Butterfly Bakery of Vermont – Dutchess Mystery Pepper Single Varietal Hot Sauce
Most peppers come from a single species. Capsicum Annuum gives us bell peppers, jalapenos, and cayenne peppers for example, while Capsicum Chinense gives us habanero, Carolina reaper, and the Trinidad scorpion pepper. Ghost Peppers are unique in that they’re an interspecies hybrid of Capsicum Chinense as well as Capsicum Frutescens, a pepper species that includes the tabasco pepper, piri piri pepper, and the Japanese togarashi pepper.
There’s big money in developing new peppers, both in big agriculture to make hardier and more consistent strains, as well as in the enthusiast market to try to create the hottest peppers to break records and claim bragging (and marketing) rights. Both big agriculture and dedicated enthusiasts spend countless hours and quite a bit of money to interbreed various strains of peppers looking to promote the characteristics they want. Occasionally, however, nature does the work for you.
That’s the case here. where Dutchess Farm found a new type of pepper growing in the midst of their Ghost Peppers – it looked like a thicker fleshier Ghost Pepper, and it tasted like a Ghost Pepper except fruitier. Thankfully they realized they had something special and teamed up with Butterfly Bakery of Vermont to release this sauce.
As far as super-hot peppers go Ghost Peppers are one of my favorites. They lack the astringency that Reapers and Scorpions can sometimes have, and there’s a beautiful smokiness and earthiness to them that grounds and rounds out sauces made with super-hots. The Dutchess Mystery Pepper takes what’s great about Ghost Peppers and makes it even better by adding some fruity sparkle on top. It’s like taking the best of the Ghost Pepper and the best of the Scotch Bonnet and combining them.
Because this sauce is all Dutchess Mystery Pepper, vinegar, and salt, you really get to taste the natural flavor of the pepper. Earthy, smoky, and fruity with a little less heat than a pure ghost pepper sauce, this sauce fires on all cylinders from the get go, it’s deeply satisfying and wonderfully tasty.
Being just a single varietal sauce with no extraneous ingredients it’s also extremely flexible. Wings, sandwiches, tacos, drinks, rice, samosas, seafood, this works well in any context.
This is a sauce not to miss, plus you get to try a pepper you’ve probably never had before. I recommend anyone to go out and get a bottle at your earliest convenience.
Ingredients: Artesano organic undistilled white vinegar, Dutchess Farms “Mystery” chili peppers, salt.
Heat Level: 6/10. This isn’t as hot as a pure Ghost Pepper sauce, but there’s certainly a nice strong kick to it. There’s tons of flavor to back it up though, so don’t be afraid of the little burn that can bring.
