Hot Sauce Carry Purse

Husband…..Will Forte
Wife…..Amy Poehler
Debbie…..Maya Rudolph
Reggie…..Bernie Mac

[ open on group of couples together for a barbecue, party music pumpin' the joint ]

Husband: [ enters living room from the outdoor grill ] Honey? They’re ready!

Wife: Alright! Who wants a burger?

Debbie: Mmm! I do!

Reggie: Oh, me too..

Debbie: You have no idea how much Reggie loves his burgers!

Reggie: You just set me up, and clear the way! Where your hot sauce?

Wife: Oh.. hot sauce? Gosh, I don’t know.. I think we have some salsa in the refridgerator..

[ music comes to an abrupt halt ]

Reggie: You ain’t got no hot sauce?! Debbie, baby, you hear that?! They ain’t got no hot sauce! I told you we should have called before we come here! Come on - dammit!!

Debbie: But, baby..

Reggie: Come on, let’s go!

Debbie: But, baby..

Reggie: Come on, woman, get in the car, we got to go!

Debbie: Don’t worry, baby.. I got it all under control. With my new hot sauce carry purse - by Tabasco. [ opens her purse to reveal the various hot sauce accessories neatly organized ] Each compartment is insulted and calibrated to keep your sauces organized and fresh. It ently carries them from wherever you are, to wherever you need to go.

Reggie: That’s right, baby. Like pool parties, the office, movie theaters, funerals and shopping, and any party thrown by white people!

Wife: I’m so glad you guys brought your thingamajig!

Debbie: You mean my hot sauce carry purse?

Reggie: By Tabasco.

Wife: Yeah.. that.

Reggie: And for you dudes who don’t want to be caught dead carrying a purse, there’s a hot sauce carrying purse for men. Oh, it’s still a purse - but it’s for dudes. And it has hot sauce in it, so, baby, be cool.

Jingle:
Heat up your love
Heat up your life.
Heat up your burgers and fries
Hot sauce carrying purse!”

Debbie: Hot sauce carry purse. By Tabasco. Available at Wilson’s Leather.

Evans Hot Sauce Corn Chips

These corn chips were a great surprise. They’re shaped a lot like Fritos, and they’ve got what seems at first like just a mildly hot seasoning. The heat keeps growing, though, and most people who tried these eventually choked on the hot seasoning that lodged in the throat. It’s not as hot as the really good hot Sundance corn chips, but it’s hot enough to mess you up if you weren’t expecting it. Good stuff!

Evans Hot Sauce Flavored Cheese Nibs

These look like short, stubby cheese puffs, except that they’ve got a fiery red coloring. The texture is sort of crunchy but a bit styrofoamy, and the taste is pretty hot, but without a whole lot of other appeal as far as the flavor goes. If you like hot stuff, they’re OK, but given the wide variety of hot-flavored snacks available in the Chicago area, you can do a lot better than these. The competing Jay’s Hot Stuff Crunchy Cheezlets win over these in both texture and taste, with a far superior crunch and a way better flavor. Still, this was a pretty big bag of snacks for just 50 cents.

Vitner’s The Original Louisiana The Perfect Hot Sauce Flavored Potato ChipsThese are excellent hot chips. The chips were thinly sliced and very crisp, and nearly even chip in this small bag was unbroken, including several impressively large ones. The taste was great! There was an impressive, though not overwhelming, heat, combined with an excellent, tasty flavor. I ate my way through the whole bag pretty quickly.

From the stalwart Tabasco to a pack of brash boutique bottlers, local hot sauces are burning into the national consciousness.

By Scott Jordan

Edmund McIlhenny first created his original recipe for a pepper sauce in 1866, and patented the culinary concoction in 1870.
Photo by BOX: The majority of bottles featured on Gambit Weekly ’s cover this week were supplied by Creole Delicacies Gourmet Shop (523-6425 and located at the second floor of Riverwalk

In an airplane hangar-size warehouse on the grounds of Avery Island in New Iberia, a liquid orange and red trail dots the floor like burning coals. In a corner, a pair of industrial-strength rubber boots is covered with the sunset-colored mixture. The air carries an invisible charge that makes uninitiated eyes mist over. The source of the vapor lies in a row of open oak barrels waiting to be sealed, and McIlhenny Company historian Shane Bernard peers into one of the barrels and offers a piece of advice. “Dip your finger in and get a little bit, and put it on your tongue,” he says. “Then spit it out.”

It sounds like the genteel ritual of a wine tasting, and swallowing a teaspoon of tabasco pepper mash surely can’t be threatening. But 10 minutes after following Bernard’s instructions, it’s clear that the Tabasco sauce factory is no place for bravado. The lingering effects of the miniscule amount create a creeping tornado in the sinuses, and hair suddenly feels like it’s charged with static electricity. It’s moments like this when Bernard’s duties change from McIlhenny archivist to safety monitor. “Don’t forget to wash your hands,” he says.

