Food

At any hot sauce event I attend, there’s always a few folks newer to the industry who walk on by asking me and other bloggers and reviewers to sample their spicy condiment efforts. At the 2011 Peppers at the Beach in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, one such up-and-comer was Steve Seabury of High River Sauces, who introduced several of us chileheads to his Hellacious Hot Sauce (you can watch our first impressions video at here at ILoveItSpicy.com).

Since that warm May afternoon, I’ve been meaning to get around to giving Hellacious a formal review. I’ve been fortunate enough to have interviewed Steve back in September but a written assessment of his sauce hasn’t happened until now. So without furth ado, here it is…

Here’s a fairly unique type of sauce: Heatseekers Chilli Incinerator Extreme Hot Sauce with pure capsaicin crystals. That’s right, this elixir contains 16 million Scoville Heat Unit capsaicin, the highest obtainable pungency when it comes to the chemical that makes chile pepper burn.

This particular sauce is the brainchild of Candice Burns of Wildfire Chilli from Australia. She submitted me her Heatseekers Chilli Smokey Jolokia Original Steak Sauce and blew mw away by the simple deliciousness and the heat it packed.

With Incinerator Extreme Chilli Sauce, she aims to create a sauce with the base flavor and heat deriving from the 7 pot chile pepper, one of the hottest in the world at between 800,000 and 1,200,000 SHU (hotter than a Bhut Jolokia/Ghost Chile and just under a Trinidad Scorpion Butch T), and make it even more insane by introducing the aforementioned pure capsaicin crystals. How was it done, you may be asking? Are there literal grains and flakes of capsaicin suspended in the sauce that can hit your tongue? Technically, not really…

The thing with capsaicin crystals is that they are hydrophobic. This means they cannot be dissolved fully and directly…

Below are all my videos, reviews and appearances on other websites. These are of course outside of anything that’s on this very site.

It also excludes regular product Reviews I’ve done on the BBQ Central Radio Show podcasts and the Hot Sauce Weekly podcasts. Keep in mind that some radio appearances which were once in podcast format are no longer available, including WLS Chicago, WMMS Cleveland and El Universo Radio City in Ecuador.

I have provided hot sauce and product Reviews for Peppers and More since 2008, and some of the post content has been duplicated on there from this site and vice-versa, so those have been left off this list as well…

Whether or not you like him (that’s a topic to be discussed another day), you have to admit that Guy Fieri has one of those in-your-face personalities that demands attention. I can’t vouch for what the Guy (pun intended) is like in person, but he seems like a cool enough dude, with an earnest interest in bold, spicy, flavorful food that regular, no-nonsense joes like me can appreciate. When I got wind that he was releasing a line of salsas in addition to BBQ sauces, I thought that these might have some potential, unlike some of the other crap that a celebrity chef’s name has been slapped on only to make a quick buck.

Fieri’s people had shipped me his new grocery store lineup for review: Old Skool Original Salsa, Green & Mean Salsa Verde, Da Spice Is Right Chipotle Salsa and Burn Baby Burn 7 Pepper Salsa. Overall I think this saucy quartet is a sad letdown, yet I discovered some good elements in a couple of them…

If you’ve paid close attention to my blog the past couple of years, you know I’m a fan of filmmaker Robert Rodriguez and his clever 10-Minute Cooking School series that appear in the bonus features of his DVD and Blu-Ray flicks. I loved his recipes covering his delectable Puerco Pibil and spicy Sin City Breakfast Tacos.

This latest installment is from the latest special edition of his Planet Terror release: Texas BBQ. Thank the Lord…Rodriguez doesn’t screw it up! Although I disagree with them about a few minor things – his disdain of pork ribs; his way-too-basic beef rub (Nine parts black pepper and one part salt? Is that all?) – but he demonstrates some very accurate rudimentary knowledge of how to smoke low n’ slow some brisket and beef ribs. Watch this and you’ll see one of the best and all-around coolest writer/directors in the entertainment biz who honestly knows a thing or two about food:

Seems like every time you turn around these days there’s a new hot sauce-flavored snack product. It just goes to show you the widespread acceptance of spiciness into the mainstream.

The results thus far have been so-so. There have been a few chips and snacks with substantial taste and heat, while others are lamentably terrible.

Which brings us to the latest spicy munchable- a pairing of two well-known brands: Cholula and Jack Links. I’ve regraded Cholula as one of my most beloved hot sauces of all time, despite it being a mass-produced fiery foods product. Jack Link’s makes some acceptable jerky, enough to satisfy my palette as a beef jerky connoisseur. So there may be good things available under the name Jack Link’s Cholula Hot Sauce-flavored Beef Jerky.

This new product is available in a 3.25-ounce resealable bag and has a suggested retail price of $5.99. The flavors include a combination of often-used term “secret spices,” pequin and arbol peppers.

