A sum­mary of art­icles from the Chile­foundry dur­ing Octo­ber 2009, click the links to see the full stories.

Banned Sauce — Video Inter­view —  This is an update on our pre­viouse art­icle on 10 Minute Burn extreme hot sauce from The Chilli Pep­per Com­pany which was removed from sale at the Brighton Fiery Foods Show

Fiery Foods UK Fest­ival — Event Review - Right, it’s Monday night, the night after the Brighton “Right, it’s Monday night, the night after the Brighton “Fiery Foods UK Fest­ival” and i have to say I’m still knackered!! It’s been a great week­end and I’ve really enjoyed myself, so i decided to take a slight detour from my usual review­ing style and instead write up a little piece about the fest­ival and how well I believe it went!

Chillies2U  — Breed­ing Lambs and Grow­ing Chil­lies - Based in Oxford­shire Ian Pax­ton has been a farmer for nearly 40 years, and farms about 100 acres, he has 3 large poly tun­nels which altern­ate between being used for lamb­ing and then when the lambs are out in the fields they are filled with Chilli Plants, he then runs a mail order busi­ness, while also appear­ing at local mar­kets selling fresh and dried chil­lies as well as his own range of sauces.

Chut­fest 09 Bar­ring­ton Court - I have just got back from Chut­fest 09, I know this is not a true chilli event, but we did find some inter­est­ing products and people.

WhyNo­tHot — Unhinged Video Review —  This sauce comes from a com­pany that was com­pletely unknown to me before the West Dean Chilli Fiesta in august, “WhyNo­tHot” are a small busi­ness based on a small­hold­ing in Cwmg­wili, West Wales, they have been around for about 3 years now and the com­pany is com­prised mainly of Ben Calder and his fiancées, who grow fresh chil­lies and try to use their own in the sauces they make where they can.

“Jeremy Clark­son” vs “limited-edition Insan­ity Private Reserve” - “The sear­ing fire had surged through­out my head. My eyes were stream­ing. Mol­ten lava was flood­ing out of my nose. My mouth was a shattered ruin. Even my hair hurt.” — Times Online (4th Oct 2009).

Chilli Vari­ety – Pob­lano —  The Pob­lano is a mild chilli (Scov­ille Units 1000 – 1500) ori­gin­at­ing from Puebla, Mex­ico, It is part of the Cap­sicum annuum spe­cies, the most pop­u­lar of all Chilli spe­cies, The plant is multi stemmed and grown to 60cm / 25 inches high, in the UK it is pos­sible to grow these in a Poly tun­nel or Green house.

Fiery Foods Fest­ival 2009 See how they do it in Albuquerque USA —  Found this on You­tube and we wanted to show you what the Chilli Fest­ival is like in the USA, I like our garden party style bet­ter, but I must admit I will be going soon.

The Ran­goon Rac­quets Club — Methi Curry Sauce —  We found this sauce on the Hot-Headz stand at the Wessex Chilli Fest­ival and it appealed to my Wife Sonia as it was milk free (very import­ant if you have a milk allergy).

The Chilli Pep­per Com­pany — 8 Ball Hot Chilli Sauce —  Now, this little sauce pro­claims itself to be in the “Hot Chilli Sauce” cat­egory, how­ever i dis­agree! “8 Ball” is a sauce that i feel is more suited to the “Padawan” cat­egory, it’s a sauce that is more for those tired of mass mar­ket bull­shit and who want to break into the under­world of non-mainstream chilli products, but let me tell you it does a won­der­ful job!

make us a brew!? – ?mint & chilli tea —  The story goes – One night, Mr Scruff was mak­ing a stir-fry, unknown to him, a small goat was asleep on the floor, he tripped over the goat send­ing the ingredi­ents fly­ing. For­tu­nately, most of it landed in the fry­ing pan, except for some chil­lies which landed in his mint tea. Whilst cook­ing, he drank some of his brew and had a nice sur­prise. From this point, he star­ted put­ting chilli in his mint tea, and offered it to guests, who also liked it. So he decided to make his own mint and chilli teabags, as not every­body has a goat in their kitchen!

Fire Foods — UK Chilli Forum - I am a mem­ber of a num­ber of For­ums and dis­cus­sion groups that talk about chil­lies, sauces and gen­eral hot food, but one I joined a few months ago has sur­prised me for the amount of activity.