It’s a lesson that’s been taught on Avery Island for 133 years. The south Louisiana landmark is where Edmund McIlhenny first experimented with a pepper sauce in 1868, and patented his culinary concoction in 1870. On much of the 2,200-acre grounds, time seems to stand still. Large parts of the island remain undeveloped, and indigenous wildlife thrives. On this balmy October day, six deer quietly graze at the edge of the woods surrounding McIlhenny’s corporate office. In the marsh, rows of turtles line the water’s surface, and in a nearby field, a pack of buzzards pick over the carcass of an armadillo. On the site of McIlhenny’s first factory — the size of a small house — old cologne bottles used for bottling sauce jut out from the dirt, still intact after a century. And Edmund McIlhenny’s original recipe — a mixture of peppers, vinegar and salt — is still used today.

Yet even as nothing has changed, everything has changed. McIlhenny Company is now a corporate juggernaut, and its Tabasco brand is recognized around the world. The sauce is bottled in 21 different languages and dialects, exported to 100 countries. More than 100,000 tourists tour Avery Island annually. The company has aggressively marketed the Tabasco name, through a clothing line and a chain of retail stores, and also co-branded with fellow food giant Heinz for a specialty ketchup.

McIlhenny Company isn’t alone in the phenomenal growth of hot sauce in the last decade. Louisiana brands Crystal and Louisiana Gold are also local icons with a national presence. And independent bottlers are making their presence felt, flooding the market with specialty hot sauces appealing to gourmands, collectors, and a growing segment of consumers obsessed with finding the hottest sauce available.

All those factors are heating up cash registers, too. According to a 2001 report by Chicago-based market research firm Information Resources, Inc., retail grocery sales for a 52-week period ending Oct. 7 brought in more than $117 million dollars. (Tabasco leads the pack with $28 million; Louisiana Hot ranks second in Louisiana brands with more than $10 million, and Crystal accounts for slightly less than $9 million.) Yet those numbers only tell part of the story. The figures don’t include Wal-Mart sales, food-service sales, mom-and-pop stores, military sales and international sales. A 1998 CNN Financial report estimated total annual sales at $140 million, but even industry experts admit that most numbers cited are educated guesses.

“All we have are estimates, because many of the companies are privately held, and don’t release sales figures,” says Dave DeWitt, founding editor of Chile Pepper magazine, author of 10 books about chiles, and currently publisher and editor of Fiery Foods and Barbecue magazine. Some of them might, but they often don’t distinguish product lines in those figures. And now there’s gourmet and specialty store sales, and web sales. It’s probably in the neighborhood of $200 million now annually.”

Tabasco’s pepper mash is aged in oak barrels for three years before processing.
Photo by Scott Jordan

Behind those numbers is a staggering range of sauces made from different peppers and different recipes. Their common bond is capsaicin, the natural substance in peppers that produces the heat sensation. Capsaicin has no odor or flavor, but acts on pain receptors in the mouth and throat. According to The Wellness Ecyclopedia of Food and Nutrition, capsaicin is so powerful that one drop diluted in 100,000 drops of water will cause blistering of the tongue.

The industry standard for measuring capsaicin is Scoville units, based on a scale developed by a pharmacist in 1912. The hotter the pepper, the higher its Scoville units. For example, bell peppers register zero Scoville units; anaheim peppers score 25-1,400; cerranos clock in between 7-25,000 Scoville units, and blinding habanero and Scotch bonnet peppers approach the 300,000 mark. Pure capsaicin has a Scoville heat unit score of 16 million.

In the laboratory at McIlhenny Company, Quality Assurance Industrial Specialist Leslie Hall checks the capsaicin levels of every batch of Tabasco sauce. “We use high performance liquid chromatography, and also test for moisture, pH levels, salt and viscosity,” she says. Their capsaicin testing is a precautionary measure, as the peppers used for Tabasco sauce — primarily grown in Central and South America, with a small crop grown on Avery Island — are already measured for quality control before they are processed.

But it’s not the capsaicin levels that distinguish Tabasco, Crystal, Louisiana Gold and most Louisiana hot sauces. “The first thing that your palate tastes is the vinegar, then the chile aspect comes in later,” says DeWitt. “It’s a style of making this kind of sauce that depends on the vinegar combination. I think that the quality is very high, so it’s not an issue of quality. It’s one of style and flavor, and whether or not people prefer cayenne-based Louisiana sauces and that style, as opposed to, say, Mexican or Caribbean sauces, which they’re competing with on a national level.”

That competition heated up in the late ’80s, as Paul Prudhomme’s Cajun cooking created a national stir, and demand for spicy foods encompassed the hot sauce industry. Before long, a whole new breed of hot sauces started appearing on shelves, taunting consumers with an underlying question: Are you strong enough to handle this sauce?

