I’ve written this review once, but sadly it was wiped out when we had our big server crash several weeks ago. I had just enough of this sauce left to make a mini version of what I did before, which makes it perfect for a mini-review.

This isn’t a hot hot sauce like many of the ones that the Peppermaster has to offer, but I was intrigued by the list of ingredients, which include:

Ingredients: sugar, glucose, fresh lime juice, fresh ginger, orange habanero peppers

Still unsure of what to do with this sauce, I asked Tina from Peppermaster and her suggestion, quoted from the website, was to “try it on egg rolls, sushi or grilled fish. Drizzle on toast or bagels with cream cheese. For a great margarita, pour equal quantities of Ginger Lime Drizzle and tequila over ice cubes and serve as an aperitif.”

Wait a moment…I can mix this sauce with one of my other passions, that being 100% de agave tequila? With that wonderful thought in mind, I set out to make a margarita truly fit for a chilehead.

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A weekend of football and other sports-watching on TV this past weekend seemed like a cool time to write a review on some great salsa, courtesy of Chuck Evans and his Montezuma Brand products. We met Chuck a few months ago through our buddy CaJohn, and he’s another fellow Buckeye making some damn good hot sauce & salsa which we hope to write more about over the next few months. This is just one of his many salsas that we have tried that are well worth your attention.

First impression: The name gives away the most dominant aromas, as your really get a good whiff of the garlic & lime from this brew. It’s thick, chunky, and chock full of good stuff like tomatoes, onions, and peppers. The jar says ‘Medium’ for heat level, but the chile aroma led me to believe otherwise.

Taste: Now THIS is salsa even a Texan would love…LOL! It’s great that the very noticeable lime & garlic flavor does not overwhelm the overall taste profile, but rather comes across quite well with chile pepper heat. Speaking of heat, this salsa has a little ninja stealth with its heat. Initially, I didn’t think this was all that spicy…like a 4/10 for heat. After munching for 5-10 minutes or so, the heat buildup began and I really started to enjoy the heat level as it built to about a 6-7/10 or so. A nice, steady burn worthy of its ‘medium’ designation. It’s a thick salsa, so make sure you use chips worthy of scooping out big bites of salsa as you’ll want more salsa than chip.

How I used it: You can probably find a way to use it in your kitchen cookin’, but this jar was demolished in pure chip & dip munching while sitting on the couch watching football.

Ingredients: tomatoes, tomato puree, onions, chile peppers, garlic, smokey chipotle (R) pepper sauce, lime juice, lemon juice, vinegar, herbs and spices

Overall Recommendation: First of all, we’re HUGE fans of the Montezuma Smokey Chipotle hot sauce (it’s Linda’s #1 fave, in fact) which is in this salsa…so that was an advantage to start. This salsa is thick & chunky, and with enough good chipotle flavor to appease even the most die-hard fans of chipotle. The flavor burn is manageable, and you’ll be amazed at how quickly you’ll consume this stuff if you’re not paying attention as you are eating it. This salsa has become an instant fave with me, and at least I know where I can get more.

This is the first product we have reviewed from the folks at Garden Fresh Gourmet. These products have won, and continue to win, a ton of industry awards. We stopped by their booth at this past ZestFest, and now we understand why. As far as fresh dips & salsas go, their stuff was pretty darn good. This review is just one in what we hope will be a long line of reviews we do on their products. Not sure why we picked this one to start with, but after you read what we have to say…perhaps you can glean why for yourself.

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Ingredients: Orange Habaneros, Serranos, Green Pepper, Onion, Garlic, White Vinegar, Lime Juice, Maple Syrup, El Tesoro Platinum Tequila, Basil, Sage, Kosher Salt.

Joe and Linda’s Yom Kippur Repentance Hot Sauce came in the mail the other day, which gave me ample time to give it the full work out of tests before my weekend review. What a work out it received! I was so excited that I was one of the people to receive a sample, that I rushed out to BJ’s Brewery to show it off. Many samples of food did it go on and the over all reaction was good. Matt, the bartender, was ecstatic over the slightly sweet taste.

For not having done a sauce in a few years, this one came out pretty good. The small mason jar that it came in gives it that “old fashioned homemade” feel and the slogan, “So hot and tasty it will make you want to repent something” is great. The color, however, is not as pretty as some of the other sauces that have blown my way. The “baby-barf green” (as it has been described) would have been easily eliminated if the green bell peppers were substituted with red bell peppers, which also would help add an extra kick of sweet.

Upon the first taste, you get a little bit of sweet before the heat kicks in. This sauce definitely has a kick and I can see why Joe and Linda were trying to lower the heat a bit. When copious amounts are used, it definitely leaves you hurting. My only real problem with this sauce is the maple syrup. It creates an odd texture on the tongue, leaves a little aftertaste, and interacts poorly with the lime juice.