How to stop the chilli burn - The magic ingredi­ent in Chilli that burn us is cap­saicin, it does not as burn the taste buds, but reacts with recept­ors in the mouth mak­ing us think our mouth is being burned, cap­saicin is an oil, so to dilute it we need to mix it with other oils or things that will stick to oil.

Dry­ing Chil­lies — How, What and Why —  So you have been very suc­cess­ful grow­ing chil­lies this year, lots of lovely chil­lies, but now what to do with them until you need to use them?

Book Review — Carib­bean Food Made Easy with Levi Roots —  This BBC book is pub­lished to go along with the BBC Two series “Carib­bean Food Made Easy” it con­tains over 100 recipes; this is a beau­ti­fully illus­trated book with pic­tures of almost every recipe.

Hot-Headz — Who Dares Burns —  “Who Dares Burns” Is one of Hot-Headz own products and was Stu­art McAl­listers own entry into the extreme heat arms race that seems to still be going on, by this i mean that every, EVERY hot­sauce man­u­fac­turer is doing its best to bring out the new­est, hot­test sauce they can think of. Now Stu decided to jump into this arms race, but her brought some pretty heavy weaponry with him in the form of this sauce, the ingredi­ents are nice and simple, extract is high on the list so you would expect the extract taste to be over­power­ing right? WRONG!

Intro­duc­tion to Mex­ican cook­ery at the Brit­ish Museum - Thomas­ina Miers, Mas­ter­Chef win­ner and owner of res­taur­ant chain Wahaca, shares her pas­sion for Mex­ican food and demon­strates simple recipes.

Pick­ling Chil­lies made Quick and Simple —  Pick­ling is a tra­di­tional method of pre­serving food using a mild acid such as vin­egar to pre­vent the growth of bacteria.

Inter­na­tional News – Chilli in the under pants ends in court  —  A WOMAN who rubbed chilli in the pants of her ex-roomy pleaded guilty to com­mon assault in Australia.

Chil­li­Chut­ney­Man — Nitro Naga Extreme Edi­tion - “Nitro Naga Extreme Edi­tion” comes in a beau­ti­ful and very unique 150ml bottle that looks sim­ilar to the old school medi­cine bottles that things like cough medi­cine and such used to come in, the lable on the bottle is very eye-catching with some lovely blen­ded red,yellow and orange let­ter­ing on a black back­ground. The sauce itself is a nice car­a­mel col­our (no doubt from the worcester­shire sauce) with black flecks, red pieces of chilli and seeds that can be seen float­ing in the mixture.

Brit­ish Street Food Awards 2010 - Some of the best food I have tasted, I would call Street Food, and now there is an award for the best UK Street Food, it is being organ­ised by food critic Richard John­son and cul­min­atesin Lud­low at the Lud­low Food Fest­ival 2010.

Ben­ing­ton Lord­ship — Chilli Fest­ival 2010 —  The 5th Ben­ning­ton Lord­ship Chilli Fest­ival is over the week­end of the 29th & 30th of August 2010 and will attact 1000’s of vis­itor to this pop­u­lar event.

Fire Foods — Firemite Video Review —  This sauce is made by a com­pany known to the world as “Fire foods”, the com­pany was star­ted 3 years ago by Nick Woods and his lovely wife Zoe ( I have met them prior to this review and they are both really nice and friendly people!) who star­ted grow­ing chilli’s and from there went on to mak­ing sauces and such, tak­ing just 6 products to Grantham mar­ket where they sold very well, so Nick “Woody” Woods and his wife went on to start the com­pany with just a hand­ful of products and £500 in the kitty.

Win­dus­tOps — Firey Foods 2009 Videos —  This year thew Fiery Foods UK event in brighton attracked over 12,000 vis­itor and with twice as many vendors as last year, the event is grow­ing quickly. Win­dus­tOps a pro­fes­sional pro­duc­tions com­pany pro­duced a num­ber of videos of the event, and they have kindly let us include them on the ChileFoundry.

Simple Dor­set Naga & Tomato Chut­ney —  This is a ver­sion of our fam­ily simple chut­ney, but super heated with some Dor­set Naga Chillies.