This category of boutique sauces is dominated by four marketing themes: physical suffering, damnation, enraged animals, and rectal damage. The first category boasts such brands as Crying Tongue, Insanity and Deathwish. The second contains names like Below Hell, Satan’s Slow Burn, and Hell in a Bottle. The third has Captain Redbeard’s Sharkbite, Screamin’ Blue Hen, and Lethal Gator. The fourth category features such memorable creations as Ass Blaster, Slap My Ass and Call Me Sally, and Ass in the Tub Armageddon.

“It’s the only segment of the industry where you can get away with scaring, insulting and threatening the customer,” says DeWitt. “There’s going to be extremes in any industry, and that’s the mindset of this industry. All these super-hot sauces are mainly sold as novelty and gag items — I suspect there’s very few of them actually being consumed.”

New Orleans’ Crystal hot sauce is a local pepper icon with a substantial presence in the national market.
Photo by Eileen Loh-Harrist

DeWitt sees one benefit of the super-hot varieties. “They’re a chemical that has some uses,” he says. “As an example, suppose that you are manufacturing a potato chip of a certain heat level, and you want it to be that heat level all the time, without the variations that happen with powders, depending on processing, age and other factors. If you use these extracts and know the precise heat level every time by measuring using high-performance testing, you can put these extracts into your mix making these chips.”

Since manufacturers aren’t mandated to put capsaicin levels on their products, the possibility of dangerous physical reactions exists. DeWitt hosts an annual hot sauce and barbecue convention and trade show in Albuquerque, N.M., each year, and carries a $2 million liability insurance policy at his convention. “One manufacturer didn’t follow regulations, and a man put a potato chip in his mouth, and fainted right away on the floor,” DeWitt remembers. “For the hot sauces, I only allow tastings on the end of a toothpick. We’ve had spontaneous vomiting and dizziness from people who are sensitive to it, and in some cases, these extracts can cause contact dermatitis, like poison ivy.”

The sauces responsible for such reactions don’t stand a chance in DeWitt’s Scovie Awards, the convention’s annual tasting competition. Hot sauces in a variety of different categories, including Louisiana-style, Caribbean, habanero and fruit-based, are judged by a panel of food-industry professionals. For independent bottlers, it’s a chance for recognition in the fiercely competitive specialty sauce market. It’s also proof that you can’t judge a sauce by its name or label.

A case in point is Bayou Butt Burner Sauce from Prairieville’s Hiram Davis, which won second place in the medium hot sauce category in the 2001 Scovie Awards. Fifty-two-year-old Davis, a former safety manager for a trucking company, is an entrepreneur who turned a weekend hobby into a new career. After planting some cayenne peppers in his backyard five years ago, he had a bumper crop that autumn, and couldn’t stand the thought of throwing away the extra peppers. After experimenting on his kitchen stove, he filled 60 bottles and gave them away to family and friends. Encouraged by the feedback, he drove to Angola and bought a few hundred more bushels of peppers, and made another 60 bottles every weekend.

“I went to Quik Print and made a label, just a little two-color deal,” says Davis. “I just wanted to see if there was any demand for it, and there was. So I went on and got myself legal, went through the health department. Every other weekend I went to the French Quarter and knocked on doors, trying to get people to try the sauce. I finally got a distributor to pay attention.”

Davis says the secret to his sauce is his unique recipe. “I don’t like a lot of the Louisiana stuff, with all that vinegar and salt. I cook the entire thing, so it’s more like a canned product, and that’s what makes it different.”

After selling approximately 1,000 bottles of Bayou Butt Burner his first year, Davis christened his fledgling company HongryHawg Products, Inc., and annual sales of his Bayou Butt Burner sauce — “I couldn’t resist the name,” he says — are now approaching the 10,000-bottle mark. Taking a cue from industry giants like McIlhenny Company and Bruce Foods, Davis has expanded his product line, and now makes a barbecue sauce and seven different hot sauces — including Bayou Fireballs, whose label features an alligator shooting skyward courtesy of a rear-end explosion, with the tag line, “Get a Tan Where the Sun Don’t Shine.”

Bayou Fireballs from Prairieville is part of a growing breed of hot sauces that taunts consumers with the underlying question: Are you strong enough to handle this sauce?
“I come up with the recipes right here on my stove, do the math, multiply it out, and take it to a food processor,” he says. “I always have to tweak it just a little bit, and then the labels are all my ideas. I go to Magnolia Labels in Jackson, Mississippi, and sit with their art department and tell them what I want. There’s a lot of love that goes into the whole process. I still peddle my hot sauce from Houston to Shreveport, and if you’re not afraid of the hours, it’s a lot of fun.”

