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By Hot Juan, July 29, 2010 9:20 am

This month we have added the UK pos­i­tion to Top UK Chilli Web sites, the ori­ginal aim of the chart was to show how well UK based sites did in the rest of the world, now you can see with a minor excep­tion of the #1 site Chil­lis Galore, the pos­i­tions are also reflec­ted in their UK position.

This is based on data from Alexa (data recorded on 27/07/10)

We are cur­rently log­ging the stat­ist­ics for 30+ sites that we feel are import­ant, if you think your site should be on our lists, please email us via our con­tact form and let us know.

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By Hot Juan, July 28, 2010 2:40 pm

Tesco is now stock­ing both Dave’s Insan­ity Sauce at £2.98 and Dave’s Ghost Pep­per Sauce at £5.99 per bottle.

I sus­pect at these prices they will not be around for long.

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By Hot Juan,

Edible Orna­ment­als has been selec­ted by Fort­num & Mason to sup­ply some of their 40+ dif­fer­ent vari­et­ies of chil­lies grown at their Cher­wood Nurs­ery, ran­ging from the mild Ana­heim chilli to the eye water­ing Dor­set Naga.

Joanna Plumb — Edible Ornamentals

“Fresh chil­lies have far more fla­vour than those that have spent sev­eral days being trans­por­ted from over­seas, and as they are loc­ally grown, it means fuel sav­ings on trans­port costs and a lower car­bon foot­print. Vis­it­ors to Fortnum’s food hall can be assured that within 24 hours of being picked at the nurs­ery, our chil­lies will be on the shop floor” said Joanna Plumb

For those inter­ested in learn­ing how to cook with chil­lies, Joanna held a chilli cook­ing demon­stra­tion in Fort­num & Mason First Floor Demon­stra­tion Kit­chen. Joanna cooked a vari­ety of recipes using fresh chil­lies, includ­ing chilli soup, authen­tic chicken enchil­a­das and Jalapeno Pop­pers, which are Jalapenos stuffed with cream cheese and bacon and cooked to perfection.

Joanna has become renowned for her fresh chil­lies, chilli plants and her own range of gour­met chilli sauces, which can be pur­chased at Cher­wood Nurs­ery. Joanna also sup­plies Waitrose and Mor­ris­ons stores as well as lead­ing Lon­don res­taur­ants. She was voted East Anglia’s Local Food Hero by Good Food Chan­nel and has made a num­ber of guest appear­ances on TV shows includ­ing ‘Ready Steady Cook’, ‘Eco­nomy Gast­ro­nomy’, Radio 2 and BBC 3 Counties radio.

For more inform­a­tion visit www.edibleornamentals.co.uk

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By Darth Naga, July 27, 2010 9:57 am

Right! time for me to intro­duce a NEW fea­ture here at the Chile­foundry! This is an idea myself and Hot Juan have had for some time, but last week was the first proper chance we got to actu­ally imple­ment it, the idea we had was for a series of fea­tur­ettes based on dif­fer­ent chilli and hot­sauce man­u­fac­tur­ers and dis­trib­ut­ors based in the UK and we shall visit these people and then make a short doc­u­ment­ary type video on each one!

I decided to call it “Meet your maker” as i felt that was title that best fits the series!

The ori­ginal idea was to do one long video and go from there, BUT due to You­tube restraints we can only upload it in 10 min chunks, which as it turns out is a good idea as now you can choose the con­tent you want to see!

So the day star­ted off with me stand­ing out­side Hot-Headz HQ on a blaz­ing hot sum­mer day in Stroud knock­ing on the door, luck­ily for me Stu­art was in work that day and not off attend­ing one of the many meet­ings he has, busy man is Stu!! Stu­art invited me inside and then pro­ceeded to give me a little his­tory on Hot-Headz and how the name became fam­ous! If you wanna know a little more about the Com­pany and the people behind it then watch this intro!

After that little bit of his­tory Stu­art went on to give me a little tour of one of the Hot-Headz ware­houses, and we came across a few sauces that caught my eye, me being the curi­ous (Nosey) type i decided this was a prime oppor­tun­ity to dig into Stu­arts vast know­ledge of Hot­sauces and who makes them.

And then came my favour­ite part of the trip…Stuart invited me to see the one room that not alot of people get to see, his own per­sonal sauce col­lec­tion or the “Hot room” as he calls it!
This is TRULY a site to behold, its a sauce col­lect­ors dream and i felt truly priv­iledged that Stu allowed us to film inside the room!

