Food

After looking at The ChileFoundry’s list of top 10 UK chilli web sites based on Alexa stats, it got me curious as to what were the most trafficked U.S. chile/hot sauce sites. Now, the UK list included shopping sites as well as blogs, fansites, etc. To call the act of compiling a list of American sites where products are sold “daunting” would be a gross understatement. There could be hundreds of potential e-commerce destinations that dabble in spicy foods, and even if I would spend days or weeks scouring the internet I would no doubt miss several good ones.

Instead, I gathered the stats for the top U.S. blogs and chilehead forums…

Here’s wishing all of the American readers of this blog a HOT, awesome and safe Thanksgiving! Today is a day to reflect on what’s important in life, including God and family (and maybe football), and to be grateful for all the blessings we enjoy. So oven-roast, smoke, or fry up (my least favorite method) some turkey and let’s all toast the day!

As the ball begins to be put into motion for the forthcoming Fiery Foods and Barbecue Show in March of next year (I just bought plane tickets a few days ago), my thoughts start to wander and meander to images of vendor booths, seemingly unlimited bottles of hot stuff and the Sandia Mountains bordering the outskirts of host town Albuquerque, New Mexico. What better way to satiate my thirst for the biggest hot sauce show of the year than to view this nice little recap created by former TV news anchor/reporter Rosa Linda Román for the New Mexicast. It features the goings-on at the 2009 FFS, and many friendly faces that are familiar to chileheads appear in the video:

You may have seen this sauce a few years back and wondered what the hubbub was about. Yes, the Burn, Baby, Burn Revolutionary Hot Sauce is the product released by the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, created by former Black Panther Party members. The Foundation’s Executive Director David Hilliard has stated as the reason for the sauce’s conception, “the hot sauce is another way to raise money and bring attention to the Huey Newton Foundation. We’re trying to turn the tide of violence and educate young people through our work.”

What I’m NOT going to in this review is cover the Black Panther Party history or discuss politics. You have the entire internet at your disposal if you wish to delve into this topic. What I want to focus on, however, is whether or not this is a good hot sauce.

Dan Houston of the Global Warming Salsa Co. has one of the most intriging tales of the spicy foods world in recent memory. He and his wife Cherie have been longtime fitness consultants with their own Michigan-based company, Houston Fitness Consultants, and have been using a “chile pepper approach to exercise” (what that is exactly is described by Dan below). Wanting to develop healthy foods and to help raise funds for an exercise and nutrition book for kids, they decided to create salsas to aide them in their quest. A portion of Global Warming’s profits also goes to help an organization that aims to help save muscle cars, as Dan is heavily into racing and classic American automobiles.

I think Global Warming has one of the cleverest themes I’ve seen in a while. Dan choose it as a play on the term heard so often today, but with much different meanings. One, the “Global” in the name is meant as flavors from around the world, as the company currently has a Japanese salsa for sale and will introduce other international flavors over the coming weeks. The “Warming” part is used to represent heat levels found in their products. A combination of these two concepts makes for one very interesting potential marketing angle.

It also doesn’t hurt that that Global Warming Salsa Co. has some really high quality and tasty products – so good, in fact, that their fire-roasted salsas have won in the Scovies and The Hot Pepper Awards…

Larry Noggle from Peppahead.com is an avid photograher and grower of chiles, and has put his excellent skills to work by creating an awesome 2010 Chile Pepper Calendar! It also includes great chile recipes and useful information about peppers. Please note that the link above is for U.S. orders only. For international orders, you can purchase the calendar at Calendars.com.

Oh, and while you’re on the Peppahead website linked above, be sure to take a look at other artwork by Larry Noggle and Mark Rutherford, plus Peppahead’s rubs, seasonings, and hot sauces.

Here is DEFCON Creator John Dilley giving a lengthy interview. Good stuff!

I just came upon some news about Dr. Paul Bosland of New Mexico State University Chile Pepper Institute – he is this year’s recipient of Governor’s New Mexico Distinguished Public Service Award. Congrats to Paul!

Here is the news release courtesy of KRQE News 13 of Albuquerque, NM:

Justin Bannister, NMSU News Bureau
LAS CRUCES (KRQE) – Even in New Mexico, it’s rare to find someone with a front license plate that reads “Chileman.”

Then again, it’s rare to find anyone who knows more about chile and whose research has done more to help the state’s chile industry than Paul Bosland, a professor in Plant and Environmental Sciences at New Mexico State University. Bosland is the recipient of one of this year’s Governor’s New Mexico Distinguished Public Service Awards.

“Service is an important component of my appointment at NMSU, and I have tried to reach out to the community through…

It’s been a while since I’ve done an edition of the Burn Buzz, where I list hot n’ interesting links about spicy food and BBQ that have been floating around on the intertubes lately…

High-Dose Capsaicin Patch Approved – Link 2

Mike Cates of Hot Shots Has Brain Aneurysm – Wishing him and his family well. Please keep him in your thoughts and prayers.