Over 200 hot art­icles pub­lished so far —  We are please to announce that we have now pub­lished over 200 art­icles and serverd over 50K pages since we star­ted in May 2009.

Tyrrell’s Altern­at­ives — Roas­ted Chilli Corn - I have had roas­ted corn on trips to the USA and have always enjoyed the crunch and fla­vour com­bin­a­tion, but out­side of food events I have not seen them for sale in the UK.

Do You Love Food? — Channel 4 Doc­u­ment­ary —  Cen­tury Films are look­ing for people with inter­est­ing food stor­ies for a Chan­nel 4 doc­u­ment­ary “Do you love Food?”

Scorchio — the UK’s biggest chilli and hot sauce store —  In 2002 Karl received a gift of a bottle of “Pain is Good — Jamaican Hot Sauce” from this the Scorchio Empire star­ted. The sauce had come from Har­vey Nich­ols, not hav­ing a branch nearby Karl searched the inter­net for sup­pli­ers, and came to the real­isa­tion that if he was look­ing, then other must also be doing the same.

Ger­man Police invest­ig­ate Chill Sauce for Griev­ous Bod­ily Harm —  After a scuffle at a Ber­lin kebab stand in Bremen’s cent­ral train sta­tion between a cus­tomer and the kebab vendor which ended in the costomer hav­ing the sauce in his eye.

Mr Vikki’s — King Naga — National Chilli Awards Multi Award Win­ner - “King Naga” comes in a beau­ti­ful little 110ml jar with plenty of angles and hon­estly looks like it came straight out of india! theres a little white label on the back with the ingredi­ents above on it, and a nice warn­ing “Warn­ing!! very hot chilli product”, adorn­ing the front of the jar is an eye-catchingly simple yel­low and black label with the pickles name, the com­pany name and eight little red chilli’s at the top! The pickle itself is a mix­ture of red,green and brown and has a con­sist­ency sim­ilar to thatof a com­mer­cialy curry paste but with more seeds and you can tell this is much more fresh and wholesome.

Cap­saicin Could Stop a Heart Attack In Pro­gress, Sci­ent­ists Find - New research just pub­lished in the journal Cir­cu­la­tion con­cludes that a com­mon, over-the-counter pain salve con­tain­ing cap­saicin rubbed on the skin dur­ing a heart attack could serve as a cardiac-protectant — redu­cing or even pre­vent­ing dam­age to the heart. The research­ers found an amaz­ing 85 per­cent reduc­tion in car­diac cell death when cap­saicin was used. This is the most power­ful car­di­opro­tect­ive effect ever recor­ded, accord­ing to Keith Jones, PhD, a researcher in the UC depart­ment of phar­ma­co­logy and cell biophysics.

Fire Foods Ama­teur Scov­ille Awards 2009 — Res­ults - Sat­urday night I spent tast­ing hot sauces, chut­neys, chilli chocol­ate and chilli vodka! No it was not a typ­ical night at home with Hot Juan, but I was a judge at the Fire Foods Ama­teur Scov­ille Awards 2009.

Chilli News from the USA —  News and extracts from chilli related web site in the USA

South Devon Chilli Farm – Chilli Chocol­ate Fruit & Spice - In the packet are two large slabs of the chocol­ate, it looks like it has been hand spread to cool, in the sur­face you can see bumps cov­er­ing the sultanas.

What Scott Roberts said about us —  Chile­head — Scott Roberts has just writ­ten at art­icle ” More Hot Sauce and Hot Pep­per Sites You Should Visit” and num­ber one on the list was

The Com­plete Chilli Pep­per Book by Dave DeWitt and Paul W. Bos­land - This book as been writ­ten by two of the great names in the US chilli world Dave DeWitt and Paul W. Bos­land. It provides a com­plete intro­duc­tion to the world of chil­lies, if a little US cent­ric (well that was the tar­get mar­ket for this book).

Chil­lis Galore — Homegrown & Homemade —  Wilf (Richard) and Kathy star­ted grow­ing chil­lies about 19 years ago in Nor­wich, ini­tially just to have a few inter­est­ing vari­et­ies to use in cook­ing, that led them on to start­ing a web sites www.chillisgalore.co.uk. They have since developed a range of homemade chilli products in their own kit­chen using their own plants from the green house.

