Welcome to the last part in my coverage of the 6th Annual Fiery Foods Festival at the North Market. Para continuar este mensaje en español, presione ono y entre en contacto con su más cercano Babel fish. To continue this message in English, please read on.

After finishing our beers, we ran back to the North Market. The rest of the crew got ready for the wing eating competition while Chem and I went to get our tongues blown out of the back of our heads. This was one of the situations that I had been slowly training Chem for, and now was his time to graduate into full a chile-head. It was time….for the Execution Station at CaJohn’s!

Basically, it’s a sampling of CaJohn’s sauces, from mild to his hottest. Buddah, I and one of Cowboy George’s friends were joking with the executioner, saying stuff like, “can we just pour it down our throats?”. Well he definitely obliged our chile-head tendencies by filling the sample spoon way past it’s brim instead of the usual sample dot. We blew through 1-7 pretty quickly then I got to #8 which was Talon. This was the one that wreaked me, it has Fatalii’s and that pepper is my Achilles Heel. You want to take me down in a pepper eating competition? Feed me one of those. After that I was nothing but tears and drool (many a pictures were taken of me, I know they are going to show up as blackmail one of these days and it’ll probably be CaJohn that does it).

Everyone else was getting sweaty and tearing up, but Chem did me proud, he stood his ground against the capsaicin gods and shouted, “I am Chile-Head!!! Hear me roar!”. Ok, so it wasn’t that dramatic, but he did get a wonderful endorphin rush and told me, “that’s the must lit up I’ve been from peppers in a while”. We finished our heaping spoonful of Mongoose and ran up stairs to witness the start of the Extreme Wing Eating Competition, after a brief recovery period in some chairs that is.

The usual faces were there, HUDD and Joe, but mostly new people that had no clue what they were getting into. The games begun after the first round of wings were handed out and the rules explained.

Round after round passed and more and more people dropped out. The wings got hotter and people faces got funnier (most notably our very own Joe Levinson, pictured below)! At one point I heard HUDD muttering, “Fatalii, I hate Fatalii.”.

The guy pictured below was obviously having the worst time he’s ever had, sweat soaked and in pain. But as much as the pain was, he saw it all the way to the end, didn’t win, but he made it.

To let the pain soak in, CaJohn make a brief appearance explaining what was coated on the next and final set of wings…and you know, to make the burn last longer for the contestants.

Then the final wings were handed out and the winner and second place winner were announced. The winner was an employee (pictured below on the far right) of one of the vendors at the market and didn’t blink an eye at the heat. Impressive, most impressive.

Most everyone cleared out of the room but us “industry” people and CaJohn brought out some sauced and unsauced wings for us to try (the ones that were used in the competition). OH MY GOD THEY WERE HEAVENLY! I love wings and eat them a fair amount but these, these were by far the best wings that I have ever tried. I must find out who made them, and find out I did.

They were made by Holy Smoke BBQ (located in the North Market) and the man most responsible for their creation is Stan Riley. Stan told me that the wings were cooked and smoked over hickory for about an hour and that today alone, he had smoked around 600 plus wings. That’s a lot of birds!

This was the end of the event so Chem and I walked a half a mile, in the freezing rain to the next brewery only to find it wasn’t open for another hour. Then we walked a half a mile back, in the freezing rain to Gordon Biersch Brewery, had a pint, then met up with the gang for dinner at the best Mexican restraint in Columbus, Fiesta Jalisco Mexican Restaurant (2670 E. Dublin-Granville Road, Columbus, OH 43231). After that, we headed out for a long drive back to Cleveland.

It was great to see everyone again and to be able to give my friend Eric Chmielewski his graduating moment into becoming a full Chile-Head. I received a bunch of things to review, so stay tuned to The Hot Zone Online because we’ve got a lot more fun content on the way!