Maine-Made Rubs and BBQ Sauces Win International “Fiery Foods” Competition – Link 2

Cocaine and Pepper Spray – A Lethal Mix?

Chili Cook-Off Brews Up Heated Competition

Hot Rods in Smokin’ Hot Sauce – Malaysian KFC loocations sell chicken pieces stacked on a skewer with a smokey hot sauce dip.

Capsaicin Skin Sprays Repel Bed Bugs with the Power of Hot Peppers

FDA Approves New Drug Treatment for Long-Term Pain Relief after Shingles Attacks

Hot Sauce and a Comb……Security Threats Inside And Out For 9/11 Trial

Fatality Hot Sauce is another sauce devised by Jim Campbell and the Mild to Wild Pepper & Herb Company. This one, as you might have guessed by the name, features the mighty fatalii chile pepper. Fataliis are in the chinense species of chiles – the same one that includes habaneros and jolokias -and are absolute scorchers. Despite the fact that they only rate on the high end of what an orange habanero would be heat-wise (somewhere around 350,000 SHU), their special mix of the capsaicinoids – with dihydrocapsaicin being the dominant one – is speculated to be the reason that fataliis taste hotter than 570,000 SHU red savinas to most people that I’ve talked to.

Jim knows his peppers and knows how to balance ingredients very well within his sauces. Fatality is a good effort and is a terrific choice if you’re on the prowl for a nice extract-free condiment to splash on your food, especially one that will really take things to the next fiery level…

Certain peppers lend themselves wonderfully to concoctions with fruit and sugar and I happen to think that sometime in the next ten or twenty years spicy sweets will explode into the mainstream. What exactly will be the cornerstone of this trend – candy, syrups and ice cream toppers, a jam or jelly, or maybe even a fruit and chile pepper based salsa – I do not know. It may be a little of everything. Nowadays they may be viewed as novelty items, but something will really catch on with your next door neighbors Plain Jane and Bob, you know, the ones who wince at the thought of putting a drop of Tabasco on their oysters.

That’s just my prediction. I could be wrong. What I can say accurately is that specialty food manufacturers are making nearly everything under the sun both old and new with peppers of all heat levels. One such type of sub-niche items I’m seeing more of are variations of tried and true pepper jelly.

A great many pepperheads have confided in me that they’re just not into pepper jelly. I may only be an occasional jelly or jam user but they have a certain appeal to me. You can spread, smear or mix this stuff on a vast assortment of things you would never even consider putting a vinegar n’ chiles mix on. One such is the subject of this review, Historic Lynchburg Tennessee Whiskey Chocolate Cherry Pepper Jelly made by Porky’s Gourmet Foods…

There may be extract-based sauces and additives that are far hotter, but for “all-natural” hot sauces (meaning ones that do not contain chile pepper extract), there may be none in the world more mouth-scorching than the ones listed below that are commercially available.

Many chileheads and sauce aficionados feel that pepper extract possesses a nasty, bitter, “chemical”-like flavor, and prefer the taste and burn provided by ground-up or pureed chiles. If you’re looking for the most eye-watering, tongue-throbbing, throat-burning, all-around hottest non-extract hot sauces, take a look at these fine offerings…

Here’s a press release a stumbled upon this morning. I can’t say whether or not this product would work, but I found this interesting nonetheless…

Most energy products deliver large doses of caffeine through oral ingestion, and this is known to cause jitters and crashing effects. Now there’s a new oral spray that delivers sustained energy without crash or jitters thanks to the power of the pepper. Spray Awake is the world’s first personal energy spray to use capsaicin as a way to deliver sublingual doses of caffeine with big results and no side effects.

Albany, NY (PRWEB) November 6, 2009 – SiCap LLC, makers of the popular Sinus Buster capsaicin nasal spray, has announced a brand new capsaicin based energy spray called “Spray Awake”. According to the manufacturer, Spray Awake delivers caffeine in small sustained amounts to reap positive results without the unwanted side effects associated with energy drinks, shots and pills…

For my brief, two-to-three minute audio sauce reviews for the Hot Sauce Weekly Podcast, I’ve been racking my brains trying to gather up a diverse array of products that I completely adore so that I can cover them. While I may eventually get around to recording a negative (or at least a less than glowing) review of a spicy food item, for the time being I want to give solid recommendations on sauces and salsas that I truly believe are some of the very best out there in fiery foods land.

One such product is Danny Cash’s Mean Streak Habanero Mango Hot Sauce, a sauce I fell in love with a couple of years ago. Danny Cash is already one of my favorite sauce manufacturers, and I think this would be the grand champion of what they produce. Out of all the hot sauces I’ve tasted, Mean Streak is easily in “all-time Top 10” territory. I’ve looked back in my blog’s hot sauce review archives and realized that I’ve never formally reviewed a single Danny Cash product, so here is this write-up to help rectify that problem.