For Davis and his independent and corporate peers, part of the challenge in creating hot sauces is anticipating culinary shifts. “There are definite trends that happen,” says DeWitt. “Whenever anything involving a certain region or cuisine or food style gets a lot of notoriety, all the things attendant to that increase in sales. Louisiana hot sauces led the country in terms of being out there and cultivating awareness. Then the Southwest region got big. Then what we went through was habaneros, and it was associated with Mexico and the Caribbean. Right now chipotle peppers are getting popular.” (McIlhenny Company is introducing a Tabasco chipotle sauce in 2002.)

“Eventually, the South American chiles are going to be popular,” predicts DeWitt, “and once that happens, suddenly everyone will be growing peppers, cooking with, and eating food from South America.”

No matter what the future holds for the industry, the market for local hot sauces remains secure. As McIlhenny Company’s Tabasco brand continues to lead the way in burning the taste of Louisiana into America’s consciousness, high-profile chefs such as Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse keep the spotlight shining on local cuisine.

Meanwhile, on Avery Island, Tabasco’s four production lines can now produce half a million bottles in one eight-hour work day, and the company is utilizing new technology to meet demand. Tabasco previously drained its pepper mash in individual oak barrels before final processing; the company recently modernized its production line with 1,600-gallon oak tanks, connected to computers that monitor the mash’s moisture levels.

Yet even as everything has changed, nothing has changed. There’s a small Tabasco deli on the grounds, where the screen door brings the south Louisiana breeze floating through the woodframe building. And as it has here for the past 135 years, hot sauce occupies the center of every table.

I go down to the store,
but I can’t buy no more.
I don’t have an inch left
in that sagging fridge door.

Too many hot sauce blues,
so many ways to light my fuse.
Scares me to say,
some how some way,
every one of these gonna shine
on my back door some day.

This one’s kinda settled,
this one tastes like metal.
What was this old water-soaked soaked label?
I forget - ugh!

This one I stored,
this one I ignored.
Here’s a sticker saying
“I Support President Ford!”

Too many hot sauce blues,
I got the door open, trying to choose.
Trying to summon my will,
as I run up the bill.
Patting myself on the back
for every little bottle I kill.

Those wings got a coating,
my tacos are floating.
Playing with beans in a deep bowl of sauce,
thinking of boating.

Pour another one dry,
with each dinner I fry.
Take one to the office,
sit in the lunchroom, and cry.

Too many hot sauce blues,
So many troubles I gotta lose.
Folks think I’m insane
as I go through my pain.
But I know deep inside,
I can’t change.

From: Alex Silbajoris

Like millions of Americans, I suffer from a 9-5 job. I work in an office building that has little to no kitchen utilities, so it’s almost inmpossible for me to bring my own lunch everyday. Thus I am forced out into the world of Fast food everyday at 12.
For today’s lunch I decided to venture to Wendy’s and try their chili. That’s where the scary part came in. The chili itself tasted fine, a little watery at best. But they also gave me two gold packets of what they have labeled as “Wendy’s hot Chili Seasoning” - This stuff is awful! Has anyone ever read the ingredients?

Ingredients: Water, corn syrup, salt, distilled vinegar, natural flavors, xanthan gum and caramel color.

No what in that list of ingredients makes it Hot? Absolutely nothing, but I found my mouth burning. Why? Because of all the chemicals they put into it. Anyone else have as bad of an experience with these little gold packets of death?

DINOSAUR BARBECUE
646 W. 131ST ST. (12TH AVE.)
212-694-1777

I DECIDED TO VISIT Dinosaur Barbecue as a matter of research. I was curious to see how the state of barbecue in New York City was faring since last year’s boom, which in New York means two new barbecue restaurants in Manhattan, plus one in Brooklyn. These eateries and Danny Meyer’s annual Barbecue Block Party have given city dwellers access to authentic barbecue, loosely defined as meat cooked for several hours in the dry, indirect heat of a wood-burning pit. If all goes well, the meat will be smoky, the fat fully rendered and the tough cuts deliciously pliant.

The timing on Dinosaur’s part is both smart and fortuitous. Barbecue isn’t as trendy as it was a year ago, but it is more established. The folks at Dinosaur bring their operation from upstate, where they made an enormous splash with their authentic barbecue in blues-bar settings in both Syracuse and Rochester. Here, they are not trailblazers, but their presence has expanded the spectrum of New York barbecue restaurants not only by default, as there are only three other barbecue joints in Manhattan that prepare their meats in a wood-burning pit (Blue Smoke, Daisy May’s and Pearson’s)

Located on the west side of Harlem at a former meat plant across from Fairway Supermarket, Dinosaur Barbecue is a peculiar oasis. On its second Sunday night of being open, it was packed. Something about this busy place in the middle of nowhere made me feel like I was back in suburban Massachusetts, where everyone went to the same hangout for lack of other options. The abundance of space—7500 square feet of it—the manufactured, shopping- mall-quality interior (think Chili’s with hub caps and license plates on the walls and paintings of pigs playing poker), and the enormous portions that glided overhead on the waitress’ trays all contributed to my feelings of déjà vu, but there was something more.

