$10 Challenge...

I apologize for the delay in the hot sauce updates, honestly life has just gotten in the way.

But to entertain you in some fashion, I will be documenting my $10 Challenge. I plan to make a meal for 4 co-workers with just $10. The toughest part? Every ingredient has to come from The Dollar Tree.

I scoped out the store yesterday (yes, I window shop at grocery stores and the Dollar Tree) and looks like my best bet is to make Chicken Parmesan and Texas Toast. I could purchase all items fro, the store, and will scratch make sauce and use pre-cooked chicken nuggets.

It is amazing the amount of items you can find at the Dollar Tree so don't knock it till you've tried it!

We are still planning which day lunch will be, but I will document it as I go along.

Perfecting the Sauce...

I apologize for my absence, my wife and I recently welcomed our second daughter in to the world and have been a bit busy. In addition to the trials and tribulations of starting any business, let a lone a food specific business, every day life does get in the way. As much as I would like to research, create, market, and do everything to get this company off the ground as quickly as possible, days and even weeks can go by where everyday life, friends, family or my day time job delay my progress.

I made a new test batch (one of the first since my wife got pregnant) a few weeks ago and planned to document the results through pictures. Unfortunately I lost most of the pictures on my camera while taking some of my newborn daughter. I can live with that :)

Creating a recipe for a hot sauce is a strange thing, because it is not like any other sauce, or recipe for that matter. Any other food item, you can taste as you go and make adjustments. Since hot sauces require a final blending stage, as well as a rest period (I like at least 2-3 weeks) for flavors to grow, you really cannot make final adjustments. I have made sauces that turned out horrible and I had lost 2-3 weeks of time. And I have had ones that needed a little something extra, which means I had 2-3 weeks more to go to re-create with additions or subtractions before tasting again. It makes it extremely hard and time consuming to get that perfect recipe.

I had created a Chipotle Sauce in the past that was simple, had mild heat and flavorful. I decided to improve (I hoped) on that sauce by adding the sweetness of mangoes. I also took a previous and very successful Roasted Red Pepper Sauce and added Basil to give it an Italian type hot sauce flavor.

The key ingredient to any homemade hot sauce is fresh ingredients and I use as many as possible in each batch. What will be interesting is to see how many ingredients can stay fresh once these are produced on a mass scale. Every sauce for me starts the same and I will share:

1 Cup Apple Cider Vinegar
1 Cup White Distilled Vinegar
1 Tablespoon minced garlic
1 Teaspoon salt

Add these items and your favorite peppers and other ingredients to a sauce pan, bring to a boil and simmer 15-20 minutes. Let cool slightly before putting in a blender and pureeing to your preferred consistency. This is when you can finally taste and get a general idea. When doing the recent Roasted Red Pepper and Basil sauce I had added multiple Jalapeños which made it too hot and drowned the flavor. In an effort to save the sauce I added a cup of brown sugar. It worked.

Make it fun, put on your favorite music, have a few drinks and enjoy creating something flavorful and exciting. There is nothing better than making something from scratch that was born out of your own ideas.

I have small changes to make to my two new sauces and I will add them to a long list of sauces I hope to produce and sell. While you can purchase bottles and caps from a place such as SKS Bottles, I also find that for this purpose, empty bottles of single serve wine work wonderfully. Plus, you have to empty the bottle of wine first :)

Miss Anna's Garlic Habanero Sauce...

Company description: This sauce has all the great flavor of Miss Anna's traditional Hot Pepper Sauce without the curry. The absence of curry, however, is more than replaced by a delicious mix of garlic, mustard, and handcrafted taste. Miss Anna's Garlic Habanero Sauce packs a slightly smaller punch for those who prefer a little less heat. Most importantly, Miss Anna has again crafted an all encompassing bottle of Caribbean flavor.

Every once in awhile I'd like to review unique and/or delicious sauces I come across that you may not find in stores. I'd like to drive more business to these small businesses in the hopes of continuing their success.

Today I'd like to review a sauce my uncle brought me from St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. Miss Anna's Garlic Habanero is an outstanding flavored thick sauce, best used to add heat and a touch of flavor to dishes or recipes. This sauce is pretty hot so you will want to use it in moderation, but along with the heat it offers a wonderful garlic flavor. A little bit rubbed on a hot dog with chopped onions takes a standard dog to a whole new level.

Along with flavoring dishes and adding that spot of heat, it can be used to kick up recipes such as my Garlic Habanero Ranch recipe I use for wings below. 

1 cup buttermilk ranch dressing

1/4 cup butter

2 tablespoons Miss Anna's Garlic Habanero sauce (more or less to taste)

Combine all ingredients in saucepan and heat to combine. Fry wings at 350 till golden brown and toss in dressing.

Please visit the Miss Anna's website to purchase this sauce and other wonderful sauces from the Caribbean. 

-Jay -

I'll be back...

I'll plan to post a blog on my new batch experiment in a few days but am currently enjoying my new born baby daughter.

Also to keep this blog fresh I'll plan to post some other food items, recipes and reviews as I see fit.

Bottling - the biggest hurdle of all

It is illegal in most states to produce a food in your home kitchen, label it and sell it. Plenty of people do it, but I'd rather go the legit route so I don't have lawyers knocking on my door someday. Sure, I could make a dozen or so bottles of hot sauce each weekend, label them, shrink wrap them and sell them to family and friends, but what is the fun in that? I'd rather do it right and sell it right.

