Incoming transmission……..

Well, it looks like it’s time again to do another of our infamous releases of the evil ZERO Habanero elixir. Those of you that are not aware of this stuff, it’s the hottest stuff we make. It’s been over a year since the last release (The Batch #4), and due to popular demand, we have fired up the lab, and are in the final stages of making the next batch of this stuff. From the harvest so far, due to an extra procedural step, it looks as if this little gem will be rarer than some of the past releases, oh yeah, and substantially hotter. We don’t know the final count yet but it will be relatively low in number (compared to the Batch #2,3 & 4). We are also trying to make some ½ ounce non-collector bottles, so you can try the stuff. Again, we don’t know how many of these we will have either, so don’t expect a ton of them.

We are looking to unveil these evil monsters sometime in August, and if at all possible to unveil them at the Weekend of Fire show at Jungle Jim’s in Fairfield, Ohio on August 2nd (Go to www.Junglejims.com for more details, it’s a LOT of fun!). . The design of these vessels is completely different from any we’ve done in the past, and a lot of extra detail has been put into the manufacturing of the collectors bottle. I won’t go into detail, but the collector bottle will actually be a matching “set”, so to speak, and each bottle will be unique in its own way.

There will be no pre-ordering this time around. If these are available at Jungle Jim’s, we will bring a small amount of them to be sold at the show, and people will pick their bottle numbers out of a hat, to make it fair. After the show, we will send out the e-mail for the rest of them, on a first come first serve basis. With the limited number of these, I doubt they will stay on the shelves for very long, so act fast! Considering there will probably be fewer of the ½ ounce taster bottles, they will NOT be at Jungle Jim’s, although you are more than welcome to stop by our booth and have a sample of the stuff (I always have a little bit of it with me).

It’s been a long time since we put one of these gems out, and I guarantee you’ll like what you see. The Createss (a.k.a. The Wife Unit) thought I was a little insane doing what we’ve done, but she certainly likes the results.

With that being said, I wish everyone luck in obtaining our latest Vessel of Exquisite Pain. Once again, if you can’t make it to Jungle Jim’s, keep an eye out for the ZERO e-mail stating they are available, our inventory of them won’t last long!

Creator out…….

Houston Hot Sauce Festival
http://www.houstonhotsauce.com

The Original Houston Hot Sauce Festival, an annual event “Always in September”, featuring hot sauce, salsa, chipotle, jams, spices, marinades, chips, dips and more fiery food products. Thousands of Chiliheads pour into the Arena to sample 100’s of award winning products. There’s also ongoing stage entertainment, free kids activities, cold drinks, a wide variety of food, “amateur salsa competition”, contests, prizes, arts & crafts, pepper merchandise, and more…. Information 281-558-3518 or email:carol@houstonhotsauce.com

Catch the fever Sunday, August 24th! Join the fun, music, and hot sauce from 11am - 5:30pm at Waterloo Park, 12th and Red River

Admission is FREE with a donation of three non-perishable food items for the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas.

In the eighteen years since its inception, what started as a friendly contest between Austin and San Antonio has become one of the largest annual contests in the world, the Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival. FREE to the public (with a donation of three healthy, non-perishable food items or a cash donation to the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas), the event draws upwards of 15,000 spectators and more than 350 entries every year. This year the Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival will take place on Sunday, August 24 at Waterloo Park from 11:00am - 5:30pm.

The outstanding musical performances and culinary exhibitions are notable attractions, but the biggest draws are the salsas. More than one hundred gallons of hot sauce are consumed at the event every year. Area restaurants show off their hot and spicy foods at booths, and vendors from across the Southwest set up shop to sell hot and spicy cookbooks, fresh peppers, and chili pepper memorabilia.

The hot sauce contest has three levels of competition: individuals (homemade), restaurants, and commercial bottlers. This gives us a good chance to recognize salsas in a class by themselves. It also gives us a chance to consider salsas made fresh daily in restaurants apart from those made for grocery store shelves. The 2008 featured Hot Sauce Festival judges are some of the finest chefs in Texas!

If you are interested in participating in the individual or restaurant categories of the Hot Sauce Contest, entry forms will run in the Chronicle during the month of August and as a download from this page. Bring one quart of your sauce, your entry form and the entry fee to Waterloo Park on the day of the event between 10:30 - 11:30am.

If you are a commercial bottler and are interested in securing a booth, please contact Elizabeth.

For sponsorship or media inquiries please contact Erin.

Sting ‘N’ Linger Salsa Co.
“Habanero”

Ingredients: Diced Tomatoes. Fresh Chiles, Fresh Onions, jalpeno Peppers, Fresh Garlic, Lemon Juice, Red Wine Vinegar, Crushed Chiles, Fresh Cilantro, Habanero Peppers, Spices, Salt.

