Food

You can now vote for who is going to enter the very first year of the Hot Sauce Hall of Fame!

The upcoming 3rd Annual New York City Hot Sauce Expo is hosting and presenting the official Hot Sauce Hall of Fame. The Hot Sauce Hall of Fame will induct 5 people that all have been instrumental in the fiery foods industry through the years. The induction ceremony will be presented live on the main stage at the NYC Hot Sauce Expo.

To be eligible for the nominating or voting process…

Rudy Reviews is back with another sauce to report on. Today I will be reviewing a sauce that came to me from the kind folks at Paulman Acre Smoked Pepper Sauces. Paulman Acre is located in Oceanside, California and is the creation of a gentleman by the name of Tim Paulman. The company started a Kickstarter campaign, and with much success they went into full operation in November of 2014.

Tim informed me that before starting his company, he made his living as a computer scientist for 20 years. He wasn’t content on spending the rest of his life in front of a computer screen; and after spending six years worth of whet, Tim is now confident in his products enough to offer them to the masses. Growing up in Appalachia, Tim told me that farming and food processing is a part of everyday life for most people to a certain degree so it only made sense to him to shy away from his computer career and step into the sauce industry. So today I will be giving my take on a sauce he named “Pinalava Sunshine.”

I received an informational packet with the package and something I found interesting was that they included a “Small Batch Facts” section. In it, it states that for every 60 pounds of peppers the Paulman Acre company uses, 10 pounds of sweet peppers and 5 pounds of habanero peppers are added and in time they achieve 25 gallons of product.

Tim also told me that he doesn’t like to refer to his offerings as “hot sauce” but rather “smoked pepper sauce.” Let’s see what’s in this rather attractive looking bottle, yeah?

Below are the winners of the Fiery Food Challenge straight from ZestFest 2015 in Irving, Texas. A massive thanks to CaJohn Hard of CaJohn’s Fiery Foods for sending these!

I will be working on reformatting &cleaning these up and adding links to these as the night transpires. Congratulations to all of the winners!

Barbecue Sauce: Mild – Consumer Ready 1. High River Sauces – Rattler BBQ Sauce 2. Woody’s Bar-B-Q Sauce – Woody’s Hickory Mild B-B-Q Sauce 3. Southern Belles BBQ – Original Belle

Barbecue Sauce: Medium – Consumer Ready 1. AmberFyre Foods – Manhattan Black Cherry Bourbon BBQ 2. CRC BBQ Enterprises LLC – Riley’s Triple R Sauce 3. Full Boar BBQ – Full Boar BBQ Sweet & Spicy BBQ Sauce

Barbecue Sauce: Hot – Consumer Ready 1. Pepper Smack LLC – Pepper Smack Pepper Q 2. Full Boar BBQ – Full Boar BBQ Sweet & Spicy BBQ Sauce 3. Southern Belles BBQ – Southern Heat…

Although the personal friendship between Al “Buddah” Goldenberg (of I Love It Spicy) and I hit a huge snag in 2013 (for personal reasons which I won’t get into here), he will always be a brother to me and I look forward to the day that we can be close again.

Also around that time frame, Al’s YouTube channel for I Love It Spicy unfortunately had gotten hacked, and three years of videos were deleted, which numbered in the hundreds. I know the loss of those were absolutely devastating to him, and I felt his frustration, anger and sadness.

Many of those videos that were wiped out had been recorded and uploaded by me for the ILIS website, as I was one of the many reviewers and contributors. I have a boatload of these video files scattered across untold DVD-R and hard drive backups from the past 5+ years. One day I may take a weekend to go through and collect all of them together for future uploading, just for old time’s sake.

But a trio of these older review videos had gotten unearthed when I recently searched a 1TB external drive for a logo file for an unrelated project. Of course, in traditional “stop what I’m working on to instead do something counter-productive” style, I had to pause to watch all of them. After doing so, it became a no-brainer to upload them to my channel for your pleasure…

Hey everyone, Rudy Reviews is back with a hot sauce review! Today I’ll be reporting on a sauce from Boulder Hot Sauce Company called “Harry’s Habanero.” Boulder Hot Sauce Company is located in Boulder, CO (who would have thought?) and is operated by a gentleman named Harry Robertson who makes all of the sauces by hand and are made with 100% fresh ingredients that contain no fillers or congealers. On their website, he proclaims that sweet carrots act as the natural thickener for this sauce. Harry also makes another sauce which he named “Smokey Serrano.”

Ingredients:

Purified Water, Vinegar, Habanero Peppers, Fresh Poblano Peppers, Fresh Onions, Fresh Carrots, Red Ripe Serrano Peppers, Fresh Garlic, and Salt…

Whatever kind of foodie you are, which include being a chilehead, BBQer, hot sauce fan, chile pepper grower & eater, chef or cook, sauce & product manufacturer, and more…I want to know about you!

Please take a few minutes to fill out the following survey so that I can serve you better as a blogger, a podcaster, a writer and as an influencer in the fiery foods & BBQ industries. I promise that your information will be kept confidential and will not be sold to any third parties. Thanks!

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If you know me, you know that I despise all ethnic and racial stereotypes. (Except Vulcans. I don’t care what you tell me, they’re all green-blooded, pointy-eared bores!)

One such misconception is about Hispanics. They frequently hear, “you’re Latino! You must LOVE hot sauce!” This spicy video, courtesy of FLAMA, proves that age old stereotype is not true: