“Out with the old, in with the new”

Gone are the old bottles of Monty’s Fire Lizard, with an old label design and ingredients that didn’t want to stay mixed over time. Enter the NEW Monty’s Fire Lizard with a new formulation which includes a lot of what made the previous incarnation so good. Along with a new label design, courtesy of Dave Kellett of the Sheldon comic strip, Monty’s Fire Lizard hot sauce is back with a vengeance. As to the commentary of what’s inside the bottle, Monty describes the sauce as:

Monty’s Gourmet Fire Lizard Habanero Hot Sauce is a masterful blend of all natural ingredients that have come together to create a fiery treat for lovers of Louisiana style hot sauces. This hot sauce will add spice to any and all Louisiana style cooking.

The ingredients of this sauce has some of the same ingredients as the old, but some new also:

Ingredients: peppers (may contain red savina habanero ™, red rabanero), vinegar, horseradish, ginger, other spices, xanthan gum

Monty has incorporated two kinds of fresh, not ground, habanero peppers while keeping the ever-popular Red Savina in the mix. Gone is the ground annatto, which only served to provide coloring anyway. With the exception of the thickening agent (xanthan), this is an all-natural list that’s short but sweet.

First impression: After getting over how much I liked the bottle on the outside, I carefully unwrapped the cap, removed it, and took a gentle whiff of the sauce. The whiff is anything but gentle, though. This sauce simply smells potent. Not sure if it’s just the red savina or whether or not the ginger and horseradish create such a pungent aroma. Either way, I salivated at the thought of what this sauce must taste like. Pouring some out onto my sample plate for review, I saw this:
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Some righteous props go out to Dave Ashley of the Ashley Foods Co. for his writeup in a recent online edition of the Christian Science Monitor. Dave’s sauces rank as some of the first that Joe ever owned, tried, and collected many years ago when he first started on his way to become the collector is he is today. In fact, the Mad Dog Liquid Fire was one of the first hot sauces he ever purchased! Anyhow, we never thought we would ever be printing an article excerpt from the Christian Science Monitor, but it’s a great article. Way to go, Dave!

Here’s a snippet of the four-page article:

He brings the heat to cooking

Self-taught chef David Ashley stokes America’s appetite for hot sauce.
By Jennifer Wolcott | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Sudbury, Mass. - Never before have I tasted hot sauce off a toothpick. But when my mouth caught fire 10 seconds after tasting “Inferno,” one of the hottest of hot sauces in the world, I understood why David Ashley, maker of Mad Dog hot sauces, had urged me to sample his sauce with a toothpick rather than the plastic minispoon I’d used to taste his other, milder sauces. He also insisted – in a stern but kind tone – that I place the toothpick in the center of my tongue, by all means avoiding my lips and the tip of my tongue. He also placed a tall glass of milk in front of me, explaining that a swig of milk is the best way to cool off the burn.

He’s done this before, I realized. I wasn’t his first victim. There must have been some hapless tasters in the past who had pursed the toothpick between their lips and regretted it. Ah, yes, I noted: Each of his colorful, playfully self-illustrated sauce labels features a warning. Some are light-hearted (”Not for pussycats”), and others downright dire: “Warning: This sauce is very hot – use it at your own risk.”

“What other business allows you to torture people for a living?” he jokes.

“Inferno” is not even the hottest of Mr. Ashley’s line of 15 bottled sauces, which he launched in his kitchen in 1985 at the urging of friends who couldn’t get enough of his homemade barbecue sauce. He also produces a sauce dubbed “357″ for its 357,000 Scoville heat units – a scientific grading system for the heat intensity of chili peppers. That’s a big leap from Inferno’s 89,000 “Scovilles,” as industry insiders call them.

Though he’s turned on the heat since his early days at the stove, Ashley’s favorite is his more tame “Green Amigo,” a blend of habanero peppers, onions, garlic, cilantro, vinegar, and lime juice, which one can eat by the spoonful. “It’s an everyday sauce that’s great with anything, especially eggs,” he says.

But as long as the market demands tongue-scorching sauces like 357, this self-described chief alchemist and founder of Ashley Food Co. plans to deliver. “It doesn’t have to be hot to be great,” he says. “But because lots of people want it hotter and hotter, I respond to that. I have to go where the market goes.”