Appearance: This salsa has a dark read color, almost like a bowl of chili. There are some large chunks of tomatoes and other ingredients are in decent sized pieces. Overall you could call this “chunky”.

Aroma: Most prominent is tomato with some vinegar ( red wine? ) and citrus in the background.

Taste: This has a very rich tomato taste; almost like the tomatoes were roasted. Actually I would compare this to some other “roasted” salsas I have had which is a good thing; they are usually more flavorful. Aside from the tomatoes, nothing else really stands out. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It can mean that the flavors are well-balanced. Unfortunately in this case, it means that the taste of this salsa is not that memorable. It’s not bad, it jst doesn’t really stand out from the “crowd”.

Heat: The heat comes on pretty quick and does linger a bit but does not really “sting”. With the habaneros being so far down the ingredient list I can’t say this is surprising. I wish I could taste them but unfortunately I think this is powered mostly by jalapenos. The medium heat will build a bit if you keep eating but fades in about five minutes whenyou quite. It never really burns the mouth.

Overall: A fairly decent canned salsa with a rich tomato-y taste. Nothing really stands out but this is a decent tasting salsa with a heat level that will entertain average joes but leave chileheads wanting.

Grade B-
( on a 1-10 scale)
Taste 5
Heat 4

Has it really been over four months since we’ve reviewed a product from the product line of CaJohns Fiery Foods? Inconceivable, I say!! Given how much these sauces have been in regular rotation here at home, it should have been easy to crank out a review at any given time. We recently got ahold of a bottle of the Killer Chipotle to round out the trilogy, so this gives me a chance to combine all the Killer sauces into one mega-review.

Without further ado (what is “ado” anyway, why shouldn’t there be any further of it?), here are those sauces and their website descriptions:

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Companies come and go in the hot and spicy foods business, usually without a whole lot of fanfare. Unless you are of the businesses that relies solely on sales of your products as their main livelihood, a large percentage of those who are manufacturers, distributors, or just plain ol’ make-it-yourself producers have primary jobs that support them above what they get from their hot sauce and/or spicy foods business. A couple of notables, to us at least, have seemed to drop off the map in the last year or so. Perhaps anyone who knows what has happened to them could give a shout-out about them:

Loco Luna - Brian Moon and his brand of Loco Luna hot sauces made a big splash when they hit the market a few years ago. Brian was also active with the blogs, but he’s not been visible anywhere online in months. His website has had nothing new there in at least 2 years as well. Brian’s one heck of a nice guy and Linda wears here Loco Luna t-shirt with pride, so what became of Loco Luna?

Scotty B’s Hot Sauces - Scott Bailie and his line of Scotty B’s hot sauces (of which there are at least seven) were also a prominent fixture at a few of the industry shows, but this Idaho-based company also seems to have no one manning the ship either. Scotty’s website also has had no changes in eons, and his MySpace page elicits no answers to where he’s been either. We assume the sauces are still available, but whether or not the company still exists is in doubt.

Nando’s - We know that Nando’s, as a company, still exists. Despite a large international presence, especially in the UK and South Africa, Nando’s hasn’t made a whole lot of headway getting their chain of chicken eateries into the the U.S. market. This may be a reason why their growth has not been as exponential here. All we know is that their Nando’s blog is either no longer there, or comes up with a strange “permission needed” screen when we try to visit, which was never there before.

People do care about these products, and the people who make them, so please say something if you know what’s become of them. Thanks!

It was a dark and stormy night…well, not really. I’ve just always wanted to start something out like that. Actually, it was a hot, bright, and sunny day and I was driving out to a local farm in Kirkland, Ohio. After a 45 minute drive with the A/C on full blast I had arrived at my destination; Rock’s Farm and Garden.

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Announcing the next great thing in hot sauce reviews, and a project that we are both honored and privileged in which to be involved, here is the introduction from Al “Buddah” Goldenberg, hot sauce aficionado and chilehead:

All American Hot Sauce: A Review to be a part of

I met the Suffern Bros. of All American Hot Sauce at the Fiery Food Show in Albuquerque. The discussion I had with their owner Josh Goldstein, opened up my eyes. Here was a company with a mission. Sure they wanted to make money, but they wanted to share their wealth. They wanted to give back to America and to help the soldiers defending our country. Each person receiving their product for review got this mission statement:

MISSION

The All American Hot Sauce LLC is a corporation with a conscience.

Brothers from Suffern, New York, thought they could make a difference by reinvesting in America and supporting organizations that strengthen our country. We wanted to invest in the future.

