I’ve long been a fan of Bravo’s cooking competition TV show Top Chef, appreciating that they keep the focus on high quality cooking competition and don’t devote much screen time to personal drama. When I saw that Heatonist had a line of hot sauces made in collaboration with the Bravo Top Chef team I knew…
With the tagline of “got the guts? eat my nuts!” and the cheeky double-entendre in the name of this particular product it’s clear that Hot Monkey Nuts has a pretty slick marketing department and is going for an irreverent and fun vibe with their products and targeted clientele. According to their website the owner found…
Blazing Foods (which confusingly also seems to run a parallel website called Deathnuts.com) makes a variety of spicy (or not so spicy) cheese balls that they call Crack Balls. I’ve samples all of their flavors and all are delicious, and will work on getting reviews up on each as I open new bags. Hatch Green…
Vermont is something of an unexpected hot sauce hot spot. Known in most of the country for Bernie Sanders, Phish, and maple syrup, hot sauce isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you consider our nation’s 2nd-least populous state. Lurking beneath those idyllic snow covered hills and quaint villages smelling of woodsmoke and…
Keith is a member of the Try Guys, a YouTube/TV entertainment group who take on a variety of tasks, many of them food related. I’ve only seen a bit of their content, but when placing an order at Heatonist a while back and needing to get my total up to a figure that’d earn me…
Sometimes I’ll see a sauce label that immediately grabs my attention and makes me interested in purchasing one or more sauces from that company. That was the case with Alliumphobia. I saw a post regarding in on Reddit and the cute little vampire running away from the garlic bulb grabbed my attention. When I looked…
Cholula is a grocery store shelf staple, as well as a sauce that’s not uncommon to see on the tables of tex-mex or more gringo-oriented Mexican restaurants. Despite its ubiquity in suburban America today, the sauce actually has its roots in Jalisco, Mexico going back three generations. Originally developed by a chef for the Cuervo…
This is another unique single-varietal limited release sauce from Butterfly Bakery of Vermont. This features the Trinidad Perfume pepper, a variant of the Trinidad Scorpion pepper that has virtually no heat, but still retains the floral and fruity flavor associated with the Trinidad Scorpion. According to BBoVT these peppers naturally start to become spicier through…
This is another sauce that I brought back with me from Mexico. The Zaaschila brand has started to show up on American grocery store shelves, but their three-entry Gourmet line of sauces doesn’t appear to have made it north of the border yet. Looking up Zaaschila they’re a Mexican company based out of the northern…
Tabasco is obviously the biggest dog in the hot sauce world. With a history dating back over 150 years and bottles available at nearly every restaurant in North America and beyond (plus famously included in US Military MREs and even having made the trip to space as part of astronaut meals) the brand’s original hot…