Here’s a quick update to the review of Danny Cash’s Mean Streak Habanero Mango Hot Sauce I wrote just a few weeks ago. Danny had told me that he recently re-formulated the recipes to all of his hot sauces and had sent me a bottle of Mean Streak to try since the re-tweaking. Messing around with a great sauce like Mean Streak is no casual thing. It had better be good.
I opened up the bottle of the new stuff and immediately noticed the different after drawing a whiff. Gone is the strong vinegar aroma and in its place is a much more mellow fruity sensation. I splashed a dash of sauce on my palm to taste it, and the distinction between old and new was confirmed. Mean Streak, as I described it previously, is no longer in “Louisiana hot sauce” territory that is flavored by heavy vinegar and salt. The newer formula is a sweeter blend, with the taste of mangos taking center stage. So much is the dominant fruity flavor that it’s almost like a mango/orange juice fusion accented by fresh habanero peppers…
You can’t peel me away from a good chicken wing, and it’s darned near impossible for me not to be reeled in by one. But if you give me a lackluster wing, and you’ll see me get mean in a hurry. I don’t know what was going on in the minds of John and Dave of 
John “CaJohn” Hard was one of my “musts” when I made my first mental list of who to interview for my website’s FireTalkers section. He’s a guy who I considered to be one of today’s foremost purveyors of heat, yet someone whom I didn’t see as the prime interview focus in material that originated in the chilehead world. Sure, CaJohn’s Fiery Foods has enjoyed enough attention from the hot sauce blogs to fill a battleship, in the form of product reviews, trade show coverage, and being featured in other chilehead events and discussions. CaJohn relishes interaction with fiery foods fans and they’ve respectfully returned the favor in spades. But it’s been a few years (an eternity in internet time) since CaJohn has had a proper interview or profile done on him and his company from online chilehead community.
It’s been a while since I’ve done an edition of the Burn Buzz, where I list hot n’ interesting links about spicy food and BBQ that have been floating around on the intertubes lately…
Fatality Hot Sauce is another sauce devised by Jim Campbell and the Mild to Wild Pepper & Herb Company. This one, as you might have guessed by the name, features the mighty fatalii chile pepper. Fataliis are in the chinense species of chiles – the same one that includes habaneros and jolokias -and are absolute scorchers. Despite the fact that they only rate on the high end of what an orange habanero would be heat-wise (somewhere around 350,000 SHU), their special mix of the capsaicinoids – with dihydrocapsaicin being the dominant one – is speculated to be the reason that fataliis taste hotter than 570,000 SHU red savinas to most people that I’ve talked to.
Certain peppers lend themselves wonderfully to concoctions with fruit and sugar and I happen to think that sometime in the next ten or twenty years spicy sweets will explode into the mainstream. What exactly will be the cornerstone of this trend – candy, syrups and ice cream toppers, a jam or jelly, or maybe even a fruit and chile pepper based salsa – I do not know. It may be a little of everything. Nowadays they may be viewed as novelty items, but something will really catch on with your next door neighbors Plain Jane and Bob, you know, the ones who wince at the thought of putting a drop of Tabasco on their oysters.