Click here to read the rest of the source article

Great news from our hot sauce buddy, “The Big Show,” also known to some as Paul R. from Connecticut. His combination hot sauce & cigar shop will be opening in a little over two weeks from now. Paul passed along the pertinent info, so here it is:

GRAND OPENING

Fire N Smoke wishes to announce their Grand Opening of their first Brick and Mortar store at 96 Center St, Southington, CT on Thursday July 12th at 5:30pm. The Southington Chamber of Commerce will have a Ribbon Cutting at 5:30pm, and the Grand Opening Celebration will continue through Sunday July 15th.

Perdomo Cigars will have a Representative on site Thursday afternoon from 2pm to 8pm with a buy 3 get 1 special on all Perdomos. Friday from 3pm to 6pm a representative from Ghurka and Oliveras cigars will also be holding a buy 3 get one free special. Saturday, Camacho cigars will be here from 10am to 2pm and from 2pm to 6pm Maxx from Cusano and Rocky Patel Cigars and will offer a buy 3 get 1 free special as well. And many others representatives from various cigar manufacturers will be stopping in.
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I’m not sure if any of you remember, but Monty’s stuff is the very first review we did way back when we had our family website months before we moved it over to a blog. I wish we would have had commenting available at that time. Then again, it’s nice having it now when I can tell you how far he has come.

His old labels, while being very creative, were original but not terribly professional looking as they are now. They definitely have more public appeal now, though you have to start somewhere. All of his sauces had a lot of separation when they sat for a while, which is not my personal favorite, but no more. All of them blend beautifully. And while he started with very few products, he now has a bazillion…I know this because he sent them to us. LOL (Love ya, Monty)

Seeing as though I’m a huge chipotle fan, I decided to have another run at Dancing Fire. Without further ado…

Ingredients: chipotle peppers, vinegar, horseradish, ginger, other spices, xanthan gum

First Impression: As before, the vinegar smell is very prominent. This made me wonder if there would be a different taste to sauce than before. It pours out on to a spoon nicely and had great consistency, though slightly thin. It has great color for a chipotle sauce which usually tend to be a bit on the darker, muted side. And the best…no separation.

Taste: As I had wondered, you could taste the vinegar right away, but it didn’t hang on like it did with his initial batch. The separation at that time created a sauce where the top layer would be mostly vinegar and the peppers and spices would settle to the bottom, even in a small sample. Thus, I got a better opportunity to gauge the full spectrum of this sauce with that one issue corrected. It has a slightly sweet beginning, but a really nice chipotle, smoky finish.

Overall Recommendation: I’ve got to tell you that I think this would be an outstanding wing sauce. If you don’t like thick wing concoctions and just want simplicity that’s going to give you flavor with a little bit of heat, this is your sauce. I have really enjoyed this in soup and on eggs. I also like this for dishes like Chipotle’s naked burritos. It’s very mellow, but very flavorful and is well suited for any dish of Spanish or Mexican derivation. My next experiment with this is adding a bit of oil, lime and pecans for a salad dressing.

Finally, Monty, thanks for the reformulations. You really have come a long way. As always, thanks for your incredible generosity. May you have much success.

Hello,
One week ago, we published an excerpt to an article about the Austin Hot Sauce Festival written for the Sun-Sentinel out of South Florida area. In our post, we wondered out loud why the author had posted an article about the show a few months before the event that made it sound like she had recently attended. In a first for this blog, we received an answer from the author herself clarifying her reasoning for writing that article now:

I wrote the review of the Austin Hot Sauce Fest. Thanks for posting it. I’d like to point out that early in the article I wrote that I had attended LAST YEAR’s fest and that’s what I was writing about (so I’m not appearing to be at the upcoming one, as you seem to state). The idea is to write about last year’s so that people can go to this year’s and have some idea what to expect.

Thanks!
Theresa Everline

P.S. Often travel articles are timed so that people can say, “hey, I want to go to that,” and book a ticket — thus the content relies on the previous year’s event, and the writing tend to be more story-like, rather than a straightforward review.

Thanks, Teresa, for setting us straight on this. If you’re able to attend this year, we’d love to hear about that trip as well!

Taking a short break from our reviewing hot sauces and such, we turned our attention this weekend to taking some pictures of our chile pepper garden. It’s been about a month or so since all the transplants were done, so they’ve had some time to grow while adjusting to their new digs. We’ve been feeding these plants some products that we got from the knowledgable folks at Cross Country Nurseries. We’ve been doing weekly post-transplant feedings that have included some FISH & KELP #1 FERTILIZER, which is primarily a 4-1-1 liquid fish emulsion, and some KELP & FISH #3 FERTILIZER, which is a 90% emulsified seaweed solution that’s like a multivitamin for plants. The results have been pretty striking for some, but not others. Here’s a photo log of where these plants are in their growth now. Above you can see the star of the group, which are the Sandia plants.