And that is the toughest part we'll encounter as we try to get our hot sauces on the shelf. Finding a bottler is not so hard, even the pricing is not bad, as you'd typically pay $1.50-$2.00 per bottle to have the ingredients cooked, mixed, bottled labeled and in most cases that cost even covers your testing, FDA approval, and nutritional content evaluation. Great, where do I sign?

Not so fast, as the minimums for most places I have contacted run between 3000-4800 bottles. And that is per flavor Do the math and you'll see a first run batch isn't as easy as it sounds.

So where do we go next? You can rent a commercial kitchen and produce and bottle and label your sauces and sell in retail stores. Ok, sounds easy enough. But your cost per bottle rises as you have to pay kitchen rent, buy all ingredients, spend time producing, plus pay normal -non-bulk pricing on empty bottles, caps, shrink bands, etc.

I believe I can still get my cost to around $2.00 a bottle this way, but that doesn't cover nutritional guidelines, pH  testing and FDA approval. I am still hunting for a place that will do these as an off shoot.

The bonus to bottling your own is you can make as many different sauces as you want and whatever quantity you desire. I have some emails out to some small time hot sauce companies to get more information and see how they go to where they are.

In the meantime, if you want to bottle yourself, I suggest you check out the following sites:

Bottles, caps, shrink bands, etc - SKS Bottles
Barcodes for your labels - Nation Wide Barcodes
Design of your logo and label for cheap - MY COMPANY! Jay Gray Graphic Design

If you have money you need to burn and do not mind a first run of 3000+ bottles, I highly recommend these companies. While I may not run my sauces through them, they were extremely helpful on the phone and I do know of two companies who use them for bottling:

Endorphin Farms
Stage Coach Sauces

If you know of any small batch companies that bottle, please let me know!

- Jay -

Chili's Restaurant

While this blog will focus on the progress
of our hot suave company, I'd like to include some other topics as they relate to food when I have the chance. Enjoy.

I hadn't eaten at Chilis in some time and the last time I went I was extremely unimpressed with their new menu. They got an A for effort in trying to create new and interesting menu items by fancying up fajitas, tacos, etc. They failed miserably with greasy food and flavors that didn't compliment each other.

My roomate and I used to drink beers and eat chips and salsa back in the day but I always thought their meals were average. But you pay for a chain restaurant, and you get the culinary equivalent so you can't really complain.

We received a free brownie sundae coupon for my wife's birthday so we gave them another shot. The menu is again filled with NEW items and I was a bit worried. We started with the bottomless chips and their new ranch salsa. It was wonderful and the chips are now lighter and crisper.

We decided to split the fajita trio which included steak, chicken and shrimp. It was excellent! The onions, peppers, and meat were perfectly cooked in a hot cast iron skillet, the sides an toppings fresh and the tortillas warm and pliable. The rice was refreshing and light with hints of cilantro and lime.

Thank you Chilis for being back to what you should be.

What's in a name?

Though we are just starting off and still have to figure out legal aspects, figure out whether to pay a bottling company or try and do it ourselves, develop brand marketing material, a logo, etc, I feel like the hardest step in any business and especially one of this nature, is simply picking a name.

I've been developing hot sauces on and off for 3 years now, as hobby, seeing as I am a "home chef" who enjoys cooking. It is one of the few hobbies that doesn't cost much, is creative and relaxing. I began developing sauces after my love for hot sauce grew, and locally, there seem to be a million different varieties. So out of boredom and a few beers I start making them at home, developing several different styles off one simple recipe and experimenting with peppers.

I purchased some 5 oz. PET bottles from SKS Bottles to put my sauce in, seal and hand out to friends. But who wants a plain bottle with no labeling? No one does. So I developed a quirky and humorous name and logo to put on the bottles, listed ingredients and stated they were produced and bottled specifically for friends. The name was Anal Volcano. Not the most appropriate of names but it was funny and invoked the hot sauce spirit. But the name made most people think the sauces were extremely hot and would send you running for the bathroom.

I through the name aside and didn't make any new sauces for a year or so. I developed a few more inventive sauces with each focusing on a certain pepper. I next came up with Major Peppers hot sauces with a clever Jalapeno mascot and American flag back drop. Again, all in fun.

Most recently as I decided it was time to take my sauces and develop a company and make this a legitimate business I was recommended by a friend to call the company Red Hot Mama after my beautiful, red-headed wife. After all we are expecting our second child Tuesday and she's a wonderful person to base a company off of.

Seeing as the name would lend to a devilish red head logo and mascot with more than averaged sized knockers, I thought the perfect slogan would be, "It's the Tits!"

A name is important for a hot sauce, as many people will buy your product based on just that. The name, the logo, the look, the description. It is one of the few condiments people will fork over $6 a bottle for and have no idea what it tastes like. The first goal is to make them buy your sauce by making it stand apart from the others through a quirky name, an attractive logo, and the name of the individual sauce. It's then my job to create a recipe that keeps them coming back for more.

In my next blog, expect some of my research on bottling companies, and the trials and tribulations of figuring out how to legally sell sauces.

- Jay -