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By Hot Juan, November 29, 2009 3:35 pm

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By Hot Juan,

Each month we look at the best selling products from some of the UK largest retail­ers, this gives us and you an idea of what is selling well (So what we need to review)

[– No Change — ▲ Moved Up — ▼ Moved Down - New New to the list ]

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By Hot Juan, November 28, 2009 3:26 pm

Apart from us who else should you be fol­low­ing on twitter..

We have decided to make this a simple thing to find out and fol­low, we have cre­ated a twit­ter list, what is a twit­ter list I hear you say?

Well a twit­ter list is a just what it says a list with a num­ber of twit­ter accounts included in it, so you only have to fol­low it not all the people.

To fol­low or view the our list click here twitter.com/ChileFoundry/uk-hot-sauce

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By Darth Naga,

TABASCO® brand Habanero Sauce

Its that time again my fel­low chile lov­ers!!! Darth Naga here writ­ing another review for one of the things in life i’m very pas­sion­ate about…HOT SAUCE!!!

This review may be a little longer than my oth­ers as i am review­ing a sauce made by the hot sauce legends “McIl­henny” fam­ous for the “Tabasco®” brand and hot sauce range. The reason i have so much respect for the Tabasco® name is simply because this is where i star­ted, its how i got into hot sauces in the first place, thanks to the McIl­henny fam­ily of Avery island in Louisi­ana i have a deep appre­ci­ation and respect for the chile pep­per and its many uses (my favour­ite being hot sauce of course!!) and i thank them for that, without them i would not be the man i am today..and i would still have some tastebuds that work prop­erly hehe!!

The McIl­henny com­pany was formed as a small fam­ily com­pany by Edmund McIl­henny in Louisi­ana wayyyyy back in 1860’s, it all star­ted with a single pep­per sauce that become world fam­ous over the next 10 or 15 years, it was made using an old method of aging a pep­per mash in white oak bar­rels sealed with salt for 30 days before adding dis­tilled white vin­egar to it and then strain­ing the mash out to leave just the sauce, 140 years later and its all made the same way, in fact the only thing thats changed is the aging time which appears to have increased to 3 years!!

Ingredi­ents:
Vin­egar, habanero pep­per, cane sugar, TABASCO® pep­per sauce (vin­egar, red pep­per, salt), salt, mango puree, dehyd­rated onion, banana puree, tomato paste, tam­ar­ind puree, papaya puree, spices, gar­lic, TABASCO® pep­per mash (pep­per, salt)

But any­way, onto the sauce i’m talk­ing about and today its the “Habanero” veri­ant of the “Tabasco®” range of sauces, this is a sauce that comes in a little 60ml bottle with a strik­ing yellow/orange/red label which com­pli­ments the rich orangey red black speckled sauce inside and i per­son­ally carry one around with me for whenever i need to add a bit of spice to my food, that and car­ry­ing round a big 140ml bottle is simply not easy lol! The aroma from the bottle is one more of fresh fruits, namely mango as opposed to habanero, the smell is deceiv­ing though and you’ll real­ise that the moment you try this one, the McIlhenny’s mean busi­ness with this sauce and the lovely fruity taste coupled with the warmth of the habanero pep­per make this an irres­ist­ible addi­tion to any­ones hot sauce cabinet.

This is a sauce that you can find any­where nowadays, its in pretty much all the big name super­mar­kets so theres no real reason to shop around online for it, its about £2 from most of them maybe a bit more in the higher end super­mar­kets, i would’nt say its fant­astic value for money as it does come in such a small bottle, but that sauce does go quite far if you use it sparingly…however if like me you use it on alot of things then you’ll find your­self going through it pretty quickly.

It has a sim­ilar fla­vour to the papaya encona sauce, which is prob­ably down to the fruit aspect rather than the pep­per but i find this just a little warmer and it brings me out in a bit of a sweat and induces my now fam­ous chile hic­cups (hic­cups i get when i try some­thing thats a little too hot!) much to the amuse­ment of Mrs Naga and my other fam­ily members!

This is a sauce that i would recom­mend every­one buy and try at least once, the stand­ard Tabasco® sauce is a great starter sauce and this just about takes it to the next level, i keep a bottle with me at all times due to it size and theres no reason why you should’nt either!!

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By Hot Juan, November 27, 2009 3:35 pm

Tod­m­orden School held a seven-a-side chilli eat­ing con­test, seven mem­bers of staff and seven six formers muched chilles to see who could eat the most. The Final win­ner was teacher Mike Smith who ate 11 chillies.

This formed the final part of the schools Chil­dren In Need week and help them raised £1,150 charity.

For the full story visit Tod­m­orden News 

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By Darth Naga,

Mr Vikki’s Hot Cori­ander Sauce

Ahh i’ve just had a long week­end off and now its tues­day and back to work, the sauce i’m review­ing today comes from a new favour­ite sauce maker here at the Chile­foundry, a little north­ern chap by the name of Adam Marks, I am of course talk­ing about “Mr Vikki” and the amaz­ing sauces, chut­neys and pickles he produces.

Before I go off on one about how good “Mr Vikki” products truly are and how I firmly believe that no home made curry should be without at least one of “Mr Vikki’s” products to accom­pany it on its jour­ney to your mouth, lets begin the review!!

Ingredi­ents: Red habanero chil­lies, vin­egar, sugar, gar­lic, spices, fresh cori­ander, cel­ery, salt.

