We’ve finally gotten around to re-tooling the posts where list our information and criteria about our Product Reviews, Featured Products, and Homemade Sauce reviews.

The Homemade Hot Sauce column now includes the offer for us to review any homemade spicy food product that you might make, including hot sauce, salsa, spice mixes, and many others.

You can view these updated posts at:

Want YOUR product featured?

Do YOU make homemade hot sauce or other creations?

More tweaks to this blog are on the way, so stay tuned!

Great article excerpt about tasting hot sauce from our friends across the pond, courtesy of Mirror.co.UK:

EXCLUSIVE: SAUCE OF PAIN
EXCLUSIVE WE TASTE TEST CHILLI SAUCES SO FIERY THEY COULD KILL YOU
By Matt Roper

I BEGIN to panic as the heat builds up and I’m struggling to breathe. My head feels like it’s about to explode and my vision becomes blurred.

I grab the emergency glass of milk but it makes no difference at all. It is only after 15 minutes that I start to get some feeling back to my tongue and throat.

I’m sampling some of the fieriest chilli sauces on the planet – and Who Dares Burns does exactly what it says on the bottle.

The question is whether it’s the hottest? Dave’s Insanity, for example, claims to be 500 times hotter than a jalapeno pepper and even stronger than police-issue pepper spray.

The label also informs me that, as well as being an ingredient in soups and stews, it also “strips waxed floors and removes driveway grease stains”.

I can well believe it. Ten minutes after putting a tiny drop on my tongue my insides feel like they’ve been burned by acid. A spoonful would probably be fatal …

Who Dares Wins and Dave’s Insanity are just two contenders jostling for position in the battle of the super hot sauces. Other rivals – with names Mad Dog’s Revenge and Mega Death – claim to be hotter.

There is a growing army of chilli aficionados who, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, enjoy the feeling of having a red hot poker shoved down their throats… not to mention the extremely unpleasant after-effects.

To discover why such stupidly hot sauces are increasingly popular in Britain, I went to extreme sauce importer Hot-Headz in Stroud, Gloc, which has seen sales triple in the last three years.

Stuart McAllister, who started the company 10 years ago, sells over 300,000 of the bottled sauces a year. He explains: “Most of the super hot sauces have no distinguishable taste, they’re just sheer heat. But I’ve got clients who can’t get enough – the intense pain they experience gives them a rush of adrenaline.”

Stuart stocks dozens of sauces, from the mildest, Brother Bru Bru’s African Hot Sauce, through daunting names such as Endorphin Rush, Widow, to No Survivors and Mad Dog’s Revenge, which scored a million on the Scoville Scale – the unit of measurement of heat in chillis. For comparison, Tabasco sauce scores just 2,500.

So are these inferno sauces safe? “Let’s just say chillis are great for cleansing. They burn on the way in, then burn on the way out,” chuckles Stuart. “It’s also normal to experience temporary loss of hearing. The burning is so intense one of your other senses goes into shutdown.”

Some of the sauces also come with a warning: “Not for people with heart or respiratory problems.” And Stuart was given a ticking off by the St John’s Ambulance during a tasting at a BBC Good Food Show: “There were lots of people feeling faint and throwing up in the toilets. We had to call a paramedic for one guy who was struggling to breath”

“For many men eating hot sauce is a macho thing, so they gulp a spoonful to prove how tough they are,” says Stuart. And as heat junkies chasing the ultimate adrenaline rush demand ever hotter sauces, manufacturers have found ways to make them hotter by adding pure capsaicin, the chemical that creates the heat in chillis.

So the hottest of the hot? Stuart holds up a tiny glass flask containing a tiny white crystal.

“This is Blair’s 16 million Reserve – pure crystallised capsaicin. If you eat this you’ll die, if you touch it you may never use your fingers again.”

TO buy any of these sauces, visit www.hot-headz.com

There are certainly some personal faves and sauces we’re well acquainted with on their tasting list. The Mega Death, Dave’s Insanity, and Brother Bru-Bru’s have all been high-traffic sauces with us for many years now.

It’s not that I consider myself a connoisseur of hot wings, but I know what I like when I taste them. Lately, it’s been a struggle to find hot wings in my local area which are worthy enough of my precious dollars spent. Case in point…last night I joined a couple of my beleaguered medical comrades for an evening of spicy wings & beer at our newest local wingery, Hooters. Now, I’m going to rant & rave a little bit, and not just about my experience last night…but about the piss-poor options in general for spicy wings, unless I make them myself of course.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

Somehow, this jar of salsa has survived intact since we got back from our Texas trip to ZestFest. Judging from how much we liked it when we tried it, I thought we would have demolished this during an afternoon of snacking during college football or something.

