ll get lucky and that will be her first official post.

Look for Ewa’s introduction soon and give her a warm, HZOB welcome.

Oh, and Chili’s bio is pretty interesting. If it weren’t already obvious, Chili definitely lives up to her name. I’ll include it below.

Chili’s Bio

On the 18th of July 2004, 10.30 AM, Chili decided it was time to make her entrance into this world. She weighed 550 grams then, which nobody believes today when they look at her, weighing 60 kg and still growing!

Our lives, house and garden will probably never be the same again after Chili’s entrance. She’s one stubborn teenager that knows best on her own – Well, that’s what she likes to believe! She’s full of energy and mischief. One prank she loves to get up to is to steal my Chile plants in the summer and do as much damage that is possible. This normally causes me to go running after her, trying to save whatever’s left! I don’t know if she’s trying to tell me she gets too much chile in her food or if it’s the opposite!

When Chili was 4 months old she started obedience class and when she was 7 months old we started her on search (and rescue) training. I was going to make an rescue dog out of her but found out that one of the rules to become a registered search dog meant that I had to be able to pick her up and carry her a certain amount of distance first, well Chili grew and she grew and she grew…..I’m sure there’s a pony mixed in somewhere in her heritage! So I had to give the certification a rest and go body build first. But Chili kept up the training and LOVES it.

Chili shares the household with another Boerboel, Gretchen Mubi, who came to live with us when Chili was about a year old. They get along great and really enjoy creating even more havoc in the garden! Fortunately enough none of us is especially interested in gardening so we leave it to the girls to keep the garden in the standard they prefer!

It’s been an exciting year for us here at The Hot Zone Online. So that you all might appreciate it what an amazing time of growth it’s been, here is our official recap of this year’s goings-on:

- 13 Featured Product columns published, ranging from products such as hot sauce, snacks, pepper mashes, salsas, and much more

- 37 Hot Sauce Reviews published, many thanks to our ace writers Chuk and Jon

- 23 Product Reviews published, covering the wide world of spicy food products including mustards, jerk sauces, wing sauces, snack foods, BBQ sauces, and others

- 11 Homemade Hot Sauce reviews published, none of which could have happened without the generosity and hot sauce fervor of our readers

- 7 Restaurant Reviews published, almost all of which were first-hand accounts…to our gastronomic delight

- Many more articles about all sorts of fun stuff, industry news, and much, much more

Also happening in 2006:

- Our readership has more than tripled from the end of the year 2005. We now have a daily readership of over 200 unique visitors. Not bad when you consider this humble blog was getting 5 hits a day when it started.

- Added four fantastic writers with diverse backgrounds: Chuk, Jon, Tina, and Shannan.

- Introduced our new Featured Retailers column in favor of the antiquated Retailers list we had to scrap

- Our Hot Rock for Autism charity drive raised nearly $700 through eBay auctions and private donations. Autographed & personalized bottles were donated by Michael Anthony (from Van Halen) and Bill Wharton (the Sauce Boss).

- We were flown to Hollywood to be a part of the ‘Hot Sauce Movie’ which is still in the pre-production phases, and hung out with ultra-groovy new writer Jon

- Joe filmed for a spot on Emeril Live having to do with his triumph at a local chile pepper-eating contest

- Attended ZestFest 2006 (along with fellow writer Chuk) where we shmoozed and tasted our way through an amazing weekend of fun, all while meeting some great people within the industry

- References to this site appeared a couple of times in Chile Pepper Magazine, including a quote by Joe in the most recent Hot Sauce issue

- Had a catastrophic server crash right before ZestFest which nearly resulted in the loss of 2/3 of all of our posts and site template. It re-emphasized how terrible our web-hosting service was. We are now on a new server, which has been much more stable and even more important…is free.

- Officially changed out site name & URL. We dropped the ‘blog’ from our name and /blog from the end of our URL, and we’re now officially The Hot Zone Online at http://thehotzoneonline.com

Coming in 2007:

- Many more reviews (hot sauces and others) and Featured Product writeups

- Adding at least 3 new writers, including our newest one from outside the U.S.A.

- New Autism charity drive in April/May guaranteed to far exceed our monetary success of 2006

- Brand new writeup coming in Chile Pepper magazine. It’s gonna be way cool…and that’s all we can say about it right now.

- New site features and some new ‘skins‘ for our site design for those of you who want to keep our look a little different on your home ‘puter.

- More that we can’t even anticipate…;)

The moral of the story: stay tuned and keep checking in with us to read the articles, contribute, and see how we continue to grow. Our blog is only as strong as its readers, both new and old, and you all rock! Thanks to you all!