As with all the “Mr Vikki’s” range, this “Hot Cori­ander Sauce” has a rather mod­est label and does’nt go over­baord on the design front, a simple yel­low label with the com­pany name, a couple of chilli’s and the title of the sauce in black adorns this bottle, which itself reminds me very much of a lar­ger ver­sion of the bottle that “Encona” branded sauce comes in, a sort of square bottle if you will, but tall…so more rect­an­gu­lar really lol!

Its worth men­tion­ing that this sauce has a sticker on it proudly show­ing off the gold award it received at the “Great taste awards ’08″ which I think is a pretty good acclaim to have earned.

Upon open­ing the bottle and tak­ing my usual nose dive (get it?) I can tell straight away that this is going to be dif­fer­ent from other sweet chilli sauces, the main aroma that hits me is gar­lic, assisted ably by the cori­ander and chilli’s it has an almost cur­ry­ish smell to it, and because of this I am eager to tuck in!

While pour­ing the sauce out onto my spoon I notice the con­sist­ency is very chunky, but not big unwieldy chunks at all, these are per­fectly small chunks of Gar­lic, chilli seeds and cori­ander sus­pen­ded in a beau­ti­ful thick reddy orange sauce, I placed my spoon into my mouth and gave it the once over! Almost imme­di­ately I am hit by a wave of fla­vours that come thick and fast, gar­lic, cori­ander, chilli and somethign I was very sur­prised to find..ANISEED!! I was gobsmacked to find ani­seed used in a sauce as i’ve never exper­i­enced it like this before!

The heat wasn’t as hot as i’d hoped, but in a sense thats a good thing as it makes this sauce more access­ible to those of you who’s pal­ates are more suited to the milder sauces, there is a gentle burn there but it is very gentle indeed, and i’m sure thats prob­ably exactly what Adam was aim­ing for when he mades this sauce, a nice, sweet chilli and gar­lic sauce with a little east­ern fla­vour to it that eas­ily out­does the likes of “Ling­hams” in the fla­vour department.

This is a sauce that I don’t think my fam­ily could be without as they really enjoyed it, it replaced my moth­ers usual sweet chilli sauce and has a place in our cup­board now, and at only £2.95 from www.mrvikkis.co.uk you’d be a fool not to have this one on your din­ner table!

Until next we meet chile­fanz, use the sauce!!

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By Hot Juan, November 26, 2009 2:00 pm

We have a new Num­ber 1 site. Scorchio who have been bur­ing up our chart are now the num­ber 1 chilli web site in the UK, knock­ing Chil­lis Galore from the top spot for the first time.

Who’s web site draws the most traffic, by look­ing at this list you can­not help that draw the con­clu­sion that the num­ber of qual­ity links to a site has a sig­ni­fic­ant bene­fit on it’s num­ber of vis­it­ors (Google we under­stand uses the num­ber and qual­ity of the links to a site as part of it PageR­ank™ sys­tem), if you look at the con­tent of the sites at the top of the list­ing you also find that the amount of tex­tural con­tent is also a major factor.

This is based on data from Alexa (data recorded on 26/11/09)

We are cur rently 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, November 25, 2009 3:52 pm

Vicious Viper from Cajohns fiery foods

We have just noticed that Hot-Headz has a spe­cial offer on Vicious Viper, a sauce that Darth Naga reviewed back in early July. The sauce is nor­mally £6.95, but is on offer at only £4.99 a sav­ing £1.96 per bottle.

Also don’t for­get if you spend more than £30 on sauces before Decem­ber 20th 2009 and you will receive a superb qual­ity Hot Sauce Gift Pack worth £12.99 abso­lutely Free!

To claim your free gift pack just quote Ref: CMS-09 when order­ing either by tele­phone on 01453 731052 or via our web site at www.hot-headz.com

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By Hot Juan,

Ol’ Clooties Sauce

There are not many sauces that look this col­our, with the light behind it, it is almost lumin­es­cent orange, this is not achieved with arti­fi­cial col­ours but is all nat­ural made with Scotch Bon­net and Carib­bean Red Habanero’s chil­lies grown by The Chilli garden in Hampshire.

Ingredi­ents: Habanero Chil­lies 50%, Dis­tilled Malt Vin­egar (43%), Sea Salt & Xantham Gum.

On open­ing the sauce, there is a strong smell of fruity Habanero and malt vin­egar, the taste is as good as the smell, it is salty and hot very much in the Tabasco style, but hot­ter, much hotter

It is worth examin­ing this sauce’s ingredi­ents, it is a very simple list, just chil­lies, vin­egar and salt.  And like many simple things, simple is best, there is no strange after taste, no uniden­ti­fied bits float­ing about. It may seem a simple recipe, but get­ting the bal­ance right takes time and practice.

Note: The Xantham Gum is added to the mix to help keep the ingredi­ents in suspension.

As you can prob­ably tell I like this kind of sauce, its the  just the kind of thing I use every­day, it is in the Louisi­ana style of sauces but in this case it is English.

Now it comes to the Goat on the label, I am sure there is a good reason for this, I sus­pect he is called Ol’ Clootie, but how he became involved in Hot Sauce I am yet to find out.

You can order online at www.thechilligarden.co.uk

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By Hot Juan, November 24, 2009 9:51 am

The Chocol­ate Bhut Jolokia is a vari­ant of the Bhut Jolokia, Frontal Agritech have selec­ted the chocol­ate bhut in suc­cess­ive gen­er­a­tions to give a pure vari­ety. The chilli has a pun­gency level sim­ilar to the red Bhut Jolokia.

Chocol­ate Bhut Jolokia

These are now avail­able from The Chilli Pep­per Com­pany order your own packet at www.chileseeds.co.uk