Well, it’s now been demolished. Consumed. Finished.

For those who don’t remember, we did a Featured Product writeup on Big Dawg Salsa back in March of this year. We were fortunate enough to have received a nice care package of salsa from Candy & Darrell, which we enjoyed immensely. Since then, they’ve added some new products to their line (such as seasonings…which we plan to review as well) and added some new salsas, of which this is one of those. It clocks in at “medium” on the heat scale, but is something really special in regards to taste. The ingredients list looks like this:

Ingredients: tomatoes (tomato juice, salt, citric acid, calcium chloride), onions, lime, jalapeno peppers, cilantro, garlic, sea salt, apple cider vinegar, red pepper, and other spices

Unlike some products we try where we come up with novel or alternative uses, this one was destined for the chip & dip snacking that salsa really goes with well. So, we poured ourselves a bowl of chips, dumped this salsa into a big dip bowl, and then began to snack away.

Initial impression: This salsa has an amazing aroma to it. The lime and garlic scent leaps from the jar, with a faint amount of cilantro. Unlike some salsas we have had recently which have been thick and chunky, this one sits at the other end of the spectrum. It’s thinner, more well-blended, and more liquid-y. It reminds me of the more traditional Mexican salsas that we eat whenever we go out to our fave eateries for Mexican food.

Taste: Delightful, addictive, and with moderate heat, this salsa is well-balanced and nicely combines a delicate blend of tomatoes, onions, and garlic without letting the lime overwhelm the flavor profile. Its chile pepper heat comes from the jalapeno, and is medium at best (4/10). I know that I have had the tendency to eschew some milder salsas in the past, but this one is perfect at its level of heat. Even the spices used, such as cilantro and salt, are so well-blended such that the combination of flavors is so much more than their component parts.

Overall Recommendation: Thin, tasty, and addictive, I polished off a jar of this salsa in a single sitting with a small bowlful of tortilla chips. Moderate in heat and maximal in flavor, you are likely to get a lot of enjoyment from this salsa. Similar in style and consistency to more traditional salsas, I bet this salsa would go well with a variety of Mexican-style foods such as tacos, burritos, etc. It has a great label & graphics, which is more appreciated if you know where the title comes from as well. Snacking with this salsa was a pure joy. Hopefully, you’ll get some for yourself and see if you agree with me. Enjoy!

Here’s an excerpt from a great article from the Baltimore Sun detailing a little about the benefits of weight loss using hot sauce as an adjunct.

If people have enough faith in Dr. Spiro Antoniades to let him operate on their spines, why not trust the guy for weight-loss advice? Two words: hot sauce.

The Hopkins-trained spine surgeon has just written The Hot Sauce Diet: A Journey of Behavior Modification, a self-published book that’s for sale on Amazon and will soon be stocked in the gift shops at Mercy and St. Agnes hospitals, where he operates.

Antoniades tells dieters to douse their food with Tabasco so they eat slowly and drink lots of water. He also advocates taking a straight shot of the stuff when food cravings strike, to more or less unring Pavlov’s bell.

“For serious, inappropriate, uncontrollable hunger, I recommend a full swig of hot sauce straight from the bottle,” he writes. “I know this is drastic, but inappropriate hunger behavior needs to be punished. Once the swig is in your mouth, you should not swallow it immediately but rather swish it around like a wine connoisseur until the burning effect diminishes.”

If that sounds hard to swallow, consider that the physician has healed himself. A year ago, he said, he had 265 pounds on his 5-foot-11 frame. The 40-year-old father of three said he dropped 70 pounds – and is ulcer-free.

Hot sauce gave him the negative reinforcement he said he needed to shake off the gluttony and guilt wrapped up in his Greek-American roots.

“My dad grew up in Athens, during the German occupation,” Antoniades said. “Any time I didn’t finish my food, I had to hear that lecture, how they were hungry during the occupation. … You can’t eat at family houses because they think you’re sick if you don’t just gorge yourself.”

Antoniades said he didn’t even try shopping his book around to publishers. He just wanted to create a guide for colleagues who keep asking how he lost all the weight. He has no plans to become a full-time diet guru.

“I have a day job,” he said.

If hot sauce works for weight loss, we should be able to shed about 100 pounds apiece!