Marco contacted me via an online bulletin board after Joe had mentioned that I like medium heat salsas the best. Marco said, “I have just the salsas for Linda.” I was pleased to receive 3 jars of salsa from Marco and the chance to do my first official solo Feature.

First, I have to thank Marco for being incredibly patient at getting this Feature out. I was in the process of wrapping up last quarter in school, taking pre-professional exams and applying to graduate programs. When I finally got the time off of school, everyone in my family got ill…really, really ill. So, it’s taken a long time to get this done and I appreciate his understanding.

Now on to the story… » Continue Reading

I’ve heard more than one person rave about how good that Marie Sharp’s hot sauces are, so I recently had the opportunity to pick up a few and try them for myself.

For one thing, there are quite a few from which to choose. Fourteen kinds, to be exact. This one is one of the habanero pepper sauces, of which the heat ranges in 6 levels from ‘Mild’ to ‘Beware.’ This one, the Fiery Hot, ranks at 3 on their heat scale. It both looked and sounded like a good place to start.

The Fiery Hot is described as:

This sauce has much more Habanero pepper added and was originally developed especially for the Mexican market. If you want to experience the Mexican level of hotness, give this one a try.

As the company is Belizean, they obviously esteem their capacity for hotness as well above the Mexicans…which makes me wonder how the Mexicans view the Belizeans…hmmmmm.

Rather than just list the ingredients, I’ll show you a picture taken straight from the bottle:
» Continue Reading

Great article about our friend Dave Hirschkop and some of the goings-on concerning his company, Dave’s Gourmet. Thanks to John Grossmann and Inc.com for putting out such a great article:

Is Dave Insane? Inside A Brand Makeover

By: John Grossmann
PAGE 1 of 8

The branding experts said he desperately needed help with his image and message. (He did?) They’d do the job for free. (They would?) In the end, Dave Hirschkop, of Dave’s Gourmet, was offered six distinct approaches for rebranding his company. So here’s the big question: Is it crazier to change everything or nothing?

Click here to go to the rest of the article

A fairly long article at 8 pages in length, it offers some great insight about Dave and his company. Even if you have only a passing interest in the hot sauce/spicy food world or are a budding entrepreneur trying to make it big yourself, this article is well worth the time to read. Enjoy!

We still lick our chops thinking about some of the spicy jerky snacks we’ve tried in the past several weeks. From the Jersey Boyz to the House of Jerky, we’ve had some really good ones. In this same vein, we ran across this article from NewsOK.com out of Oklahoma:

Retailer savors double-digit increases in dried foods
Jerky movement

By Chris Brawley Morgan
Business Writer

Nobody called him a jerk, but Mark Garvey didn’t have a lot of supporters when he opened a store with just one product: dried meat.

“Everybody to a person said, ‘That is the dumbest idea I have ever heard of. You will lose every penny you have,” Garvey said.

Today, Garvey and partner Philip Robertson are called proprietors. As the owners of the Beef Jerky Emporium, they sell more than 250 varieties of jerky, including alligator, antelope, buffalo, duck, elk, kangaroo, shark and tuna. Beef jerky is still king, though, with Fesperman’s Beef Jerky from Okmulgee being the most popular.

Click here to go to the rest of the article

If you don’t feel like reading the article, then what we can tell you is that the proprietors mentioned are those for The Beef Jerky Emporium, and they hail from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. They carry a pretty good selection of some exotic stuff, like the mahi, shark, and tuna jerky from Caribbean Specialty Foods, who we met at ZestFest.

Tuna jerky not your thing? Their list of beef jerkys are equally as impressive, and a few of them spicy. They do have the Jersey Boyz ones, plus one called Xtreme Hotshoppe Habanero Beef Jerky which looks like it might be good as well. You could also go for some traditional items like nuts & snack mixes, of which spicy ones are available there as well.

We’re not likely to go to Oklahoma anytime soon, but we may say hello to the folks at The Beef Jerky Emporium. There’s always room for good spicy jerky. Mmmmm, jerky.

Cape Fear Pepper Company: Red Savina Habanero Premium Hot Sauce (wow, what a long name for a sauce). Ingredients: Red Savina Habanero Chilies, Vinegar, Onion, Tomatoes, Lemon Juice, Salt, Garlic.

Following closely on the heels of Joe and Linda’s excellent review of this same product, I too received a bottle from the main man himself, Tracy Campbell.

