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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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Please visit our spon­sor www.hot-headz.com

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By Hot Juan, July 7, 2010 9:50 am

500 Hot Articles

Darth Naga and I (Hot Juan) have now pub­lished 500th art­icles since we stared just over a year ago, this is a big land­mark for us, our tar­get was to pub­lish one art­icle per day, and we have exceeded our target.

We would like to thanks all our con­trib­ut­ors includ­ing Scott Roberts, Joe Bishop, Peter Sey­mour, Chris Jag­ger and Steve Wal­ters who have helped with articles.

*** WIN A HAMPER ***

To win this hamper all you need to do is use our “Con­tact Us” form to sent us a mes­sage with the sub­ject “Win a Hamper”, at the end of the month we will put all the entries in a box and pull out a winner.

Note: We will only ship this to a UK address

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By Hot Juan, April 10, 2010 4:31 pm

TristamChilli

This is my first visit to a Fiery Food’s Fest­ival, and I was impressed by the first chilli event of the year, it is not a large event like West Dean Chilli Fiesta, but it is very well organ­ised with enough to delight the vis­itor. There were lots of chilli products to taste, great food to eat, and even a tent with children’s enter­tain­ment and a live band.

Darth and Mrs Naga worked with TristamChilli on one of the stands organ­ising tast­ings, Tristam was an event on his own, please ask him to do this seagull impres­sion, it is well worth it!

The event was a great mix of food stand and chilli sauce pro­viders including:-

Thrilli Foods

Spicy Mon­key – Who has a very impress­ive range of sauces and spice mixes, we have some to review, so you will know out ver­dict on these, but our ini­tial tastes and repeated visit to their stand was ago indic­a­tion of the qual­ity of the products.

Thrilli Foods – Who’s amaz­ing Green Chilli Pickle was backed up by some other equally good sauces and chutneys

David’s Chilli Oil – A very pop­u­lar product this range of oils, and a unique fla­vour, ideal of drizz­ling on salads, using in a stir fry, or just mar­in­at­ing meat before grilling or BBQ’s.

Fiery Foods – A massive range of impor­ted and UK pro­duced sauces from there ship in the Brighton Mar­ina, with tast­ings and advice from Darth Naga and TristamChilli.

Fiery Foods

Chil­liPep­per­Pete – Pete’s range is ever increas­ing with even more qual­ity products from their own kitchen.

Fallen Angel Micro­Brew­ery have been mak­ing Chilli beer for years and it shows in the well bal­anced taste of there brews, these are not beers with a bit of chilli added after brew­ing, but the chilli is an integ­ral part of the pro­cess. But more of this later, we did get a few bottles to try.

Jethro’s – provided samples of their mar­in­ades, vinai­grettes, sauces and dips we loved the Green Chilli and Cori­ander sauce, we hope to get some of these to review in the next few months.

We vis­ited the show of all three days and tried to eat at all of the food stands over, my fam­ily loved each one we tried, but my favour­ite was the pulled pork from the BBQ Shack, it reminded me of my vis­its to the USA, and has inspired me to fire up my Cac­tus Jack off­set wood BBQ and to try to per­fect my own real BBQ.

deli welli doo daaa

I have sold Chilli Ice-cream at events, but “deli welli doo daaa” had make a Naga Ice-cream that was about as hot as I have ever tasted, and very creamy being pro­duced to order from an whippy style ice-cream machine, they also sold some very tasty chilli cupcakes.

Part of my visit was to act as a Judge at the first round of the National Chilli Awards, Chil­liPep­per­Pete, Darth Naga and myself tasted and rated a table full of sauces, Jam, Pickles and chut­neys, we has to find the best in three cat­egor­ies Taste, Heat and Present­a­tion and then a final Over­all Win­ner.

The com­pet­it­ors had gone to some length to cre­ate these sauces, the win­ner of the Heat cat­egory had used vodka to make his own Bhut Jolokia Oleor­esin the sauce being which as aptly name “The Evil One”

There was a big debate over who would win the taste award with two sauces “Des­troy All Mon­sters!” and “Lilly’s Lime Ginger and Chilli Jelly” mak­ing it hard to pick a final win­ner, but after many re-tastes and dis­cus­sion the win­ner was “Lilly’s Lime Ginger and Chilli Jelly”

After just miss­ing out on the taste award, “Des­troy All Mon­sters!” was a clear win­ner in the present­a­tion category.

National Chilli Awards

The Over­all Win­ner of the first round of the national Chilli Awards went to “The Evil One” it was a major achieve­ment to make a super­hot sauce at home with such a good fla­vour and con­sist­ency, the choice was unanimous.

Dur­ing the tast­ing we were filmed by a Pub­lic TV chan­nel from Korea, so if you see me on Korean TV let me know.

Chilli Eat­ing Com­pet­i­tion Winner

At the end of each day there was a chilli eat­ing con­test, we stayed for the last one on the Sunday and this was likely to be the biggest and the BBC had entered Michael Mos­ley as part of a new series to be call “Pleas­ure and Pain”. Darth worked hard passing out the chil­lies and the sauces to be tasted, Michael was the first to drop out, and then after a few more rounds of hot­ter and hot­ter chil­lies there were just six com­pet­it­ors. Who then had to eat ChilliPepperPete’s Naga’s fol­lowed by Satan’s Shit Hot Sauce, then they com­bined them, and soon there were just 2 con­test­ants left.

The com­pet­i­tion had never got this far before without find­ing a win­ner, so out same a small bottle of Sub­Lime a 3 Mil­lion SHU extract, this was first offered on a cock­tail stick, but the last two com­pet­itor were still hanging on, a tea­spoon of Sub­Lime finally fin­ished the event with the win­ner beam­ing and still seem­ingly unaf­fected by her trail by heat.

You can see more images from the event here

We had a great time and will not miss the next Fiery Foods Fest­ival in Brighton on the 18th and 19th of Septem­ber.

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Please visit our spon­sor www.hot-headz.com