For those of you who are students of history- ancient history it now seems- you might recall that Joe & Linda had me write a brief introduction of who I was in the hot sauce world. The expectation was that I’d follow that up periodically with more writing about the hot sauce business and my role in it. I jumped at their offer, mostly because “periodically” was left undefined After catching a bit of grief that it meant something a bit quicker than geological time the second installment has arrived.

We left off with my brilliant business plan to form a chile pepper growing company. That plan consisted of throwing some seeds in the ground and calling a purely random assortment hot sauce makers to see who might be interested. To my everlasting good fortune, three of my very first customers turned out to be some folks who would go on to be some of the biggest names in the business a few years later. Among these was an aspiring restaranteur named Blair Lazar. Also included in this group was a duo of chefs, called appropriately enough “Two Chefs, Inc” who made the ‘Road to Hell’ and ‘Pure Hell’ series of hot sauces. A fellow by the name of ‘Dave’ who made a sauce called “Insanity” was also among those first few customers. From Mr Lazar I learned how to process the chile peppers into a mash that was unique among the industry at the time. Most mash was fermented and preserved with massive amounts of salt which rendered it nearly useless unless diluted down to nearly undetectable amounts. After a bit of trial and error, I learned to ‘heat treat’ mash and offer a product that really didn’t exist on a commercial scale. From the Two Chef’s I learned that selling fresh chiles for a living really wasn’t the brightest venture one could choose. As they needed fresh chiles for their processing, I was getting off duty from my 24 hour shift at the firehouse, loading up chiles, driving 20 hours straight to Denver CO, dropping off chiles, and 20 hours back to Indy just in time to start my next 24 hour shift at the firehouse. That will make an old man out of you in a hurry!

I also had no idea that the demand for habanero chiles was so great. In just a couple of short years of growing, I was shipping chiles everywhere from New Jersey to California and Canada to Puerto Rico. I had to shake my head a few times at the idea of Indiana grown chile peppers being sent all the way to Puerto Rico for use in hot sauce. The concept of a ‘global marketplace’ was really impressed upon me when Melinda’s started buying Red Savina(R) chiles from me. These were Indiana grown chiles being sent to Costa Rica to be turned into a Belizian hot sauce that was then sold in the US. Who’da thunk it

I was learning very quickly though, that farming was a *very* tough way to make a living. For all this ‘world wide fame’ there sure wasn’t much money to go along with it! The day I officially figured out I could truly call myself a farmer was when I found I was planting the next season to try and pay off the bills from the previous one! To be certain though, I *was* having a lot of fun at it and counted myself darned fortunate indeed that I had a ‘real job’ to help pay for the ‘chile pepper thing.’ I’ve always said that in the quest for fame and fortune, you can have the fame, I’ll be happy with the fortune! Without doubt you can make a small fortune in the hot sauce business- all it takes is starting out with a large one.

The chile pepper farming has led to some pretty interesting adventures. It seems to be the bulk of the “fame” as folks seem tickled with the idea, or at least were, that chile peppers could be grown somewhere other than the tropics. The Food Network has been to my fields a couple of times now to film the operations, specifically a little bash that I throw called “Open Fields”. That will be the subject of the next update, occurring sometime soon I’m sure

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