» Continue Reading

This is the first homemade hot sauce review we have endeavored to do, courtesy of Lynn Duck. Lynn is one of our fellow hot sauce aficionados and discussion-istas from The Hot Pepper discussion forum who stepped up and provided some of her homemade creations for us to try. The first of her two creations we will be reviewing is called Nuclear Scurvy, and we can’t imagine from where she got this name…but here’s what this sauce is composed of:

Ingredients: habanero and jalapeno peppers, vinegar, onion, spices, olive oil

To the casual observer, it seems to be a pretty standard list. That, plus a little olive oil. Olive oil? Not sure what that was going to do for the taste or the consistency, but I’m eternally the optimist about hot sauces and their ingredients until I am proven otherwise. That said, I set about the task of evaluating this sauce.

First impression: Removing the cap and taking a quick whiff, the aroma of peppers is dominant. Mostly the habanero, but there is a little bit of jalapeno nose to it as well. Where this issue is with this sauce is appearance. It is yellow. Not just yellow, but really yellow. Aside from mustard-based sauces, there are few other hot sauce I’ve ever tried that compare…and the main ones that come to mind are fatalii-based sauces, in which the flavor would be radically different than this. Also, the sauce is liquidy-thin and pours quite quickly from the bottle. This sauce would benefit from one of those flow-restrictors to keep you from wasting sauce if you get overzealous in your pouring. Having made my own sauce with consistency issues, I thought that a little more added base, like carrots, or a little less vinegar would solve this issue in no time at all.

Taste: Despite my previous concern, I knew that the real value of a hot sauce is in its taste. Because of its relative liquidity, I tried this sauce out initially in a couple of soup & stews as well as to add some needed schwerve to a little marinara sauce. The results were good for the most part. It was a damn fine add to a couple of different chilis and soups, and those really help bring out the flavor of onion & spices along with the peppers. I opted for the marinara because of the added olive oil, but the sauce provided more heat than flavor to my pasta sauce. It was somewhat less good poured onto food, but was great in any dish where you could mix it in.

Overall recommendation: This is definitely a sauce with potential, but has a little ways to go to realize it. I’ve done my hammering above about issues regarding color & consistency, but the fact is that this sauce tastes pretty darn good. With a respectable heat level (about 8/10), it will satisfy most chileheads’ yen for heat as well. Pairing it with foods may prove to be either a lot of fun or something of a challenge, depending on how motivated you are to get this sauce to do your culinary bidding. Bottom line: even with some issues, it’s a good sauce. Enjoy!

Even though Christmas is not exactly a big holiday in our house, we’re taking the day off from writing and plan to just watch a little football and chill out for the day.

Everyone here has been sick (or is currently sick), so we need the day for convalescence. Will get back to writing about hot & spicy stuff again tomorrow.

Happy Holidays!

You have your Blair collectibles…and your CaJohn collectibles….and even your Dave’s Gourmet collectibles.

Then there’s this one.

For quite a while, Melinda’s made a bottle that they called their Magnum, which was a 1-liter bottle which looked just like a regular bottle of hot sauce..on steroids. This bottle was one that I first saw while visiting Chili’s Fire Pit to do a little hot sauce shopping a few years back, but didn’t have the money (or the shelf-space) to pick it up at the time. I forgot about it for awhile, but was inspired one day to seek one out and see if there was any way to add one to my collection. I just imagined how swanky it would look along with the rest of my collectible bottles.

Upon calling the nice folks at Melinda’s, I was shocked to find out that these bottles were no longer in production. Apparently, these didn’t sell all that great…so eventually they stopped producing them. One of my brand new Melinda’s contacts gave me a tip that one of their loyal customers had bought up the remaining bottles, but that he might be willing to part with one (or more) for a collector such as myself.

Now enter ChileHeadEd. Ed is a chef, hot sauce collector, and now a budding hot sauce entrepreneur. Ed and I had a long conversation about hot sauces, the joy of collecting, and some of the cool people we’ve met along the way. In short, he offered to sell one to me to enrich my collection. Yup, I was giddy as a schoolgirl about it as well.

This did not go without a little tragedy, though. Thanks to the drop-kicking geniuses at UPS, the first bottle Ed shipped to me was broken in transit…turning my collectible into a pile of broken glass and hot sauce-soaked styrofoam pellets. Not what I was hoping for, to say the least.

The second shipping attemopt was flawless, and so this bottle sits on my shelf in all its glory. It’s just really darn cool. If you’re interested in getting one of these for yourself, or anything else collectible that Ed has to offer, drop me a line using our contact form and I’ll hook you up.

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