Letter From the UK – January 2010

Christmas is well and truly over, the snow has gone, the kids are back in school, it is now time to make good on the New Year’s resolutions, like learning to write better articles, losing weight, etc…

My last letter from the UK came out just before Christmas, most of our UK vendors had just moments to go before they would not be able to ship and more orders and where running as fast as they could to ship all the orders, all reports from the front reported good sales well up on last year, but there was little hot news in the last few days.

Now as we move into 2010 we have heard from a couple of our larger UK suppliers that they are close to moving to larger premises and their business continues to grow.

From the business that provide us with their online sales data the biggest selling product by unit sales was not a UK product, but Blair’s Death Rain Habanero Chips.

The ChileFoundry also made it to #5 in the UK Top 10 Chilli websites and our traffic continues to build, it will not be long till we will have served our 100,000th page (since we stared tracking about 6 months ago), the #1 site was still Scorchio (www.scorchio.co.uk) who knocked the previous and only other site to hold the #1 position Chillis Galore (www.chillisgalore.co.uk) the month before.

In 2010 we are going to have a go at growing the Trinidad Scorpion, so to start the series, we did a quick hunt for information on this most interesting looking chilli only to find very little information. It seems to be very little known about it, we could not find any test results, just conjecture and rumour about how hot is it, maybe at the end of the season we will send some our pods to be tested.

We published a few of recipes this month, based on notes I had collected over the year (I store my notes using Evernote) which I have now also installed on my new Nexus One phone (and yes that is the new Google Android phone, sorry Darth Naga). I can the look up any recipes I have collected or am developing while I am out shopping and get the ingredients I need.

The first recipe this month was a very successful attempt at a chilli jelly, which I suspect will not last long as we have already finished the 1st jar and this is a house with 100’s of open bottles of chilli products available.

The 2nd recipe this month was from Angeli of the My Caribbean Food Blog who’s fiery pickled Scotch Bonnets recipe had caught my eye while browsing.

The final recipe was a shot in the dark, I had come across a few mentions of a Tsire Spice Mix from West Africa and decided to give it a go, the mix was simple to make and I decided to make meatballs and use on them. I could not find any goat meat for sale (well not in Yeovil) so I used lamb, they worked very well, and tasted I think even better the next day in a meatball sandwich.

Darth Naga has done some silly things over the past few months, but this month he dared to try a sauce that was banned from the UK Fiery Food Show, and he did this on video so we could all enjoy the after effects.

Also mentioned this month was:

Hot-Headz Nihil Timendum Est (Fear Nothing) Hot Sauce
Nitro Naga Biohazard Edition
Vivien Lloyd’s Tomato and Chilli Chutney

I hope you have enjoyed our round up of the UK chilli markets from the Chile Foundry, we have lost of articles lined up for next month, so we will hope to see you then.

Hot Juan