As you can see, these Sandias already have a few peppers growing on them. These are mid-season peppers, so it’s now inconceivable that they’d be growing some adolescent peppers already. The fact that they are light-years ahead of the others in growth, though, is what’s so amazing about these.
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Finding it’s way into my hot sauce loving presence is yet another one of Csigi Chilli Sauces. This time around, it’s not a Pasta Sauce but in fact an actual hot sauce.

Csigi Chili Sauce Big Boss Jalapeno Tomatillo Ingredients: Vinegar, Jalapeno chilies, tomatillos, extra coarse sea salt, Hemp Protein (0.00% THC), roasted garlic, arrowroot, turbinado sugar, spices.

After reading over the ingredients list I stopped at one in particular; Hemp Protein. I jumped for joy, then was saddened by the fact that it’s 0% THC, then jumped for joy again. FINALLY, someone who’s paying attention! For those not in the know, hemp seed (which is what hemp protein is derived from) is the most complete source of food out there. So along with a interesting tasting sauce, you get a big boost of health hemp protein to help your body do what it needs to do.

Speaking of interesting tasting sauces, this would nail that category. It’s your standard green sauce with a little bit of a kick and a little bit of tart mixed in. Unfortunately it is a little heavy on vinegar, which would cause it to be on the watery side. Luckily, sauce creator, Lars, threw in some arrowroot to thicken it up a bit. Distracting vinegar taste aside, the next flavor is green. While some of you will say, “Passow’s been consuming too much hemp seed protein if he thinks green is a flavor” (and some of you might be right), green is a descriptor for a very, fresh, organic, chlorophyll taste. This is derived from the unrippened Jalapenos and the tomatillos.

The green taste of Jalapenos combined with the tartness of the tomatillos mixed with the sweetness of the turbinado sugar causes a dizzying flurry of tongue sensations. I wonder how many times Lars had to mix the doses to get the tastes to stack like that? There is a hint of garlic that lingers but it is dominated by the sea salt. While the sea salt does bring out the flavors of the tomatillos and Jalapenos, it’s a little bit too up front for my tastes. However, when cooking with this sauce you won’t have to throw any salt for taste, especially if you are making an omelet (which I highly suggest doing).

For a green sauce using unrippened Jalapenos, this has quite a kick to it. The Jalapenos attack the front of your tongue while the tomatillos grab the sides, and the vinegar makes you pucker up just a bit. In the end, it actually seems like the Jalapeno and Tomatillos really are the “Big Boss” of this sauce.

Taste: 7.8, Heat: 3.5

Chile peppers know they’re getting some righteous attention when they get a writeup in Time Magazine. This article, which recently appeared as a link on CNN.com, offers some historical perspective along with a look at the latest hot pepper to grab people’s attention, the bhut jolokia.

Chili Peppers: Global Warming
By SIMON ROBINSON/TEZPUR, INDIA

In 1492, when Christopher Columbus set off from Spain to find a westward route to Asia, he was looking to secure Europe’s kitchen, not change it. Europeans had used black pepper as a medicinal aid and to spice up their cooking since Greek and Roman times. The ingredient, imported from the Spice Islands of Asia, had fueled the economies of trading ports like Alexandria, Genoa and Venice. But by the Middle Ages, black pepper had become a luxury item, so expensive that it was sold by the corn and used to pay rent and taxes. When the traditional land and sea routes to Asia were cut off by the rise of the Ottoman Empire, European traders looked for new ways to India and the lands beyond — not just for pepper but for other lucrative spices, and for silks and opium. Columbus headed west, certain he would find a new route to the East Indies. He never got there, of course, but in the islands of the New World the Italian navigator found a fiery pod that would, within years, not only infuse southern European cooking with bold new flavors but also revolutionize cooking in India, China and Thailand, the very places he’d set out to reach.

The remarkable spread of the chili (or chilli, or chile, or chile pepper, to use just a few of its myriad names and spellings) is a piquant chapter in the story of globalization. Few other foods have been taken up by so many people in so many places so quickly. Ask a Chinese chili lover or an Indian or a Thai and most will swear that chilies are native to their homeland, so integral is the spice to their cooking, so deeply embedded is it in their culture. European and American chili addicts, though less numerous, are just as passionate about the spice.

Click here to read the rest of this article

Sorry for the title of this review. There’s not much I can do with the name Csigi Chili Sauce Spicey Fra Diavolo Pasta Sauce. But that doesn’t mean the sauce isn’t creative. In fact, it’s down right delicious!

