Author: Scott Roberts

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.

The subject of this review comes from a BBQ competition team that calls themselves Rooftop Barbeque. As their website explains, “[Our name] comes from the book of Acts, in chapter 10. Peter, the apostle, was sitting on a rooftop while people were cooking dinner below him. He fell asleep and saw a vision in his dreams with a large sheet coming down from heaven filled with all kinds of unclean animals.

And a voice came to him, ‘Rise, Peter; kill and eat.”

So now we can eat pork… mmmm, pork.”

I love it! Now I’m going to tell you if I love their product, Rooftop BBQ Sauce, as well….

The New Jersey company of Born to Hula presents a quartet of hot sauces that are by no means original. If you give them a try yourself, you will no doubt feel that you’ve had all of these sauces a dozen times before. There’s a big “but” here… Born to Hula takes these retreaded concepts and does them exceptionally well. Think of them almost as “upgrades” to a lot of familiar favorites: Cayenne Pepper Sauce, Habanero Ancho Chili Sauce, Habanero Guajillo Pepper Sauce and last but not least the smoked jolokia-infused Ghost of Ancho…

I’m sure a lot of you foodies spend quite a bit of time on your computers and smartphones looking up restaurants, both when you’re traveling far from home and when you’re scouting out new haunts in your own neck of the woods. Websites maintained by these restaurants can be very helpful for both the business and the customer, giving pertinent information such as specials, hours of operation, menu items, their street address and contact information.

But there are annoyances committed by some dining establishments that I’ve found to be a hindrance to getting the type of information needed by potential customers. These are my restaurant website pet peeves…

Usually whenever I do these occasional radio appearances I forget to grab the podcast link from the RSS feed before it’s eradicated from the stream forever. I actually remembered to download the podcast clip from when I was a guest last week on the Brad and John Morning Show on KISM in Seattle, Washington.

I did not know the specifics of the subjects that were to brought up beforehand, but Brad and John inquired me about Blair’s Death Sauce, the Scoville Scale and what the world’s hottest chile pepper would do to a person’s body.

At the onset of the segment, the hosts did mention the local Washington Black Market Hot Sauce Company. I was hoping to be able to deliver a plug for my friends Sam and Tina McCanless of Zane & Zack’s World Famous Honey Co., based out of Renton, Washington, but never got an opportunity.

Click here to download an MP3 of the 8-minute-long segment.

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.

When I gave the lofty moniker of best sauce (so far) of 2011 to Heartbreaking Dawns 1498 Trinidad Scorpion Hot Sauce, I didn’t think that title would be usurped so quickly. I believe it was “Firehead” Thomas Gately who informed me that Heartbreaking Dawns’ Johnny McLaughlin had sent him a test bottle of the new ghost pepper sauce on which he was working and proclaimed that this newer sauce was even better than 1498. At this year’s ZestFest, Johnny told me his plans of releasing additional sauces to fit in with the “year” naming convention, so of course the then-upcoming one would be another year…this one being 1841 (which the bottle explains as the year Reverend Miles Bronson arrived amongst the Naga people in India, ending the widespread practice of headhunting).

So back to the point: did I agree with Firehead Thom’s assessment? I have to give…

Ladies and gents, I present to you my favorite new sauce of the year. It’s taken a mighty long while for this product to build itself up to that lofty level; Nicole and Johnny of Heartbreaking Dawns had shipped me a prototype bottle of this, their Trinidad Scorpion sauce, last Fall along with some of their yummy, experimental 7 Pot Chile Pepper Jelly. Ample time was given to me to employ the sauce in a variety of ways. I found that I liked it but didn’t love it, but I thought that it might have widespread appeal (and it did have signs of that, for my non-chilehead ex-wife had tasted some of this before our divorce and gave it a thumbs up, despite it scorching her tongue).

A few mere months later, Johnny sent a bottle of the Trinidad Scorpion sauce with the finished label artwork (absolutely killer!) and it’s final name, 1498 Trinidad Scorpion Sauce. The number 1498 signifies the year that Christopher Columbus discovered the island of Trinidad. Very clever, I think. Unfortunately, in conversation I still find myself mixed up on the year and will accidentally call this stuff 1493 or 1488. Oops. I have to tell myself that old children’s rhyme, “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” and then account for a additional few years for the voyage where Columbus stepped on Trinidad soil.

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.

The restaurant was called Pearl Cafe. Owners Scott and Tommy Truong decided to up the ante on heat in their regular dishes (which include highly-praised fare like tom yum gai, curries, and noodles) to get some additional attention for themselves.

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.

With a pair of fairly new grilling sauces – North Star Honey Datil Grilling Sauce and Meridian Serrano Grilling Sauce, Heartbreaking Dawns continues their steamroller-like proficiency in yet another area of flavoring food. While neither is a dead-on, perfect sauce, each one has its strengths and is worthy of you picking up a bottle or two of each to try for yourself.