It has once again been a year of continued growth for us here at The Hot Zone Online. In no particular order, here is our official recap of this year’s goings-on:

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

- 56 Hot Sauce Reviews published, thanks especially to ace writer Passow for his efforts

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

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

- 5 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 2007:

- If you’re into the stats, we had 84,296 unique visitors to our blog in 2007, of which 68,856 were first-time visitors and 15,440 were return visitors. We had visitors to our blog from 160 countries from six different continents. While there’s definitely room for more growth, we are definitely a world-wide phenomenon!

- Our readership has doubled again from the end of the year 2006. We now have a daily readership of over 400 unique visitors. Again, this blog was getting 5 hits a day when it started in 2005.

- Added three more fantastic writers with diverse backgrounds: Jim, Harald, Woody. Harald is from Germany and Woody from the UK, so that definitely adds an International flavor to our chilehead readership and authorship.

- Our Raising the HEAT for Autism charity drive has raised nearly $1300 by the end of the year through the sale of a limited edition hot sauce collectible by CaJohns, eBay auctions of donated products, and private donations.

- Attended the inaugural Jungle Jim’s Weekend of Fire where we shmoozed and tasted our way through an amazing weekend of fun, all while meeting some great people within the industry

Coming in 2008:

- Many more reviews (hot sauces and others) and Featured Product writeups. On average, there is a review of something new done every 3 or 4 days here.

- Anticipating adding at least 3 new writers officially, including some from within the industry to add their unique stories and experience

- 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!

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This is Chili (chile in swedish), the boerboel that helps me with my chile growing and manufacturing. She eats the tiny budding plants if left unattended with them, she steals the full grown plants and goes running though the garden with me following, she eats the chiles I’ve tossed out of the greenhouse as rejects for some reason or other and she loves spicy food - we don’t love the way she smells day after as much though

My wild gang and I would like to wish everybody a fabulous 2008.
We hope it will be a prosperous year for each and everyone and that we all keep healthy.

My own personal new years resolution this year is to take more time out to write in here. I really enjoy reading all posts and comments and I learn new stuff all the time. There always seems to be something going on! It’s also great to feel as welcome as you all made me feel.

Things currently going on is that we’ve had a seed-chain moving across the country and I picked up some interesting new seeds for summer to come, I also picked up a recipe for a hazelnut/raspberry/chile/chocolate truffle cake that I will share with you. When it comes to getting hot sauces off the shelves over here it’s still a disaster, Thank God for good friends that send me stuff and internet overseas orders! But I’ll try and get my act together and tell you all about it in 2008! Now I made it public - you can hold it against me later

Well from all of us to all of you - Let’s have a great chile year to come!

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My introduction to these sauces and products came as an evolution-like process. First I saw the media articles come rolling across my computer screen. Then came the impressive list of awards through the Fiery Food Challenge and Scovie competitions. I even read a review or two about the sauces on another site which does reviews on hot sauces and spicy foods (there are others?). Finally, out of the Internet ether came an offer from Chef Bud Selmi himself of Sizzlin Sauces asking us to try his humble products and to allow us our own say about them.

Sizzlin Sauces actually hails from the great state of New Hampshire. Besides its nickname as the “Granite State” and being known for snowy winters, great places to ski, and the birthplace of Adam Sandler (my trivial knowledge has no limits to its depth about stuff like that), it also didn’t really have a reputation as a hotbed (no pun intended) of hot sauces and spicy food. That is, until now.

Chef Bud is a pretty interesting guy. We don’t know too many chefs in the hot sauce business, so we dialed him up (that is, sent an email) and asked him to tell us a little about himself, his products, and how he went about making New Hampshire a place on the hot sauce map….

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background. How did you get become a lover of things hot & spicy?

I have always been a lover of Hot and Spicy food items. For years I grew my own Hot Peppers. Back in 2000 a close friend introduced me to friends of his who had started an online Pepper Plant business – Cross Country Nurseries. That year I purchased some plants, had a bumper crop of Habaneros, and then had to do something with a whole bunch of peppers. So I made a batch of sauce, gave away a bunch and also sold some. 6 weeks later the sauce was all gone. The next summer I purchased a green house and a whole bunch of pepper plants and started our business. We continue growing most of our own hybrid Habanero peppers.