“The combination of these premium brands and iconic flavors resonate well with our consumers and are a natural fit in quality and reputation,” stated Kevin Papacek, Jack Link’s Beef Jerky Brand Manager of Innovation. “Jack Link’s new Cholula hot sauce beef jerky provides consumers with convenience, satiety, protein and guilt-free snacking, all wrapped up in the flavor and heat of Cholula’s hot sauce.”

It’s been slammed on Facebook and panned by James Wreck of Eat More Heat. People have asked me what I think of Heat Seekers, which originally aired on the Cooking Channel and are now being replayed on Food Network. I’ve finally gotten around to watching my DVRed copies; and as of this writing I’ve viewed the Chicago and Seattle episodes, so my opinions are based on how those two installments turned out.

Here’s a short synopsis of the program: two chefs, Aaron Sanchez or Roger Mooking, travel to a major U.S. city each episode and visit three pre-determined different eating establishments, known for at least one super-spicy dish, where they will partake in eating a spicy food challenge of some sort at each one.

My quick take is that Heat Seekers is boring, seems forced, and is a slap in the face to every chile-loving individual from Miami to Moline. What did I specifically find at fault about it? Read on…

It’s less than two months away from the 5th Annual Jungle Jim’s Weekend of Fire! Of course, the most noticeable change from previous years’ events is the fact that the Weekend of Fire has moved from August to October. This was done to facilitate the expanded outdoor food vendors because it’s more likely that more pleasant weather will occur in October than in the hot n’ humid dog days of summer.

Like last year, there are spicy eating contests (look to both I Love It Spicy and this blog in the near future for a list of events), a big turnout from the chilehead blogging contengent and great sauces and flavor enhancers from vendors.

Below is the vendor list as of right now. This can (and probably will) change quite a bit before the WOF show kicks off on October 1st….

There a million blogs out there in cyberspace, each with its own focus, level of quality and amount of work put into it. Anyone can slap one together thanks to Wordpress and a seemingly limitless supply of free templates out there. While I admire most anyone with a passion and a panache for writing, there are some of the things that drive me up a wall when it comes to general foodie blogs…

The hoity-toity food porn pics

Too many foodie bloggers have succumb to the trend of posting up artsy-fartsy “food porn” pics. These photographs showcase dishes that looked like they took…

More national exposure for one of our own! A photo of Vic Clinco‘s incredible 3000-plus bottle (and growing) hot sauce collection will be shown on NBC’s Today Show this coming Monday, August 8, 2011 at approximately 8:55am Eastern/7:55am Central. So set your DVRs, VCRs, or Betamax machines now so you don’t miss it!

Below are the preliminary Scoville Heat Unit measurements for various super-hot chile peppers that grower Jim Duffy and capsaicin expert Marlin Bensinger tested late last year. Many of these were done both individually by Bensinger and after he submitted some chile pods to an independent, third-party lab, Analytical Food Labs in Grand Prairie, Texas.

As always, please keep in mind that the Scoville Heat Units listed are just estimates at best. Scoville units for each chile pepper may vary greatly due to the seed lineage, season, climate, soil, and other conditions in which the they are grown. In the case of the “newer” super-hot chiles such as the Trinidad Scorpion “Butch T” strain, organizations like the Chile Pepper Institute will grow the chiles for several more growing seasons in order to test for a more accurate average SHU rating.

A happy couple enjoy the simple life at home with Cholula hot sauce and their cat, Jingles.

It’s time for yet another list, but this time out it’s going to be quite the undertaking! To help out, I’ve asked several of my chilehead and industry friends to join in this gargantuan task. What’s the topic? It’s everyone’s top 10 favorite sauces of all time!

To some heat fanatics, it can be as easy as pie, and many already had a good idea in their noggin of what their top spicy items already were. For others, such as myself, it’s like trying to pick two or three favorite children out of a room crammed full of youngsters. It hurts like crazy, but the list had to be whittled down to a mere 10 (or 11 in a few cases…) choices.

What qualifies to be put on a favorites list? They must be amongst our top ten liquid “flavor enhancers” of most any classification, purpose or usage; they can be a hot sauce, BBQ sauce, salsa, condiment, marinade, cooking sauce, wing sauce and more. It is simply what the person considers to be the creme de la creme of spicy-type sauces. A qualifying sauce needs to have been commercially available at one point, but it does not matter if it’s still in production or currently defunct…

Just like the hot sauce field, barbecue sauces number in the tens of thousands and can be baffling to sort through. Everyone from food conglomerates to chefs to backyard grillers to competition teams have thrown down the metaphorical gauntlets and offer their own product for home consumption.

The subject of this review comes from a BBQ competition team that calls themselves Rooftop Barbeque. As their website explains, “[Our name] comes from the book of Acts, in chapter 10. Peter, the apostle, was sitting on a rooftop while people were cooking dinner below him. He fell asleep and saw a vision in his dreams with a large sheet coming down from heaven filled with all kinds of unclean animals.

And a voice came to him, ‘Rise, Peter; kill and eat.”

So now we can eat pork… mmmm, pork.”

I love it! Now I’m going to tell you if I love their product, Rooftop BBQ Sauce, as well….