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Austin Hot Sauce Festival

spicyguy — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:22:27 +0000

With almost two decades under its belt, the Austin Hot Sauce Festival is a time-honored tradition featuring some of the most defining characteristics of life in Austin: hot sauce, hot weather, live music, great food and a fantastic way to give back to the community.

A major fundraiser for the Capital Area Food Bank, the festival boasts free admission, with a donation of three healthy, non-perishable food items or a cash donation to the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas. Always held in late summer, the weather is guaranteed to rival the sauces in hotness, but this popular event consistently draws more than 15,000 spectators to Waterloo Park in downtown Austin – this amounts to a sizeable donation to one of the most community-centric and necessary non-profits in town.

The heart of the festival is the hot sauce competition. The contest, with separate judging for individuals, restaurants, and commercial bottlers, is divided into three categories: red, green, and specialty variety. The festival attracts as many as 350 entries, who each provide a quart of their entered hot sauce that makes over 100 gallons of hot sauce being consumed annually at the festival itself, let alone all the jars available for purchase. Combined with over 650 lbs of tortilla chips, the sauces are available to be sampled by all participants. The sauces are judged, however, by respected area chefs, and as this festival’s reputation has grown, so has the competition, which is as fierce as the heat.

In addition to sampling the finest hot sauce in the area, spectators can partake of food from many local restaurants, many of whom have entered, and won, the hot sauce competition. The food provided often highlights or incorporates the salsas, and although weighted towards Austin’s renowned Tex-Mex, interior Mexican and BBQ, other ethnicities are often represented. Restaurants that have participated in the past include Curra’s, Dona Emilia’s, Matt’s El Rancho, Ruby’s BBQ, Santa Rita and Suun Garden Shaved Ice.

What would an Austin festival be without live music? Again focusing on our local talent, the festival boasts quite a cross-section of musical genres, with kid-friendly bands, country, jazz, conjunto, and many others. Bands who have played at past hot sauce festivals include, Loose Cannons, the South Austin Jug Band, Los Jazz Vatos and the Gourds.

Getting to try the cream of the salsa crop, eat the best food Austin has to offer, dance to the grooviest bands in town and make a contribution to a worthy cause is one of the highlights of an Austin summer. The Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival is an institution, and one that will face its next two decades in the same spicy fashion.

Spice used in India to cure stomach ills is named world’s hottest pepper

spicyguy — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:48:20 +0000

CHANGPOOL, India – The farmer, a quiet man with an easy smile, has spent a lifetime eating a chili pepper with a strange name and a vicious bite. His mother stirred them into sauces. His wife puts them out for dinner raw, blood-red morsels of pain to be nibbled — carefully, very carefully — with whatever she’s serving.

Around here, in the hills of northeastern India, it’s called the “bhut jolokia” — the “ghost chili.” Anyone who has tried it, they say, could end up an apparition.

“It is so hot you can’t even imagine,” said the farmer, Digonta Saikia, working in his fields in the midday sun, his face nearly invisible behind an enormous straw hat. “When you eat it, it’s like dying.”

Outsiders, he insisted, shouldn’t even try it. “If you eat one,” he told a visitor, “you will not be able to leave this place.”

The rest of the world, though, should prepare itself.

One for the record books
Because in this remote Indian region facing bloody insurgencies, widespread poverty and a major industry — tea farming — in deep decline, hope has come in the form of this thumb-sized chili pepper with frightening potency and a superlative rating: the spiciest chili in the world. A few months ago, Guinness World Records made it official.

If you think you’ve had a hotter chili pepper, you’re wrong.

The smallest morsels can flavor a sauce so intensely it’s barely edible. Eating a raw sliver causes watering eyes and a runny nose. An entire chili is an all-out assault on the senses, akin to swigging a cocktail of battery acid and glass shards.

For generations, though, it’s been loved in India’s northeast, eaten as a spice, a cure for stomach troubles and, seemingly paradoxically, a way to fight the crippling summer heat.

Now, though, with scientific proof that barreled the bhut jolokia into the record books — it has more than 1,000,000 Scoville units, the scientific measurement of a chili’s spiciness — northeast India is taking its chili to the outside world.

Exporters are eagerly courting the international community of rabid chili-lovers, a group that has traded stories for years about a mysterious, powerful Indian chili. Farmers are planting new fields of bhut jolokias, government officials are talking about development programs.

‘Tremendous potential’
Chances are no one will get rich. But in a region where good news is a rarity, the world record status has meant a lot of pride — and a little more business.

“It has got tremendous potential,” says Leena Saikia, the managing director of Frontal AgriTech, a food business in the northeastern state of Assam that has been in the forefront of bhut jolokia exports.

NATIVE WASHINGTONIAN WINS TWO AWARDS IN THE HOT PEPPER AWARDS 2009

spicyguy — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:44:21 +0000

Washington, DC, November 17, 2009 –(PR.com)– Monica Sanowar, the new Hot Sauce Diva of DC at least, has managed to win not one, but two awards in The Hot Pepper Awards 2009. It is such an honor to win one, but to get two of them is over the top. Sun Pony, Inc. won 1st place for Shak Shak Gourmet Jerk Sauce. This sauce is hands down, delicious and it is very easy to use and in no time at all, your kitchen will have the most incredibly delicious smell wafting through it and then into your mouth. Shak Shak Gourmet Jerk is great on chicken, fish, pork, beef — even veggie burgers. Put a little Shak Shak on your favorite foods and you’ll be thoroughly syrinsified.

DC Redbone Hot Sauce is Hot Hot Hot but has a wonderful flavor and will spice up your foods. Beware — DC Redbone Hot Sauce is totally addictive. DC Redbone is simply fierce!