“When you said we were going to Harlem for barbecue,” said my friend Allen, “I thought we were going to a storefront with fluorescent lights and black people.” After a little digging, we discovered that the folks we saw crowding the tables—enough young white guys in baseball caps to fill a college town—were graduates from universities in and around Syracuse and Rochester who, transplanted to New York City, were excited to revisit their old stomping grounds. And compared to the three-hour-long wait one can expect at both upstate Dinosaurs, the wait here (and thanks to the cult following, there is, after only one week of being open, a wait) is negligible.

The “authenticity” of Dinosaur is delivered in high doses the moment you walk in the door. The prefabricated honky-tonk vibe is in full force as the hostess calls for parties on the microphone (”Party of two, come on down!”); management encourages graffiti on the bathroom walls; a waitress who can’t be older than 19 calls her patrons “darlin’”; and g’s are dropped from the “ing” words in the restaurant’s menu. While doing some research on Dinosaur, I came across this quote from Barbara Lang, a restaurant retailing professor at Cornell University in Ithaca. “In Syracuse, and in Rochester, there is that sense of authenticity,” she says of Dinosaur. “It just has that outlaw quality you can’t manufacture.”

I haven’t been to either of the original Dinosaurs, but this quote struck me as ironic, since these are the precise qualities that the New York City location lacks.

The look and feel of Dinosaur’s menu best exemplifies the restaurant’s cloying down-home theme. The marketing-driven copy is both heavy-handed and relentless, but if you can tolerate this kind of talk at dinner—”These meaty muthas are marinated for 24 hours with our unique Action Spice Rub, then slow pit smoked and slathered with our Sensuous Sauce. Ribs so Good You’ll Slap Yo’ Pappy!”—you should be able to overlook the “Drunken Spicy Shameless Shrimp” or the “Dinosaur Menage A Trois (Can Satisfy Two, Maybe Three).” In fairness, the modest vibe wasn’t all put on—we did have to push up our sleeves and bus our own tables, and when Allen complained that his chair was sticking to the floor, our waitress threw him her rag.

The most attractive qualities of dining at Dinosaur revolve around the food, which is good and inexpensive. We studied the lengthy menu over cold beers—a large selection of New York micro brews is on tap—exceedingly sweet tea ($1.50), which my Texan friend said wasn’t sweet enough, and my favorite, the Saranac draft root beer ($3). We sampled a round of appetizers, which ultimately impressed me more for their flavor, delicacy and ingenuity than the main dishes did. The tomatoes in the extra-fancy fried green tomatoes ($8.95), crusted with panko crumbs and flash fried, were a cut above pedestrian. But the shrimp remoulade—the “extra fancy” part—was excellent. Smoked shrimp cut lengthwise in a creamy, pale pink sauce of mayonnaise, mustard and a reduction of barbecue sauce cooked with shrimp shells were smoky, fresh and quite refined.

Sticky, smoky garlic chipotle chicken wings were also a highlight ($4.95 for 6), as was the iceberg wedge salad ($5.95), a white hunk of crisp lettuce dressed up with house smoked bacon, grape tomatoes, spicy pecans and cayenne buttermilk ranch dressing. Peel-and-eat Drunken Spicy Shameless Shrimp (half pound for $9.95) cooked in beer, garlic, cayenne, herbs and spices with habanero cocktail dunking sauce were very good apart from the unappetizing reality of being served cold.

Dinosaur has at its disposal three pits for cooking meats like pulled pork and beef brisket for 14 hours, and chicken and ribs four hours, using hickory and fruit wood as its only fuel. At our table, we tried the ribs, the chicken, the pulled pork and the brisket. All in all, my friends were more impressed than I was (although I must emphasize that the food is good quality). Murmurs were heard over sides of coleslaw and baked beans. My sister enjoyed the ribs, which she says were smoky and juicy, but to me were a bit dry and salty and tasted like pastrami—the other smoked meat.

The brisket passed the muster of Lee, the Texan, but I found it a bit fibrous and dry. I also didn’t detect any real smokiness in the chicken, which, in addition, wasn’t particularly juicy or tender. Their strongest suit was the pork shoulder, which I got in the form of a pulled pork sandwich ($5.95), a simple mound of moist shredded pork, sans sauce, on a white bun. We also sampled the very good pan-fried cat fish ($13.95), but could have done without the sweet potato pecan ($5) and the chocolate layer cake ($5), both of which were generic.

