After fifteen years on a quiet little street, we just transferred our hot sauce shop to a new establishment in which resides not one but two ghosts. At least that is the story we were told as we trotted our hundreds (or thousands) of bottles of hot sauce into our new spectered home, a sixty year old house on Main Street in Old Town Spring, Texas. We had one visitation the very first week, so what better time than this to talk about our favorite group of hot sauces - the spirited sauces made with the Ghost pepper.
Ghost pepper sauce is naturally hot, because it is created with one of the hottest peppers on the planet, the Jolokia pepper from northern India and Bangladesh. The story told to me is if the pepper is grown on the northern side of the Brahmaputra River it is called the Bhut Jolokia, and if the pepper is grown on the southern side of the river, the same pepper is called the Naga Jolokia. Or is it the other way around? Whatever. Whether it is your pleasure to dash some Bhut Jolokia sauce on your dish, or splash some sauce made by the Naga Jolokia version of the pepper, what matters is that until recently the Ghost pepper was officially recognized as the hottest pepper in the world. With a Scoville rating in excess of 1,000,000 units, the Ghost pepper made a great ingredient for the truly hot, naturally hot, sauces.
If your passion is hot sauces, you know there is an entire genre of sauces made with chile extract. These sauces are hot but not naturally so, and as far as I am concerned these extract sauces are largely about heat but with close to zero attention given to the flavor. The Ghost pepper sauces, though, are the real McCoy, hot and bold with flavor. Of the fifteen or twenty Ghost pepper hot sauce brands we recommend, I have never tasted a bad one yet. To put the heat level into a quantifiable measure, a dash of Tabasco sauce packs a modest number of 2500 - 5,000 Scovile heat units. Put a sprinkle of Ghost pepper sauce on your tongue, and your getting a cool 1,000,000 Scoville heat units.
But now there are pepper challengers, vying to overtake the Ghost pepper sauce from its claim to the "hottest hot sauce" throne.
About the time the hot sauce makers championed the Ghost pepper as the most trendy, daring, hottest pepper for turning into a sauce, here comes the Naga Viper pepper believed to hit your taste buds at about 1,300,000 Scoville units.
And before we could even get our hands on any Naga Viper sauce, the world of peppers learns about an even newer pepper that, again, makes a claim to be the hottest pepper known to man, the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, with a Scoville rating of over 1,400,000.
Anything at this level of Scoville rating, naturally, is nuclear, so numbers become immaterial at this point.
I suppose it's great to be the
If your passion is hot sauces, you know there is an entire genre of sauces made with chile extract. These sauces are hot but not naturally so, and as far as I am concerned these extract sauces are largely about heat but with close to zero attention given to the flavor. The Ghost pepper sauces, though, are the real McCoy, hot and bold with flavor. Of the fifteen or twenty Ghost pepper hot sauce brands we recommend, I have never tasted a bad one yet. To put the heat level into a quantifiable measure, a dash of Tabasco sauce packs a modest number of 2500 - 5,000 Scovile heat units. Put a sprinkle of Ghost pepper sauce on your tongue, and your getting a cool 1,000,000 Scoville heat units.
But now there are pepper challengers, vying to overtake the Ghost pepper sauce from its claim to the "hottest hot sauce" throne.
About the time the hot sauce makers championed the Ghost pepper as the most trendy, daring, hottest pepper for turning into a sauce, here comes the Naga Viper pepper believed to hit your taste buds at about 1,300,000 Scoville units.
And before we could even get our hands on any Naga Viper sauce, the world of peppers learns about an even newer pepper that, again, makes a claim to be the hottest pepper known to man, the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, with a Scoville rating of over 1,400,000.
Anything at this level of Scoville rating, naturally, is nuclear, so numbers become immaterial at this point.
I suppose it's great to be the
About the time the hot sauce makers championed the Ghost pepper as the most trendy, daring, hottest pepper for turning into a sauce, here comes the Naga Viper pepper believed to hit your taste buds at about 1,300,000 Scoville units.
And before we could even get our hands on any Naga Viper sauce, the world of peppers learns about an even newer pepper that, again, makes a claim to be the hottest pepper known to man, the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, with a Scoville rating of over 1,400,000.
Anything at this level of Scoville rating, naturally, is nuclear, so numbers become immaterial at this point.
I suppose it's great to be the best at something. In the world of peppers, growers would clearly translate the status of "best" pepper to being the "hottest" pepper. It is a highly coveted thing. For me, though, I'm content to just enjoy the Ghost pepper sauces which fit the bill for "fiery and full-of-flavor" wonderfully, both the Bhut Jolokia sauce version or the Naga Jolokia version, whichever side of the Brahmaputra River you find to be your favorite. In their local India, the Ghost peppers are smeared on fences to keep wild elephants away. In my house, Ghost pepper hot sauce is smeared on my sandwich, or used to make just about anything taste better.
Recently a patron came into the shop carrying a baggie containing one or two Ghost peppers that he grew in his garden. I haven't screwed up the courage to eat one yet but they sure are pretty.
About the Author:
And before we could even get our hands on any Naga Viper sauce, the world of peppers learns about an even newer pepper that, again, makes a claim to be the hottest pepper known to man, the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, with a Scoville rating of over 1,400,000.
Anything at this level of Scoville rating, naturally, is nuclear, so numbers become immaterial at this point.
I suppose it's great to be the best at something. In the world of peppers, growers would clearly translate the status of "best" pepper to being the "hottest" pepper. It is a highly coveted thing. For me, though, I'm content to just enjoy the Ghost pepper sauces which fit the bill for "fiery and full-of-flavor" wonderfully, both the Bhut Jolokia sauce version or the Naga Jolokia version, whichever side of the Brahmaputra River you find to be your favorite. In their local India, the Ghost peppers are smeared on fences to keep wild elephants away. In my house, Ghost pepper hot sauce is smeared on my sandwich, or used to make just about anything taste better.
Recently a patron came into the shop carrying a baggie containing one or two Ghost peppers that he grew in his garden. I haven't screwed up the courage to eat one yet but they sure are pretty.
About the Author:
Jay Potter, here sharing information about Ghost pepper sauce, is the owner of Simply Texas Gourmet Foods. Along with eating and selling hot sauces, he loves to educate readers about the world of hot sauces, including Ghost pepper hot sauce.