As far as my background I am a Certified Chef through the American Culinary Federation. Although not formally schooled in the culinary field I apprenticed under several very talented chefs.

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When dealing with the public, you get to meet all kinds…..

The Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis is world renowned for it’s Native American and Western Art. It is a spectacular facility that used to host an annual chili cook-off as part of the fund raising efforts. I used to sponsor the ‘firefighter division’, encouraging area fire department teams to compete against other firehouse cooks for bragging rights to the best firehouse chili. I’d participate as well, though not in the competition, making an extract based chili that was simply done as a joke… and because it was expected of me. This stuff was not only incredibly hot, it was totally inedible and designed to be that way. You figure out the suspected heat level from some of the following ingredients. Keep in mind that this only went into a single four gallon pot of chili: one pound of finely diced habaneros, one pound of finely diced Red Savina®, one half pound of Tepin chiles, one quarter pound of Apple Smoked Red Savina®, one bottle of my Red Savina® Garlic Sauce, and two entire bottles of my ‘Stupid Hot’.

My chile was made this hot only because of popular demand. Over the years, oddly enough, I’d developed a reputation as having some incredibly hot chili. I seemed to attract the lunatic fringe and folks came back year after year wanting, no- demanding to know if I had made it hotter than the previous year. I was only giving the customers what they wanted. There would usually be a crowd of some fifty or sixty people hanging around at my booth, chanting at the timid folks in line- ‘do it, do it, do it’. Upon shooting down the small sample of chili, the crowd would cheer and roar and invite the person to come over and suffer through it with them, they being veterans of it and all. The crowd favorite one year was a teenager who started pulling up handfuls of turf and sticking them into his mouth, trying vainly for some relief.
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Joe is always asking me to either take more pictures for the blog, or write some more articles. Well, here was a way for me to do both! We’ve had this jar of Csigi Chili Sauce Fra Diavolo Pasta Sauce just sitting on the shelf waiting to be used for quite some time. Since we’ve reviewed this sauce already, we just wanted to find another good way to use it to make something yummy for dinner. I tossed around the idea of making a meatloaf, but at the last minute I changed course and decided to make some spicy meatballs for use with or without pasta accompaniment.
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Just when we thought that we had issues with growing our own peppers, we ran across this article from the Las Cruces Sun-News about the manpower vs. technology issues of the chile pepper cultivation out in New Mexico. Hey, at least we still pick our own peppers by hand. Granted that’s from like 12 plants or so…

Mechanized chile harvesting could ensure future of N.M. crop
By the Associated Press
12/25/2007 12:00:00 AM MST

LAKE ARTHUR, N.M. - A handful of farm laborers are busy at work on a warm day in mid-November, helping harvest 140 acres of Cecil Conklin’s red chile crop. But at this southeastern New Mexico farm, the workers aren’t stooped over hand-picking the peppers - they’re driving Conklin’s mechanical chile harvester as it plows through row after row of chile plants, methodically pulling off the peppers.

“The machine harvests about seven acres a day,” said Conklin, one of the first farmers in New Mexico to make the switch to mechanical harvesting more than a decade ago. “That’s about the same acreage that it took 40-50 workers to pick each day before we had the machine.

Mechanization “was forced on us - we couldn’t find the labor. Now, chile definitely has to be mechanically harvested in order for farmers to make money,” he said.

Increased market pressure from foreign chile imports, declining prices and lack of labor have made it tough for chile farmers to thrive. Using machines to harvest the state’s signature crop is the only way the $400 million chile industry can stay competitive, said Terry Crawford, professor of agriculture business and economics at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

Click here to read the rest of the source article from the Las Cruces Sun-News

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Hot sauce manufacturers, take note…astronauts are your new target demographic. Get them hooked on it, then have them take it up into space. When they say that there’s a whole new world that needs hot sauce, they may have actually been talking about the world of outer space. Check this article out from the Gonzales Ascension Citizen out of Gonzales, LA:

Astronauts waiting on second ‘Fireball’ hot sauce shipment
By Wade McIntyre, The Weekly Citizen
Wednesday, December 26, 2007 11:10 AM CST

PRAIRIEVILLE - Few people keep a closer eye on the NASA Space Shuttle Discovery and its valuable cargo these days than local hot sauce maven Hiram Davis.