That being said, this sauce goes great on burritos! Just smear a little, or in my case a lot, of the sauce on your burrito and add tomato paste, cheese, meat and you’ll be in flavor heaven. It also goes decent on burgers. Overall an enjoyable sauce and I hope to see a Joe and Linda’s Happy Hanukkah Hot Sauce sometime in the near future…hint hint Joe and Linda.

Taste: 8, Heat: 8.5

One of the interesting thing about attending ZestFest was trying a fair amount of chili mixes. As people who regularly host chili cookoffs, we have generally spurned chili mixes because we have wanted our ‘contestants’ to make their chilis from scratch. It just seems that you can take a lot more pride in your creation if it’s your own mad scientist brew, right?

With this preconcieved notion in mind, we ran into Cindy Reed and her crockpots full of chili made with her Cin Chili mix. It was a lot of people dressed in cowboy hats holding two-ounce servings of chili, so we cautiously approached ready to be polite if we didn’t like it all that much. Chugging that shot of chili, we were pleasantly surprised at how good the taste was…and promptly laid $5 on the counter to take a bag home so we could try some ourselves. We didn’t have an upcoming chili cookoff or anything, but we were sure that we could make do in our own humble kitchen.

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Cool article quoted in part from the TCPalm, an online media outlet from Florida’s Palm Beach area:

Pepper fans can’t get enough of hot chilies

By GWEN SCHOEN
The Sacramento Bee
October 11, 2006
Chili-heads have no sympathy for those of us who live in fear of the hot pepper.

While blinking back tears, mopping sweaty brows and reaching for tissues to dab at their noses, they croak their insults and boast of their conquests.

• “Only a wimp takes out the seeds,” says Margaret Watson Hopkins of Rancho Murieta., Calif.

• “My motto is, if it doesn’t work with a hot pepper, it’s not food,” says Elizabeth Weintraub of Land Park, Calif. “I’ve been known to eat peppers so hot that nothing would help, not milk or even bread. The only thing I could do was stand over the kitchen sink and drool into it.”

• “I’m a hottie,” says Pattee Thorpe of Rocklin, Calif. “I eat hot peppers on everything: cereal, popcorn, ice cream. Once I was in a specialty food shop in Virginia where the owner was offering hot peppers to sample. He said the peppers were so hot that we had to sign a waiver stating we wouldn’t sue him if our mouths caught on fire. I signed the waiver and bought five jars.”

Most Americans just don’t understand the complexities of flavors in hot peppers, according to chef Rick Bayless, author of “Authentic Mexican: Regional Cooking From the Heart of Mexico” (Morrow Cookbooks, 384 pages, $30). Bayless is the chef and owner of Chicago’s Frontera Grill and Topolobampo, two of the nation’s most acclaimed Mexican restaurants.

“Most people focus on the heat and not the variety of flavors that hot peppers have to offer. Dumping a lot of fire into a dish is not good cooking,” Bayless says.

“Flavors can range from sweet to astringent and from mild to picante (spicy hot),” he says. “Some peppers have a grassy or floral flavor and others are smoky, nutty and earthy. When you know the difference, you can completely change the flavors of your dish.”

Chili-head Weintraub says she’s a connoisseur who can definitely tell the difference between the varieties.

“It’s more than just heat,” she says. “Some are deeper, richer flavor and some are more smoky. There is a difference, and people who really know their chilies can taste it.”

HOW HOT IS IT?

Capsaicin, an alkaloid found in chilies, is what gives them heat. Some peppers have it, some do not.
Capsaicin is measured on the Scoville scale, named after its inventor, Wilbur Scoville. One part capsaicin per million equals 15 Scoville units. A bell pepper, for example, registers zero and pure capsaicin is 16 million Scoville units.
The hottest pepper ever recorded, according to the Royal Society of Chemistry, was a red savina habanero at 577,000 Scoville units.

Here’s how the most common fresh peppers measure up:
Bell and sweet Italian: 0 Scoville units
Pepperoncini: 100-500
New Mexico: 500-1,000
Ancho, pasilla, poblano: 1,000-1,500
Sandia, rocotillo: 1,500-2,500
Jalapeno: 2,500-10,000
Serrano: 5,000-10,000
Habanero, Scotch bonnet: 80,000-300,000
Thai: 100,000-350,000
Red savina habanero: 577,000

Our inaugural Featured Retailer post is on behalf of Cosmic Chile, a great online retailer that hails out of the great state of Montana. Eric Vinje (pictured below) is the grand poobah of Cosmic Chile, and he has been a great supporter of our blog since the very beginning. Cosmic Chile offers a wide, eclectic collection of “Hot Sauces, Salsas, BBQ Sauces & More!”