I consulted New York’s winningest competitive barbecuer, Robbie Richter, for his opinion. He’s eaten a lot of ‘cue in his day and has visited Dinosaur twice. “Not any one of these meats is going to knock you off your feet, but all of them are up there,” said Richter. “There might be a barbecue restaurant with better ribs, but the pulled pork would be horrible. There might be a better place for brisket but the other meats would be horrible. Dinosaur’s meats were all up there, and that’s why I liked it. In competition, it’s only when you have all your meats fired up in third place, fourth place, that’s when you become the grand champion.” Richter thinks that right now, Dinosaur is the best barbecue in New York.

By competition standards and by Richter’s, it’s better to be a generalist than a specialist. This is where we differ. I would return to a restaurant for one outstanding dish—the beer-can chicken at Daisy May’s, for instance—but would be unlikely to visit a place if everything were above average but nothing excelled. If I were in the neighborhood, I would consider visiting Dinosaur again, but that has as much to do with limited choice of places to eat near the highway in Harlem as it does with the draw of another meal.

By GREG THOMAS/The Times-Picayune
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — When little-noticed Baumer Foods Inc. bought a Texas condiment company in October, adding a meat flavoring called Hickory Liquid Smoke to its portfolio of hot sauces and other concoctions, the acquisition marked the end of a realignment of the New Orleans company’s products.

Baumer had long been locked in government contracts, providing jams and jellies for World War II combat rations early on and supplying Veterans hospitals in later years.

But in a gutsy move, the family owned company said goodbye to the stable but strangling federal contracts in 1994 and hello to a niche market it would grow to dominate: bottling private-label condiments.

Baumer’s bottles 24 products under its Crystal label, including the table mainstay Crystal Hot Sauce. It also bottles condiments for others, a business that propelled the 81-year-old firm to $54 million in revenue last year.

Besides its hot sauce, Baumer is perhaps best known to locals for its iconic, 60-year-old art-deco billboard that rises from the roof of the New Orleans plant, high enough to be seen by autos screaming by on the elevated Interstate 10.

The aluminum sign has spotlights on a smiling ”jam cooker” stirring a pot of strawberry jam, while neon lights spell out simply, ”Crystal Preserves.”

Baumer, which employs 205 people, is the only remaining large-scale condiment producer in the city since Wm. B. Reily & Co. Inc. moved production of Blue Plate mayonnaise out of state in 2000.

Best known now for its sauces, Baumer’s past included a large vegetable canning operation that employed 100 seasonal workers until about 20 years ago.

But it was jams and jellies packed into half-inch tall, olive-drab green cans included in each box of World War II combat rations that opened up a national market for the small company.

To this day, out-of-state World War II veterans who spy the I-10 sign while passing through often detour to the plant.

The self-invited visitors always tell Baumer employees that Crystal strawberry preserves and other flavors were the only good thing they remember about old-style C-rations, and they wanted to see where they were made.

”We give them some jam,” said Alvin Baumer Jr., president and chief executive. Jams are still part of the company’s product line. The jam comes in squeeze-plastic bottles today, but originally came in 2 1/2-pound wooden jars.

Military contracts for jams and jellies during the war propelled the company from local to national food processor and manufacturer, but those same federal contracts often hamstrung the firm.

”We always had to give them (the federal government) a price for the year” for a specific commodity, ”but they wouldn’t commit to an amount. We didn’t know if it would be 10,000 or 100,000 cases,” Baumer said.

Baumer Foods’ canning operation included shrimp, okra, red and white beans and sweet potatoes, but after Alvin Baumer Jr. became top executive in 1980, canning and military contracts went out the door.

”I just didn’t see any future in it,” Baumer said. Baumer Foods still bottles whole small peppers under the Crystal brand, however.

In 1998, former food broker Terry Hanes came to Baumer Foods as senior vice president and chief operations officer. Baumer credits Hanes for seeing and jumping on the private label market.

Private labels now account for 46 percent of Baumer’s business, Hanes said, or about $24.8 million of the company’s 2003 revenue.

Private label production allowed Baumer to distribute more of its product to the public while avoiding the costly slotting fees retailers charge producers to put products on their shelves. The company that brands and distributes the private-label product pays the slotting fees, Baumer said.

Baumer Foods’ products may be known for their fiery tang, but its genesis in 1923 was the chill of sugary snowballs.

Alvin A. Baumer Sr. wanted to marry Mildred Wirth, but didn’t have a job. So he decided to create one. He borrowed money from his future father-in-law, Charles Wirth, a German immigrant who created a real estate company and brewery. The Wirth building at 1441 Canal St. bears his name.

Baumer bought Miss Fruit Products, a bottler of syrups for snowballs, and peddled the syrups to snowball vendors.

But among the syrup recipes that came with Miss Fruit was one for a hot sauce using the relatively mild but flavorful cayenne pepper.