One of our favorite foods in the hot & spicy food world is salsa. Whether you call it salsa roja/verde, pico de gallo, salsa cruda, picante sauce, or just plain salsa…it’s all generally pretty good. We’ve tried quite a bit in our time, and even more over the past couple of years as we’ve done our tasting & reviewing. There is certainly a divergence in style from fresh salsa versus cooked salsa, in everything from style, shelf life (if any), relative cost, availability, and taste. We want to know what YOU, our devoted readers, like & look for when you go salsa shopping. Feel free to free-form your comments below as well.

As for us, we like ‘em both. Much of what we eat is the cooked salsa, but we won’t pass up a well-made, tasty fresh salsa either. We find the good ones (fresh) harder to come by, but usually worth the cost when we do.

Ingredients: Habaneros, garlic, onions, carrots, lime juice, ginger, whiskey, honey, apple cider vinegar, salt, black pepper.

A few weeks ago I traded our own Chuck Hell some of my Zesty Blend for his hot sauce. I was shocked when I received, not one, but two of his hot sauces. Today I’ll be reviewing one of them, Chuk Hell’s Magic Blend #2.

This is a chili-heads dream sauce. It has a nice sweet taste, great heat, and blends perfectly with almost every thing you put it on. The taste that first jumps out at you is the all-too-familiar fruity habanero (along with their heat) along with the apple cider vinegar and honey. At first I thought this was a bit too sweet until I tried it on an Ostrich taco at El Coyote. Much to my surprise, the sweet taste evens out when mixed with various foods and that’s when you really start to appreciate the quality mixture of flavors. The lime juice, carrots, and whiskey round off this sauce very nicely.

Chuk makes a mean sauce, I must say. The heat caught me off guard, hitting me right in the front of my tongue. It left me with the “habanero sniffles” and a small endorphin rush. Not too many sauces have that distinction now a days, so cheers to you Chuk.

Since I was trying this at a Mexican restaurant, all the help ended up sampling it. Boy did their eyes light up. Most of them wanted to order it right then and there, so Chuk, if you are reading this (and I know you are) you better start production of this sauce soon or else you might have a horde of heat deprived Mexicans banging on your door. You know you have an exceptional sauce on your hands when you have the approval of the Mexican nation.

So, in closing, everyone needs to start bugging Chuk to go main stream with this sauce because a sauce like this deserves to be readily available for me…er…the world to buy. Thanks for the sample Chuk!

Taste: 10, Heat: 7.67

This article is cool as we’ve used and liked the hot sauces from the folks at Amazon Sauce. Their Red and Green sauces are excellent. So good are they that we used them up in fairly short order and only have bottles left that are in our display collection. Maybe Giorgio will see this article and send us some more so we don’t have to go looking for them!

(This article is quoted, in part, from the online Houston Chronicle.)

Colombian pins his hopes on peppers
Plants offer an alternative for farmers who depend on coca

By JOHN OTIS
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle South America Bureau

BARRANQUILLA, COLOMBIA – Inspecting a plastic tub filled with green jalapeño peppers, Colombia’s hot sauce czar spotted a single overripe slice with a reddish hue.

“They all must be green,” Giorgio Araujo told workers at his food-processing plant as they tested a new product in the laboratory. “No red ones.”

When it comes to the pungent and the piquant, Araujo knows what he likes. Not only does he slather chili peppers on everything from his breakfast eggs to shrimp dinners, Araujo produces his own line of hot sauces and exports the products to the U.S., many through the Port of Houston.

Hundreds of Colombian farmers, who used to struggle growing cotton and corn, make a living raising chili peppers for Araujo. Now, the 43-year-old entrepreneur wants to set up a series of “chili pepper colleges” to help peasants who grow coca, the raw material for cocaine, switch to cayenne, habanero, jalapeño and tabasco peppers.

“I always think of John F. Kennedy’s words,” Araujo said as he wandered past 55-gallon drums of peppers soaking in brine. “Ask what you can do for your country.”

To view the rest of this article, click HERE for the source text.

On the heels of doing our review on the Smokin-Hot Stuff by E.Z. Earl, we quickly sped to open and use the bottle of the Blazin-Hot Stuff we were sent as well. Since we knew that the Blazin-Hot was the hotter of the two sauces and the Smokin-Hot Stuff was pretty damn hot, we had to prepare our tastebuds for some serious stress of dealing with the heat level of the Blazin-Hot Stuff.