Lady Bird Johnson’s Ped­ernales River Chili - This recipe ori­gin­ally con­tained beef suet, but that ingredi­ent was omit­ted after LJB’s severe heart attack when he was Sen­ate major­ity leader. Remem­ber to skim the fat off the chilli.

Vol­cano Chilli opens in Lincoln’s Cent­ral Mar­ket —  Chris and Rosie Jag­ger have opened Vol­cano Chilli in Lincoln’s Cent­ral Mar­ket selling all kind of chilli products includ­ing super hot sauces, dried chil­lies, chilli chocol­ate and jams

Who Dares Burns — 1812 Over­ture Advert —  Hot-Headz has put this fun video on You­Tube show­ing the effects of Who Dares Burns set to the 1812 overture..

Edible Orna­ment­als have been awar­ded a bursary by Slow Food - Edible Orna­ment­als have been awar­ded a bursary by Slow Food, the inter­na­tional non-profit organ­isa­tion which cam­paigns for good, clean and fair food. This award will help Joanna and Shawn con­tinue pro­mot­ing their pas­sion for using the best in fresh pro­duce by exhib­it­ing their fresh chil­lies and home grown chilli sauces at the Mas­ter­Chef Live Show at Lon­don Olympia.

Simple and Quick Salsa Verde - This is a very simple ver­sion of a South Amer­ica green Salsa; it can be made in a few minutes, but improves if kept in the fridge for an hour before serving.

Veer­aswamy Mango Chilli Chut­ney  —  Veer­aswamy is Britain’s old­est Indian res­taur­ant open­ing in 1929, their range of Chut­neys are dis­trib­uted by Bart Spices and includes Gar­lic Mas­ala, Lime Chilli, Green Chilli, Mango Bengal Spice and the one I am tast­ing today Mango Chilli Chutney.

Chilli Variety? – ?Masquerade - Part of the Cap­sicum Annuum Spe­cies Mas­quer­ade is a very early hot vari­ety with long erect fruits that start purple and mature through yel­low, then orange and finally to red. Ideal in pots on the patio, grows to between 20-30cm high and 20-25cm wide.

Gaby’s Hot Stuff — FFUK09 Best Hot Sauce —  I’m sat here on a cold Octo­ber night, look­ing at what could pos­sibly be the most beau­ti­ful and elab­or­ate bottle of hot sauce I have ever seen, the sauce comes from a com­pany run by a hot blooded woman from Panama! Gaby used to love see­ing all the chilli’s grow­ing in the local gar­dens in the coun­tryside of Panama and she was often given some to try, she loved the fruity aromas and fla­vours given off by the chilli, it was then she real­ised that she was indeed a chile­head, and set about mak­ing her own hot sauce!

Hot Headz & Scorchio Top 10 Products — Octo­ber 2009 —  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

UK Chilli Mar­ket On Twit­ter - Apart from us who else should you be fol­low­ing on twitter..

The Chilli Pep­per Com­pany — Chilli Sweets & Snacks —  At the Brighton FFUK I had the pleas­ure of acquir­ing sev­eral snack foods from my good friend Ged from “The chilli pep­per com­pany”, now in my mind, although snacks are a damn good thing to have, I don’t feel I can devote an entire review to just one of those snacks, so I roun­ded them all up and decided to review them all in one go, attrib­ut­ing a few lines to each product, that way you get some­thing nice to read, and it gives you a fair idea of how these snacks taste, without fur­ther adieu, lets start eh?

Top 10 UK Chilli Web Sites — Octo­ber 2009 - 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 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.

Wahaca look­ing into open­ing Chilli farm in Devon - Wahaca the Mex­ican styled res­taur­ant chain foun­ded by Thomas­ina Miers (Mas­ter Chief Win­ner) and Mark Selby is to open it third UK res­taur­ant in Canary Wharf next month along side it Cov­ent Garden and West­field sites.

In 2002 Karl received a gift of a bottle of “Pain is Good — Jamaican Hot Sauce” from this the Scorchio Empire star­ted. The sauce had come from Har­vey Nich­ols, not hav­ing a branch nearby Karl searched the inter­net for sup­pli­ers, and came to the real­isa­tion that if he was look­ing, then other must also be doing the same.