Eric was gracious enough to share some information about himself, his business, and the truth behind “sex and chiles”….

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Announcing a change to our blog format…

We’ve abolished our old “Retailers” section that we have had since this blog first started. If your favorite retailer was on there (or even if it was you), we’re sorry but it was time for a change. So, we went back to the drawing board and wiped the slate clean.

On the right sidebar, you should now notice a new section called “Featured Retailers.” What we will be doing from now on is similar to what we’ve done with our “Featured Products” section, but with a hot & spicy food retailers slant to it. We plan to do some posts on our fave retailers that we like or order products from, and will do a post that will remain on the blog that has an interview, some pictures (if available), and other miscellaneous information that we feel that the hot & spicy food-loving public might want to know.

There is a “price” to this, but it involves no exchange of money…just a professional courtesy we will ask of you the retailers to help out this humble blog continue to grow. If interested, let us know and we will pass along the requested info to you.

We plan to debut this column soon, so stay tuned. We hope to have our first one posted by this coming weekend. Stay tuned!

This is the second mustard we’re reviewing from ZestFest, courtesy of the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum. Unlike the one we previously reviewed which had a habanero kick to it, this one’s heavy on the horseradish. It’s even heavier on great flavor, which we will go into further below.

An interesting sidebar about horseradish, and how its “heat” is different than that of capsaicin. Horseradish has been described as a “flavor heat” rather than a “hot heat” that chiles provide. Horseradish is botanically-known as Armoracia lapathifolia and A. rusticana, and is believed to be native to Russia or Hungary. It is related to the mustard family, hence its biting flavor and aroma. It is the volatile mustard-like oil in horseradish that brings tears to the eyes and heat to the tongue. One of the main chemicals in horseradish, the pungent allyl isothiocyanate, is not heat resistant; therefore, horseradish is only seldom used for warm foods and then added immediately before serving. Heat eliminates both aroma and zing which is why true horseradish afficionados prefer horseradish raw and freshly grated. This is one main reason why you have to keep this mustard refrigerated if you want to maintain the horseradish heat, zing, and flavor.

From the Mustard Museum website, this is what they have to say about this mustard:

First place winner (best Mustard and best Horseradish Product) at the 2006 Fiery Foods Challenge. This is the strongest horseradish mustard you will ever taste! Be careful!

First impression: The Hit & Run comes in a fairly small container, but one whiff gives you the notion that a little of this stuff goes a long way. It is a little bit of a lighter brown than some commercially-available mustards, and appears to be slightly grainy in texture. Did I mention the horseradish smell? Several nostril hairs were tragically lost due to the wafting odors of this mustard. Yikes!

Taste: I sampled a heaping sample-spoonful of this (like 1/10 of an ounce at most) and was really diggin’ the taste when the horseradish heat hit me like a freight train, and I thought my eyeballs were going to melt. Potency, thy name is mustard! It has a great straightforward mustard taste with an overwhelming amount of horseradish in it. Every place on my tongue tingled that this mustard touched, and it absolutely zapped every one of my tastebuds that it encountered. It’s definitely a different sort of heat, but one that is quite pleasurable once you get used to it.

What foods I liked it with: Despite its strength, this mustard can have some surprising utility. As with most mustards, I gave it ample opportunity on different sandwiches, spreading it a little thicker with each one to see exactly how much I could tolerate before my brains started to leak out of my nose. I also mixed it with a couple of other condiments, like mayo and salad dressing, and they became awesomely horseradish-ly laden in the process. Honestly, I just used it like any other mustard might be used…just in carefully controlled amounts. I just bet it would be great on gefilte fish, too!

Ingredients: Distilled vinegar, water, mustard seed, horseradish, salt, soybean oil, oil of mustard

Overall recommendation: This mustard’s label dubs this as “excruciatingly painful,” and it sure can be if you are not careful with it during your dining/tasting. The fact is that this mustard tastes pretty darn good, regardless of the horseradish in it. If you’re a chilehead looking for an entirely different kind of “burn,” you just gotta get yourself a jar of this mustard. Aside from chomping on freshly grated horesradish root (which I don’t recommend, btw), you’re not going to find much fresher tasting horseradish in a condiment than this mustard. We all know those people who say they can handle any level of heat, even red savina habaneros …so give them a tablespoon of this and watch ‘em squirm. We are still experimenting using this mustard in different foods, and we encourage you to do the same. It might just clear your sinuses in the process.

We like jalapenos, but perhaps not this many…

Atta pepper! CPA eats 247 jalapenos in 8 minutes

If the story makes the ESPN (not even “The Ocho”) site, you know it’s gotta be good!