Comparing the ingredients of this sauce to the other, we saw that the Blazin-Hot Stuff has these ingredients:

Ingredients: pure white vinegar, filtered water, diced tomatoes in juice, English-Style Worcester sauce (no anchovies), secret blend of 12 natural herbs & spices, Oregon clover honey, concentrated lemon juice, x-hot horseradish, salt, natural hickory smoke, precooked food starch, hot chili extract, natural Xanthan (as stabilizer)

Look familiar? They should, if only because it’s the exact same list of ingredients as the Smokin-Hot Stuff. What we surmise is that the heat-making components, such as the herbs, horseradish, and extract, have been ratcheted up a notch to make this a hotter sauce. Since we liked the taste of the Smokin-Hot so much, we hoped that the additional heat wouldn’t adversely affect the flavor.

Pouring some of this sauce onto a spoon, there wasn’t any noticeable change in consistency by comparison. In fact, its character pretty well matches up with the Smokin-Hot in every way that we could tell. However, the difference is slightly in the taste and more so in the heat. We did the taste-test-off-the-finger again, and again our response was…

[Read the rest of this entry...]

When this tasty-looking package arrived here at our house, courtesy of Doug at Jersey Boyz Jerky, it was definitely all mine. Linda’s not the fan of good beef jerky like I am, so I claimed this for my own and refused to share it. (Thpppttt!)

For those of you who disdain jerky as truck stop food for the less refined palates and/or “plain country folk,” lemme tell you something. That’s just plain wrong. Here’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia about the origin of jerky:

The word “jerky” itself comes from the Quechua term Charqui, which means “dried meat”.

Throughout human history and culture, drying meat has been a common method employed to preserve it. By drying thinly sliced meat in the sun and wind next to a smokey fire, the meat is protected from insects which would lay eggs in the raw meat. Jerky is one of humankind’s original, critical and essential products: storable food. These prehistoric methods to preserve meat for storage have been used by the Inca and many other ancient peoples, who prepared jerky from the animals they hunted or husbanded as an essential matter of need.

Beef jerky itself is a fairly healthy snack, as far as most snack foods these days can be. High in protein, low in fat, and low in carbs, the only real issue is that they can be somewhat high in sodium…making it a point of concern for anyone who has to limit their salt intake.

I remember reading a review for the extra-spicy version of this jerky, so I wanted to give the regular spicy version a try and see how well it compared to others I’ve tasted. To do this properly, I decided to get a couple of other commercial beef jerky samples to do a “compare & contrast” on them and go from there. First, here’s the skinny on the ingredients of the Jersey Boyz Spicy Jerky:

Ingredients: beef, soy sauce (which contains water, soybeans, wheat, salt, molasses), worcestershire sauce (which contains vinegar, water, molasses, salt, sugar, anchovies, onions, garlic, citrus juice, tamarind citrus oil). Other ingredients: cider, vinegar, cayenne pepper, cajun seasoning, spanish paprika, red pepper, black pepper, fresh habanero peppers

Tasting: I tried this jerky along with some Jack Link’s Hot & Spicy Beef Jerky and Tabasco (R) flavored Slim Jims. (I know that Slim Jims aren’t really beef jerky, but I needed to have something to make a total of 3 things to try.) I felt that the Jersey Boyz jerky held its own to its competition. It wasn’t too tough or dried out like a few of the pieces of Jack Link’s and didn’t have the same greasiness that comes along with pretty much any Slim Jim. What you have is a good, moderately-spiced beef jerky snack that will make you wish the package was bigger. Its spice level in terms of heat would be what I call moderate, and made me pine a little for the extra-spicy version of this jerky to sizzle my tastebuds. The Spicy jerky has just a little spicy tingle, but with better flavor than many jerkys you might find. Plus, how many jerky products come with a “floss” that lets you plumb every last molecule of jerky goodness from your palate after you eat?

Overall recommendation: This jerky is pretty decent, but I know that I like the spicier the better when it comes to my beef jerky snacks. (Hear that, jerky-makers? I am your target demographic for the mega-spicy beef jerky!) I’ve tasted the Toxic Tonic hot sauce that this jerky uses as its marinade, and I’ve loved that with its habanero-peppercorn sorta taste, so this jerky has that going for it. Is this the best jerky I’ve ever tasted? Sadly, I have to say no. However, I like it well enough that I would buy it over many of the commercially-made schlock I see at the store every time I go. In fact, I’m willing to bet I’d like the extra-spicy version even more. Skip the Slim-Jims and other poseurs, and pick up a couple packages of this jerky to keep around your house. That, or a couple of guys named “Spike” and “Guido” might make a little visit to your house to help gently guide your next beef jerky shopping experience. Capisce?