With this year’s 2009 Fiery Food Show going on out

in New Mexico, we’ll take our chance to post some of our pictures from this past weekend’s Fiery Food Show here at the North Market in Columbus. The first part will cover some of the Wing-eating contests that occurred.

As was the case with last year’s events, CaJohn made it so that this wasn’t about the quantity of wings you could eat but rather the ratcheting up of the heat level with each successive round. There were two divisions of competitors, Hot and Extreme. Here is the lineup for the Hot:

From left to right: Little Kick, Big Kick, CaBoom! Gourmet Hot Sauce (red savina), Butt-Twister, ZestFest Special hot sauce, North Market show sauce

The hottest was the far right bottle, with its show-specific label. The sauce in question there is the Ignite hot sauce, a fiery habanero sauce that is one of my personal faves from CaJohn. Here is the lineup for the Extreme:

From left to right: Fire Mountain Jolokia, Nagasaurus, Scorch, Select Fatalii puree, Jolokia 10, and Ignite

All in all, a veritable gauntlet of capsaicin pain and anguish awaited the competitors, particularly in the Extreme division.

This is what the competitors saw each round awaiting them. See how evil those wings look? I think that was some from the last round of the Extreme.

Danny Huddleston did his best job to show he was a chip off the ol’ iron-clad palate’s block from Papa Hudd.

Seems like there’s always one girl who joins up for the Hot wing division. She didn’t win, but bless her for trying!

This was the waiver to enter the Extreme contest and yes that was me who penciled in the word “idiot” as my middle name.

Us chileheads having a moment of clarity before the contest.

We had 90 seconds to eat our wings each round. I figured I could use up 60 seconds just waiting during the first round to try and spare my taste buds some fiery damage. It didn’t help.

Yep, that was me breathing fire there during the competition. I lasted to the end of round 3, when the Scorch took me out. It’s always the fatalii that does me in, that evil pepper!

This guy looked like he was gonna absolutely spontaneously combust after each round, but he held on until nearly the end. All that suffering, and he looked like he had taken a bath by the time it was done.

Hudd, as usual, kept up with all the hot wing heavyweights until the end of the competition but couldn’t triumph in the speed round for the eventual championship.

Dante, who is on the far right in this picture, easily took down the competition for the crown in the Extreme division. In fact, I don’t think he even shed any perspiration at all. To be honest, I’m not sure his taste buds feel any pain since he seemed rather unfazed by it all. Way to go, Dante!!