The All American Hot Sauce donates 7% of its profits to organizations that share our commitment to improve the lives of Americans at home and abroad like the American Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity.

Our mission is to join the ranks of companies like Ben & Jerry’s and Newman’s Own as they continue to work towards making the world a better place to live.

Noble enough for this hot sauce reviewer to take notice. They told me they wanted to get themselves out there, so they could take the steps in spreading the word about their mission. If you go to their website, you will see they have a separate page just in case someone out there wants to help more than just buying one of their products. Check it out: How you can help?

These guys have their hearts in the right place, and because I have always supported wherever I could, I wanted to do something special for these guys in the way of a review. They sell 4, well actually 5 products in all (Original- Full Bodied and mild, Southwest, Northeast and Bayou).

I had an idea to seek out Joe and Linda from www.hotzoneonline.com and see if they would be interested in doing a dual website review with www.tastethefear.com. I figured if we could get both websites to give them exposure at the same time, we could be really helping them the best way I could think of. I really wanted to make it work, and once Joe and Linda said they were on board, I had Josh send out the bottles to the review team. What I didn’t expect was the overwhelming generosity that came in the parcel that came a few days later. I received quite the bounty of bottles, I think it was 15 in all, but it might’ve been more. Now we have plenty of sauce to experiment with.

So starting on the month that America declared it’s freedom, every Tuesday we will be posting a review for each of their 4 signature bottles. We will kick things off with the Original Hot Sauce on Tuesday July 1st on www.HotZoneOnline.com. Each review will be posted by our 4 person review team- the infamous Passow, Troy aka Generallee, my Louisiana raised friend Cajun, and myself. Each Tuesday we will rotate the reviews between HotZoneOnline and TastetheFear. We hope you will follow the reviews on both websites and support a company that wants to make a difference. Thank you, and God Bless America!

We never thought we would post such an economics-based article, but here is one we just couldn’t pass up. Take an article that focuses mainly upon a regional economy, throw in some chile peppers and spicy food, and you have this article from the Rightsideadvisors.com site talking about hedge funds and such. An entertaining article despite its off-beat title:

HEDGE FUND BOOSTS STAKE IN RESTAURANT GROUP

By Maurice Barnfather
Updated: Friday, June 20 2008 11:06:AM

Food for thought

Back in the 1990s the New Mexico legislature passed a resolution declaring the official “state question” to be “Red or green?” You did not have to serve tables to know that the topic was chile, the defining ingredient in southwestern food.

Visitors to the Southwest are familiar with ubiquitous chile gift stores, which stock everything from ristras (decorative strands of dried chiles) to bottled sauces with extreme names (such as Ass Kickin’ Horseradish Hot Sauce). But in recent years, the trend has spread to other parts of the country. Salsa, the spicy condiment made from chile peppers, now sells more bottles in America than ketchup.

“South-western food is more American, in the widest sense, than any other food,” according to Mark Miller, a lapsed anthropologist and culinary impresario who set up the fancy and much-copied Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe. “It incorporates the region’s indigenous, Spanish and European heritages,” he asserts as he sketches the plant’s history: “Its botanical relationships, its peppers especially, are the continent’s oldest. Wheat didn’t come along until Russian immigrants moved to the Great Plains; it never grew in New England.”

Several things have encouraged Americans’ once-bland palate to warm to the spicy chile pepper. Chiles are healthy. They are low in fat, low in calories and high in vitamins A and C. In addition, travel has brought more and more Americans into contact with foreign cultures and cuisines, and some of America’s fastest-growing immigrant groups, including Mexicans and Asians, have introduced their traditional spicy cooking to Americans in family-owned restaurants.

Click here to read the rest of the source article

Everyone has their own type of adventure. Some go mountain climbing, white-water rafting, skydiving, whatever. For me, it turns out that it’s taking my boys (ages 2 and 5) down to the North Market for the Grillmasters Festival 2008 and hoping that things will not go awry. This was not our first foray to the Grillmasters Festival with the kiddies. We went last year, and you can see that post HERE. That trip, though, was a little easier since we had both Linda and myself there to help deal with the little ones.

This year, Linda’s out of town on vacation for a few days…so I was on my own.

Knowing that my time was as limited as the patience and endurance of a pair of toddlers, I packed up my camera, some extra diapers and snacks, and headed downtown to see how the Festival was shaping up for this year. I arrived just in time to see roughly half of the Amateur BBQ sauce contest. Above you can see the motley crew of judges, Chuck Evans, CaJohn, Anthony Frazier (of Urban Chefs), earnestly going about the task of selecting a trio of winning BBQ sauces from the dozen or so submitted.
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