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.
It’s time to revisit one of my favorite topics – other hot sauce blogs! Despite the advent of social networking streams like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, the now mature tool of blogging remains largely influential not to mention a still easy-to-access method of acquiring news and information about the movers and shakers in the fiery foods industry and the wonderful (and sometimes admittedly not-so-wonderful) products they create.
The New Jersey company of 
It doesn’t matter if it’s Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, or the dead of a blizzard-plagued winter…Millions of meat lovers across North America are now venturing outdoors to grill succulent pork, beef, chicken, and other delicious types of animal flesh. Mmmmm! The following is a list of handy tips to ensure in your grilling and BBQ successes.
I like desserts and snacks a lot. My dad loves to eat sweet things that are also spicy. He gave me some of his Heartbreaking Dawns Fountain and Fairfax Ghost Pepper Chocolate Chip Cookie and it is hot!
I don’t normally throw around accolades with any sort of casual frequency. I’m cautious to declare any food product I try – whether it be a barbecue sauce, a salsa, a mustard, a seasoning, or a hot sauce – to be “great”. I have to know for sure that it has the culinary spunk before it rises above the level of an agreeable but generic item.
St. Louis and its surrounding ‘burbs are largely dry when it comes to spicy eating challenges, plus the Gateway Area is not exactly a bastion of fiery cuisine in general. It was only a mere four weeks ago that I got a tip that some little Thai eatery up in North County was offering what us heat freaks were craving for…a capsaicin-fueled grapple that would test the limits on what our tongues could take.
It’s new flavorings time at Buffalo Wild Wings, and when I got word of two new sauces they were offering – Jammin’ Jalapeno and Thai Curry – you had better believe that I wanted to try them. The Jammin’ Jalapeno sounded intriguing, as its marketing description was, “Spicy jalapenos, blended with a touch of tequila and a hint of lime. Sweet heat.” Yet it was B-Dubs’ spin on another Asian flavor that got me walking through their doors. Of course, with most of their new sauces, they come attached with all the standard phraseology to go along with it, e.g., for a limited time only, etc.
Heartbreaking Dawns cannot be explained away as another young food enhancer maker attempting to have a ubiquitous presence by overextending themselves with lots of new but unnecessary products. Like an elder spicy sauce manufacturer such as CaJohns, just about everything Heartbreaking Dawns sells is good. And as long as they offer quality products and are able to sustain their current clench of focus, then more power to ’em if they produce 8 items or 80.