The sauce was originally named Crystal Louisiana Pure Hot Sauce, which Baumer first hand-ground, aged and bottled in a small industrial building on Tchoupitoulas Street, adding salt and vinegar to produce the table mainstay. The formula was modified by the family a few times over the early years to create its present flavor.

Baumer dropped sugary syrups and moved to its Tulane Avenue location just before World War II. Both Alvin and Mildred Baumer ran the plant, with Alvin focusing on operations and Mildred dealing with hundreds of food brokers across the nation.

In 1952, Alvin Baumer Jr. was adopted at birth by Mildred and Alvin when they were nearly 50. Baumer practically grew up in the plant, and was unofficially working there as early as 12.

”He was working the old-style switchboard, the kind with the plugs, and the government came in and cited Baumer Senior for employing an underage worker,” Hanes said.

At 16, the younger Baumer legitimately began working in the family business, driving a Volkswagen Beetle with no air conditioning to stock area grocery stores with Crystal Hot Sauce.

He finished college and in 1980 became president of the company. His parents, however, continued to work at the plant. The elder Baumer kept that routine until two weeks before he died in 1991 at the age of 88. His wife died at age 85 in 1988. ”She was here just two or three days before she died,” her son said.

Doug Wakefield, Baumer vice president of operations, recently watched as noisy conveyor lines whirled by, bottles being filled with hot sauce and labeled.

He shouted above the clamor that the line runs three shifts a day. It takes about one hour to clear and clean the bottling lines for a different product, such as switching from steak to soy sauce or mustard to barbecue sauce.

Baumer said that the October acquisition of The Figaro Co. of Mesquite, Texas, was a chance to get market presence in the Southwest, where the company’s flavoring products are most popular.

Figaro’s condiments are now being made at the Tulane Avenue plant and will retain their original labels. Along with Figaro came several condiments, the most well-known being Hickory Liquid Smoke.

The Figaro products are being produced without additional employees. Only one Figaro employee, a national sales executive, was retained in the purchase.

Baumer and Hanes said they watch for potential acquisitions, but have none in their sights presently.

Through the years, it’s the cayenne pepper that has been the one constant.

Every August, Baumer treks to northern Mexico to inspect pepper fields. The peppers are trucked to New Mexico where a processor grinds the peppers to mash.

The mash, aged for 60 days, is trucked from New Mexico to New Orleans.

Outdoor tanks hold the mash until it’s time to blend with salt and vinegar and head to bottling lines.

Crystal Hot Sauce is a hit internationally, with Saudi Arabia being the largest single importing country, Baumer said, complete with Arabic labels.

Not only is the company’s past based on pepper, its future will be based on pepper — in more ways than one.

Alvin ”Pepper” Baumer III, 16, is completing boarding school, eyeing college, and determined to one day head the family business, his father said. And he doesn’t mind the nickname.

”The only child will take over the family business from an only child,” Baumer said. ”He’s anxious to finish school and start working here.”

This is an old hunting camp appetizer that brings the taste buds alive with the fire of jalapenos, the comforting taste of bacon and the rich, delicious flavor of duck. Many variations exist, including adding pieces of sliced water chestnuts for a crunch or using bell peppers and onions instead of jalapenos for children. Each side of a breast from big ducks like a mallard can produce four appetizers , while wood ducks and teal will do two or three each.

Ingredients

6-8 duck breasts, cut into 1-inch wide strips, pounded.

1/3-slice bacon for each piece of duck breast.

1 thin slice fresh (not pickled) jalapeno per piece of duck.

1/3-cup merlot or cabernet.

1/3-cup Moore’s Meat Marinade.

Salt and pepper to taste.

Toothpicks for skewers.

Preparation

After tenderizing duck strips, place in sealable plastic bag, add wine, Moore’s, salt and pepper and refrigerate for 30 minutes. Cover toothpicks with water while duck marinates.

Place a piece of bacon on a flat surface. Top with a piece of duck and a slice of pepper and roll it all up. Push a toothpick through the entire roll to hold it together. Continue until all duck pieces have been used.

Cooking

Over hot coals, place the duck rolls on a grill and cook 2 minutes and turn. After another minute, turn again to an uncooked side and continue each minute until bacon is done. DO NOT OVERCOOK. Serve while main course is on the grill. Pieces should be about bite-sized and are best when taken all in one pop.

Leftover pate

On the rare occasion of leftovers, remove the toothpick and place several poppers in a food processor. Add mayonnaise and horseradish to taste and process on high until smooth. Season as you wish and serve as a dip or cracker spread.