After much research Scorchio opened its doors in 2004 and has never looked back. Before they stock any­thing it has to be taste tested, the ethos of ‘savour the fla­vour’ is para­mount in the selec­tion process.

The web site is cus­tomer driven with customer’s reviews being a big part of the sales pro­cess, backed by a very large range of products, many hours can be spent select­ing products from around the world, of just the UK.

Karl was recently a judge at the National Chilli Awards along with our own Darth Naga and Dany Lamote, they tasted a massive range of products before select­ing the winners.

For 2010 they have even more products on the way… but enough said, we hope to review new addi­tions as they arrive.

Visit the web site to see what you fancy — www.scorchio.co.uk

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Please visit our spon­sor www.hot-headz.com

Con­tinue read­ing ‘Scorchio  —  the UK’s biggest chilli and hot sauce store’»

Its a cloudy, cold sat­urday after­noon in Octo­ber, i think its time i wrote another review, this sauce comes from someone known as “Chil­li­chut­ney­man” and he sells some of his products through www.scorchio.co.uk . Bryn (as is the chillichutneyman’s name) used to be an insur­ance broker but then star­ted grow­ing and mak­ing recipes from his own chilli’s, it star­ted as a hobby but then after some encour­age­ment from friends he decided to sell his products loc­ally, nowadays he makes and sells a vari­ety of pickles, chut­neys and sauces, one of which i have here right now!

Ingredi­ents: toma­toes, onions, gar­lic, dried naga chil­lies (1g), dried red chil­lies (2.5g), herbs, spices, mus­tard powder, sugar (19g), worcester­shire sauce,malt vin­egar, ginger, salt (1.25g), pep­per, water.

“Nitro Naga Extreme Edi­tion” comes in a beau­ti­ful and very unique 150ml bottle that looks sim­ilar to the old school medi­cine bottles that things like cough medi­cine and such used to come in, the lable on the bottle is very eye-catching with some lovely blen­ded red,yellow and orange let­ter­ing on a black back­ground. The sauce itself is a nice car­a­mel col­our (no doubt from the worcester­shire sauce) with black flecks, red pieces of chilli and seeds that can be seen float­ing in the mixture.

I took off the lid and gave this my usual olfact­ory once-over, and i’m pleased to say i could smell a hint of Naga and tomato in amongst the unmis­take­able smell of worcester­shire sauce, now at this point i was a little con­cerned that this would be the over­power­ing factor and the naga fla­vour would be over­shad­owed by the worcester­shire, but ever pre­val­ent in my tast­ing cam­paign i sol­diered on undeterred and took a large spoon of this stuff!

The taste as it hit my tongue was one of tomato and ginger, coupled very well with the fla­vour of Naga’s and Worcester­shire, this sauce has such a com­plex fla­vour its dif­fi­cult to pin­point any par­tic­u­lar one, then the heat hit me..it was an inter­est­ing heat, and as i took another mouth­ful i real­ised this is a heat that builds as you eat more, a heat thats not pier­cing, but warm enough to set the saliva glands glands off and get my fore­head leak­ing a little.

“Nitro Naga Extreme Edi­tion” Has such a unique fla­vour i had great dif­fi­culty try­ing to find a sauce to com­pare it to, if you took a worcester­shire sauce and per­haps mixed it with “Ass kickin ori­ginal hot­sauce” you’d have a little idea of how this tastes, but its more than that! Chil­li­chut­ney­man has cap­tured so many fla­vours into one sauce that it will be almost impossible to emu­late it, that blen­ded with a heat that is cer­tainly not “OMFGHOT” but a more subtle and warm­ing heat, the kind of heat that you can appre­ci­ate will be hot for most people, but a pleas­ant change for the nut­ters like myself.

At only £3.99 for 150ml exclus­ively from www.scorchio.co.uk , this sauce is extremely good value for money, and def­in­itely one i recom­mend buy­ing! You will go through the first bottle quickly as its quite more­ish, but take your time and savour it, then go back and buy another, at that sort of price you can’t afford not to!!

So thats it for another sauce review, until next time padawans, keep watch­ing and please feel free to email your com­ments to myself or Hot Juan, or bet­ter still why not register and leave com­ments on the reviews them­selves!! May the sauce be with you!!!

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Please visit our spon­sor www.hot-headz.com