Since the delay of a Dec. 6 scheduled liftoff, Davis peers at the sky and scans the Internet for updates on NASA’s efforts to repair the Discovery fuel line and fuel sensor, hoping that a launch comes soon.

When the shuttle does take off, its cargo will include a second batch of Davis’ “Bayou Fireball” hot sauce for astronauts on the International Space Station who await a capsaisin fix to jazz up their notoriously bland space food rations.

Click here to read the rest of the source article

We’ve written about Hiram’s hot sauces before, so check out our recent articles:

Hot sauce in space! Must be seen to be believed!
Beam me up some hot sauce, Scotty!

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In a world of Hooter’s, BW3, and other underwhelming choices for dine-in options for chicken wings, it’s nice to see that there’s a place that at least seems to promulgate both concern for the biosphere/environment AND quality food that’s not so full of crappy ingredients that you’re well on your way to your first heart attack before you even get up to leave. Well, Hurricane Grill & Wings promises to be one of those places. While mostly in Florida, it looks like they are franchising their way to the rest of the country as soon as they can. Heck, we’d eat there…so build one up here in Ohio, OK?!

Hmmm…the franchise possibilities are tickling our imagination! Here’s a snippet of the good article from the Broward New Times out of Palm Beach, FL:

It’s the Sauce, Stupid!

Hurricane takes the wing world by storm
By Gail Shepherd
Published: December 27, 2007

What I didn’t know about chicken wings when I first set foot in Hurricane Grill and Wings would fill the corporate libraries of Tyson and Perdue.

I didn’t know the things we eat today by the basket-load, a deep-fried finger-food that has conquered corner bars and corporate franchises, the dripping mouthfuls of heat served with a tub of blue cheese dip and celery sticks for tailgate parties up and down the East Coast, came into being just 40 years ago. The Bellissimo family served the original hot-sauce-drenched wing at its Italian eatery the Anchor Bar to take the edge off late-night drinking. Or else the chicken wing was pioneered at Young’s Wings ‘n’ Things, where John Young drew on the history of African-American chicken recipes to come up with his special Mambo sauce, creating from a not-so-appetizing poultry part (only a neck or tail could be less edible) a snack to turn otherwise reasonable people into Mambo-smeared zombies. Here’s what we know for sure: The greasy trail from today’s Hooters or Wing Hut leads back to Buffalo, New York, in the mid-1960s.

I also didn’t know that Americans eat 90 pounds of chicken per person a year. Chicken wings are the fastest-growing segment of the “casual dining” market, according to Nation’s Restaurant News, soaring high through war and recession. And I didn’t realize that the boneless chicken wings advertised on sports-bar backboards aren’t wings at all. They’re pieces of deep-fried chicken breast if you’re lucky; they’re unidentified chicken scraps pressed together and laden with chemicals if you’re not. (A truly boneless chicken wing, achieved by painstaking kitchen surgery, is another story.)

Click here to read the rest of the source article

Details:
Hurricane Grill and Wings
1905 Pine Island Blvd.
Plantation, FL
Sunday through Thursday 11 a.m. till 10 p.m.
Friday and Saturday till 11 p.m.
Call 954-475-8815.
http://www.hurricanewings.com/

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Merry Christmas from the Hot Zone Online!

We’ll be celebrating Christmas in our own special way, just like our ancestors did…by ordering Chinese takeout and watching the news about where NORAD thinks that Santa really is….

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Fast on the heels of our last posting about our eBay charity auctions, the next auction of hot sauces for the “Raising the HEAT for Autism” event is now online and available on eBay. Straight from the fine people at Nando’s, we are auctioning:

Nando’s collectible hot sauce for Autism charity

The winner of the auction gets bottle #148/150 of this limited edition, plus a sampler pack, all donated by Nando’s to support the Raising the HEAT for Autism charity project.

Follow the link above and see if you want to get in on this collectible for your very own. The starting bid is well below how much these items would normally cost, but keep in mind that the funds raised are all going to charity…no matter how much for which they ultimately sell.

Thanks, and stay tuned for more auction information!

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