Loco Luna Gourmet Foods Launches Lava Gourmet Sauce Line

DALLAS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Dec. 21, 2004–Loco Luna Gourmet Foods has launched its Lava line of gourmet hot sauce. Lava Sauce is the flagship product from Loco Luna Gourmet Foods. Lava Sauce is a small batch, gourmet sauce that is made from only the finest natural ingredients. Lava Sauces are available in mild, medium, hot and extreme heat varieties. That way, everyone from the most deranged hot sauce junkie to your ninety-eight-year-old grandmother can enjoy Lava Sauce’s surprisingly rich and complex character.

“We are extremely passionate about what we do, and we are very proud of what we have created in the Lava Sauce product line,” says Brian Moon, CEO of Loco Luna. Moon adds, “Heat is great, but at Loco Luna, our focus is on great natural flavor. That’s why Lava Sauce is so good even as a marinade or grilling sauce - or by itself as a dipping sauce.”

Loco Luna products will soon be available in leading grocery stores, gift and gourmet shops across the country. Loco Luna Gourmet Foods can also be found on the Web at www.locoluna.net. Not only can you get Lava Sauce there, you just might learn a little about chili peppers while you’re there — and have some fun doing it.

About Loco Luna Gourmet Foods, LLC

Loco Luna Gourmet Foods is a privately held producer of small batch, hand crafted, gourmet sauces. Founded in 2004, Loco Luna is headquartered in McKinney, Texas, with regional sales managers scattered across America. Loco Luna Online can also be found at www.locoluna.net. Sales and distribution inquiries are welcome.

b LANE FILLER

lfiller@leader.net

BEAR CREEK TWP. - Ho ho ho, hot hot hot.

This winter, Ray McKnight makes his living uttering the Santa slogan on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday at Wyoming Valley Mall. The rest of the week, and the rest of the year, the focus is on hot.

McKnight owns Flamerz II, located on Bear Creek Boulevard, or state Route 115. The store sells hundreds of items, 99 percent of them devoted to the pursuit of spicy flavor perfection. McKnight also sells at the Blakeslee Flea Market on weekends.

Hot sauce companies compete over heat, but also over originality of names and labels.

There’s Pocono Mountain Road Kill, the sauce for when you’re “not sure if it’s safe to eat.” There’s Slap Yo Mama, a cajun rub.

There are celebrity sauces, such as Cheech’s Gnarly Garlic, produced by legendary pretend stoner Cheech Marin, and Tonya’s Hot Sauce, which features a picture of a blonde skater and bears the slogan “not for the weak-kneed,” a reference to skater Tonya Harding.

Ron Howard has a sauce, as does Aerosmith’s Joe Perry, and McKnight sells sauces to appeal to local memories, particularly the Super Hot XXX Sauce that will “burn you longer than the Centralia Mine Fire.”.

But McKnight didn’t set out to spend his life selling the stuff.

“I was a riverboat pilot and docking master in Philadelphia,” said McKnight, 46, “but I got hurt and I had to give it up.”

McKnight lives with his wife, Sherri, in Thornhurst, where a home that once served for vacations has become their full-time abode.

The interest in hot stuff started after the accident, when McKnight helped a friend at the original Flamerz on the Wildwood Boardwalk. Later, McKnight opened a kiosk at Wyoming Valley Mall to sell the spicy stuff, then got his store going.

“I like hot food, I like a lot of these sauces, but I don’t like the insanely hot stuff,” McKnight said. “I’m not trying to prove anything.”

That’s good, because the hottest items McKnight sells - extracts - could land anyone who tastes or even touches them in the hospital.

Heat in sauce and chili peppers is measured by the Scoville unit. A jalapeno might rate 5,000 Scovilles, a very hot habanero (also called a Scotch Bonnet) might come in at 300,000 Scovilles.

But McKnight sells an extract called The Source, which rates 10 million Scovilles and is $125 per ounce, could seriously injure or even kill someone who ingested much of it.

The Santa gig started just last year, and McKnight said it’s a challenge.

“I tell the kids Santa can’t put quads or anything with gas engines on the sleigh, and I never promise them a gift,” McKnight said. “I tell them some things fall off the sleigh because the elves don’t tie them down properly.”

So McKnight deals with the public every day, and mostly likes it. One thing you shouldn’t ask him for, though, is “something really hot to play a trick on a friend.”

“I don’t like that,” McKnight said. “I think it’s wrong and dangerous, so when people ask I just say ‘Why don’t you taste it first and see if it does the trick.’ That usually shuts them up, one way or another.”

Lane Filler, a Times Leader staff writer, may be reached at 829-7250.

INTERESTED?

Flamerz II sells hot sauces, rubs, marinated olives and pickles and extracts, as well as T-shirts, jerky makers, walking sticks and knick-knacks. The store opens at noon, Thursday-Sunday, closing at 7 p.m. Thursday and Saturday, 8 p.m. Friday and 4:30 p.m. Sunday. The store is located at 3381 Bear Creek Blvd., and the phone number is 822-2204.