Ingredients: Tomato Puree, organic crushed tomato, red onion, tomato paste, extra virgin olive oil, basil, minced garlic, orange Habanero (Fresh Whole Pods*), extra coarse sea salt, turbinado sugar, coarse black pepper, spices.

The one thing that I love about this sauce, besides the taste, is the label. Why do I like the label so much, you ask? Well, hold you horses. I was going to get to that point but you interrupted me with that question. Now, where was I? Oh yes, the label.

Besides that strange logo of “two peppers screaming” as company owner, Lars described it (I still say they are English Bull Dogs), is the color of the label. It’s white! 99% of the Pasta Sauces on the market have a red label because it matches the color of what the sauce is. Imagine your walking down the Pasta Sauce isle in the grocery store. Horribly tacky music playing over the loud speaker, occasionally interrupted by a request for a price check or a clean up. Screaming children demanding that their parental units purchase them candy. Row after row of red labels uniformly spaced. But wait, there’s a white label! It just jumps out at you because it doesn’t blend in. I must say, Lars will get a lot of attention with this label.

You might have noticed that Lars put an asterisk in the ingredients list next to orange Habanero. That is in reference to the line stating, “*not every jar will contain a habanero pod. This is due to the canning process”. A slight disappointment fell over me when I read that because if you are marketing a “hot pepper product” you should be able to guarantee a pod in every jar. Instead of a whole pod, perhaps chopping it up and mixing it in would guarantee a pod. Luckily, there was a pod in my jar. It tasted a little different than most Habaneros I’ve had, though. It was extra fruity and all the ingredients, especially the tomato, had been absorbed into the pepper. I quite enjoyed that mix of flavors.

This is definitely a pasta sauce. I know, I know, it says so right on the label. There you go again, interrupting my review with obvious statements. What I mean to say is that it has the standard taste qualities as all the other pasta sauces on the market with a few differences. The tomato, onion, and basil are the major dominating flavors. There is a slight “slick” taste that coats your tongue. This is the standard occurrence when olive oil is used as an ingredient.

The fruity flavor of the Habanero is definitely detectable but it’s heat has been squashed. There is some back of the throat heat there that lingers for a bit, but it is not enough to scare people away. Coming in at the background is a little dash of black pepper and a smidgen of sugar, which complements the tomato quite nicely. It’s also nice to see that Lars didn’t use any vinegar or preservatives. While it does shorten the shelf life of the product, it allows you to really get the flavor of the sauce without that nasty distraction of vinegar.

Overall, what a top notch sauce. Everything used tastes extremely fresh, as if I had my imaginary Italian grandmother just cook it for me. That paired with the size of the jar and label makes this a perfect sauce for any type of pasta. Also be sure to make some casadias with it (just be sure to throw in a few more Habaneros to kick up the heat)!

Taste: 10, Heat: 2

It’s not often that we get a request to review some hot sauce from across the ocean in England, so the email we got from Nick & Zoe at Fire Foods (UK) definitely got our attention. Chile peppers are taking the world by storm, and those in the British Isles are no exception to this invasion. This sauce, the Woody’s Extreme Sauce, arrived in a simple brown padded envelope several days ago, and I’ve been working it into as much of my meals as possible trying to appreciate its flavor and uses. Always conscious of a sauce’s composition, I noticed the list of ingredients which said:

Ingredients: fruit juice, carrot, chilli (18.5%), vinegar, mustard, black treacle

Now, fruit juice and carrot being the first two ingredients on the list didn’t strike me as an extreme sauce…but it all depends on your tolerance, of course. The “chilli” is apparently a scotch bonnet pepper, and noteworthy is the addition of mustard since it can be a strong taste that some people either really like or really dislike. Then there’s the black treacle. What the heck was black treacle? Was it pine tar? An exotic mushroom? As it turns out, the answer surprised me a little. Consulting the appropriate Recipes4us.co.uk website, they say this about black treacle:

Strictly speaking, Treacle is the British generic name for any syrup made during the refining of sugar cane. Therefore, theoretically, Treacle, Black Treacle, Molasses, Golden Syrup and Blackstrap are all treacles.

Black Treacle, (equivalent = dark molasses) is made from the syrup obtained from later boilings and is about 55% sucrose.