So there you have it, the ins and out of Hot-Headz HQ and the people behind it all, Even though the last video says it all i just want to thank Stu­art McAl­lister for let­ting us film inside his headquar­ters, Hot Juan for doing all the driv­ing and mak­ing this visit pos­sible and Mrs Naga for film­ing it all for us! As a rare treat i will sign off with a little tast­ing video we did at Hot-Headz HQ where Stu­art him­self actu­ally joined us and gave his views on a couple of sauces, so check this vid out and see just what the God­father of the UK hot­sauce move­ment has to say! Till next time chile­fanz, may the sauce be with you!

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By Darth Naga, July 26, 2010 6:23 am

Right back again live and kick­ing from my little break in Yeovil where myself and Mr’s Naga stayed with Hot Juan and his fam­ily for a very pleas­ant few days, but now its back to busi­ness, so lets kick it off with a little some­thing from Blair eh?

Blair’s Queso

For those of you who have been liv­ing under a rock for the past 10 – 15 years, Blair is the US Daddy of the hot­sauce scene, he makes what i con­sider to be some of the freshest and tasti­est sauces out there and has been doing it for about 15 years or so now! The product i have for review today is one of Blairs lesser known items but it non­ethe­less deserves some recog­ni­tion for the reason that it con­tains two of my favour­ite products, chilli and CHEESE!!!

Ingredi­ents: Water, Toma­toes, Cheese mix, Whey mod­i­fied food starch, Malo­dex­trin, Dex­trose, Salt, Xanthan gum, Nat­ural fla­vour­ing, Soy­bean oil, Onions, Cheese enhan­cer, Fire roas­ted Habanero, Mod­i­fied food starch, Green Chil­lies, Pimen­tos, Spices and Jalapeno seasonings.

(Many thanks to www.scorchio.co.uk for the review Jar)

Okay, so i looked at the list of ingredi­ents in “Blairs Queso” and thought to myself “wow, thats alot of ingredi­ents!” and the hor­rible thought imme­di­ately hit me that this was going to have a very “plastic” and chem­ical fla­vour to it, like alot of “cheese” based products and i noted too that the Habanero’s were down very low on the list of ingredi­ents so i was’nt sure this was going to be hot at all. The label is a lovely bright orange with full col­our pic­tures of Jalapenos, onions and cheese, together with the title of the sauce in bold yel­low let­ter­ing and blairs sig­na­ture logo above that.

Upon open­ing the jar and tak­ing a sniff i imme­di­ately recog­nised the chee­sey smell and sur­pris­ingly i could really smell the Habanero’s! It was at this point i star­ted to get a little more excited as it dawned on me that this product may just exceed my expect­a­tions, so i grabbed my spoon and dug out a huge glob of this stuff. The sauce is quite firm and yel­lowy orange in col­our, peppered with red and green chilli pieces and also bits of onion, my nose lit up as i placed the spoon into my mouth and swirled the sauce round and round try­ing to ascer­tain the dif­fer­ent flavours.

Imme­di­ately the cheesy fla­vour hit me hard, like a ched­dar cheese train that was’nt stopping…but what was this??? The Habanero’s burned in my mouth like hot coals straight from the engine of this mighty cheese beast, and it was’nt about to let go! Reach­ing for a glass of milk i real­ised that i had def­in­itely under­es­tim­ated this stuff and that its burn was HUGE! With sweat pour­ing off my brow but no hic­cups to speak of, this was def­in­itely a sauce to be reckoned with!

I think this product would be more suited to the medium-insane range of peeps as it has an amaz­ing fla­vour but a huge punch of heat that you just don’t expect, it’s suit­able for alot of things, if you’re a bit of a wimp then mix this stuff with mayo at a 3:1 ratio for a real nice dip (thats 3 mayo to one Queso) to have with corn chips or the like, and if you wanna add a kick to your next lasagna or macar­oni cheese then chuck a table­spoon of this in with your cheese sauce to give it a nice fiery kick up the arse!

At only £4.99 for a huge 453G jar from www.scorchio.co.uk i think this is amaz­ing value for money as it has so many prac­tical uses in food and par­tic­u­larly party food, so go out and grab one as soon as Scorchio get more back in stock, in fact email them and pester them for it, it really is THAT good!

Till next time my chilli padawanz, may the sauce be with you, always!

Fla­vour	(9/10)
Heat	(7/10)
Pack­aging	(7/10)
Value	(7/10)
Over­all	(8/10)