The origin of treacles are pretty interesting, so I encourage you to check out the above website and read about it. For this hot sauce, I wondered what the addition of black treacle would do for both the taste and the consistency since treacle/molasses is not a common component of many hot sauces on this side of “the pond.” First, though, I wanted to hear from the folks behind the sauce to get them to tell me a little about themselves and their creation. I spoke with Woody (who I think is Nick unles he tells me otherwise), and here’s what he had to say:

Tell us a little bit about your introduction to chile peppers and what the path has been like from being aficionado and then a maker of hot sauce.

I entered the world of chillis about 18 months ago, a friend at work gave me six plants and i was hooked, within 6 months I had a polytunnel in my back yard and planning “fire foods”

Where did your recipes come from, and how has the creative process been for you with them?

My recipes have been played around with for many months. I belong to the “chillis galore forum” and together with a few members we had a chilli tasting session at my house, in which I took all the best ideas and rolled them into one! I am currently doing local markets and the demand is very high, so I am looking in the future to making sauces full time.

Before making your own sauces, where did you get your hot “fix”? Other sauces, kinds of food, etc.

Before chilis I used to go for a curry quite a lot and always had a medium syle meal. Now I can eat the hottest no problem, so I think my taste buds have been killed!! Whilst on holiday last year I went to the home of the dorset naga “peppers by post.” I bought a plant and my love of super hot chilis was born, so I now plan to cross the naga with a bell pepper to create the perfect sauce pepper.

Say someone who hadn’t tried your sauce before was interested in trying it, so tell us what you’d say to sell them on your stuff.

If somebody wanted to buy one of my sauces but was a little unsure…I would say if you like superb flavour with heat buy one, as we only use the freshest ingredients. I have tasted many sauces and i believe mine are up there with the best.

In the coming months I will be bringing out signed limited edition bhut jolokia sauces along the same line of my extreme. I will be selling 2 bottles, one to enjoy and one to keep. I will sign each bottle and the run will be 499 bottles….prices to follow.

My future aim is to be known in a similar breath as Blair (of Extremefood.com), and one of the top UK sauce makers. I hope to see Fire Foods to grow and become a well known chilli site and most of all to enjoy what I do.

Well, on to the sauce itself! As is my usual deal, I doled out a portion to get a closer look:

As you can see, it’s a beautiful aromatic red sauce with many a pepper seed floating within the mix. Even if I didn’t know exactly that there was Scotch Bonnet pepper used in this sauce, the fragrant aroma of the chinense would have had me guess at something related to a habanero. While mostly chile pepper, you can definitely detect the scent of the mustard also. The consistency is fantastic…slightly thinner than that of catsup, although the seeds in the mix do make it a little more likely to come out of the bottle in clumps. Not much in the way of separation, even with prolonged periods of standing as well.

Taste: My first impression upon tasting this was, “Wow, this tastes so fresh!” This sauce manages to highlight the great taste of the peppers without too much bite from the vinegar. It’s a simple yet effective sauce that’s not too complex in taste, making it a lot easier to pair with foods. Again, I also was able to taste the mustard, but without much influence from the fruit juice or treacle. For the kinetics of taste, the treacle must have added a smoothness to the sauce that other hot sauces should envy. Providing some thickness and viscosity without the sugary taste of syrup is no small feat, and I’d like to see more sauces emulate this…by whatever ingredients work for it. The heat is formidable but not overwhelming, and I’d rate it as about 8/10 with some definite heat buildup with more usage.

Matching this sauce up with food was delightfully easy, because I failed to find many foods that this sauce failed to enhance. Whether I used it poured on, dipped into, or mixed into foods, this sauce provided a great combination of heat and flavor. My almost-daily bowl of lunchtime chili was a great cup o’ red with this sauce, as was any of the other soups & stews I mixed it into. I used it both poured onto sandwiches as a condiment, as a dipping sauce for a variety of foods, as a spicy steak sauce, and even as spicy addition to my salad dressing. With each, the sauce performed as well as I had hoped, although mustard-haters are likely to not dig how that flavor hangs around. That said, I’ve been plowing through the bottle at an enormous rate. That, plus I was able to share this sauce with a half-dozen or so people at work. Those who have tried not only said they liked it, but also asked to use it again for another meal or food. That itself speaks volumes for its appeal.

Overall recommendation: This hot sauce import from the UK is something worth checking out. Spicy hot and full of flavor, it is has enough utility to find use in a wide variety of anything you might eat. Even if you don’t like mustard or don’t want to know what black treacle is, this sauce may surprise you in its quality. I think that an even hotter version of this sauce is possible as well, and there’s certainly an audience for that as well. I really liked this sauce a great deal, and you may as well. Consider getting a bottle of your own and trying it. Enjoy!

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