Blair’s 16 Million is featured in today’s edition of the New York Post, with a mention going to HotSauceBlog.com! I’ll post more on the article later when it comes online, I just pick up the print edition while walking the dogs. Hot stuff.

You can get the excerpt here. But you have to login/ register to get the whole article online.

Blair’s 16 Million compares to tabasco the way a bottle rocket compares to Nagasaki - NY Post May 4th, 2005

Blair’s Death Sauces have always been the hottest sauces on the market and the extract line of sauces have become high dollar collector’s items. Blair’s newest reserve is called Blair’s 16 Million Reserve and it’s not really an extract. It’s pure cap, in its powdered form. This hot concoction comes in the traditional Blair’s Reserve bottle, but it is actually a small vial, almost like a salt shaker, that is stuffed inside the bottle and then sealed with white and gold wax.

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Blair warned me of the heat level of this item many times. He talked about having put a small speck, a piece about the size of a salt crystal, on his tongue and apparently his tongue was wounded for a few days afterward. So when I managed to get ahold of a bottle before anyone else, I knew I had to try it out for myself. I made sure to have plenty of protective gloves on hand before even handling the container and I also made sure to take out my contacts and put my glasses on. Don’t want to lose an eye to this stuff

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The bottle is tiny - extremely tiny. Here’s a picture of the bottle compared to a 6 A.M. bottle.

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The bottles are reverse threaded so that none of the crystals fall out when you unscrew the top. Inside there is a blue stopper that looks a lot like a salt shaker. The speck that you see towards the top right of the image below is a capsaicin particle from the shaker.

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Here’s a slighty better view of the bottle - You can see the threading and the capsaicin crystal a little better.

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After racking my brain on how I could try this stuff without seriously injurying myself, I decided to mix one crystal into tomato soup. I took a can of standard condensed tomato soup, mixed with one can of water and brought it to a boil. The capsaicin crystal will not mix like any of the other Blair’s A.M. line, which makes perfect sense, since it’s a dry crystal and not an oil based extract. So the only way to liquify this stuff is to heat it up. So using tweezers and gloves, I picked up the tiny crystal.

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And into the pot of soup it goes.

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It’s important to note that the heat will not distribute throughout the soup right away, you need to continue to heat it up, preferably while stirring with a disposable spoon. After about 5 mintues of boiling, my soup was ready to go. First bite was not that hot, so I had the wife take a bite. She threatened divorce once she could speak again, so I tried it again. Then it was hot! So I took a few more bites and had to toss the rest of the pot away - it was too frickin’ hot! And it’s very rare for me to say something is too hot. But this is the hottest hot sauce product known to man. You can buy Blair’s 16 Million Reserve from Sweat ‘N Spice if you think you’re up to the challenge.

But then again, the bottle looks so spiffy, you probably won’t be able to bring yourself to open it. Don’t worry, your taste buds are already thanking you…

Tabasco pepper sauce was named after the Tabasco River in southern Mexico by creator Edmund McIlhenny because he liked the sound of the word.

Tabasco pepper sauce is made from a variety of pepper called Capsicum frutescens, known for centuries in Latin America and first recorded in 1493 by Dr. Chauca, the physician on Columbus’s voyage.

Capsicum peppers contain an alkaloid called capsaicin, a spicy compound found in no other plant.

In 1912, pharmacologist Wilbur Scoville devised an organoleptic test to rate the hotness of peppers. The mildest bell peppers rate zero; habaneras peppers score 200,000 to 300,000 units. Tabasco pepper sauce scores between 9,000 to 12,000 units on the Scoville scale.

Tabasco pepper sauce is still made much the way Edmund McIlhenny first developed the sauce. Ripe peppers are harvested, crushed, mixed with Avery Island salt, and aged in white oak barrels for up to three years. The peppers are then drained, blended with strong, all-natural vinegar, stirred for several weeks, strained, bottled, and shipped.

Harvard University’s Hasty Pudding Club produced Burlesque Opera of Tabasco in 1893 with the approval of Edmund McIlhenny’s son, John Avery McIlhenny, who bought the rights to the production and had it staged in New York City.

In 1898, Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener’s troops brought Tabasco pepper sauce on their invasion of Khartoum in the Sudan.

In the 1920s, Fernand Petiot, an American working at Harry’s Bar in Paris, created the Bloody Mary. Tabasco pepper sauce was added to the recipe in the 1930s at the King Cole Bar in New York’s St. Regis Hotel.

In 1932, when the British government began an isolationist “Buy British” campaign, Parliament banned the purchase of Tabasco pepper sauce, popular in England since 1868 and available in the House of Commons dining rooms. The resulting protest from members of Parliament was dubbed “The Tabasco Tempest,” and inevitably Tabasco pepper sauce returned to parliamentary tables. To this day Queen Elizabeth uses Tabasco pepper sauce on her lobster cocktail.

During the Vietnam war, the McIlhenny Company sent thousands of copies of the Charley Ration Cookbook, filled with recipes for spicing up C-rations with Tabasco pepper sauce, wrapped around two-ounce bottles of Tabasco pepper sauce in waterproof canisters.

President George Bush is a Tabasco pepper sauce devotee, sprinkling the pepper sauce on tuna fish sandwiches, eggs, and fried pork rinds. After receiving the Republican nomination for President in 1988, Bush handed out personalized bottles of Tabasco pepper sauce as presents for members of his family who dined with him at Arnaud’s Restaurant in New Orleans. “I love hot sauce,” Bush told Time magazine in 1992, “I splash Tabasco all over.”

During Operation Desert Storm, a miniature bottle of Tabasco pepper sauce was included in one out of every three ration kits sent to troops in the Gulf. The United States military now packs Tabasco pepper sauce in every ration kit. ( I saved over a hundred of these tiny bottles from my Navy days. Gotta love MRE’s)

Over 100,000 people visit Avery Island each year to see Tabasco pepper sauce being made, visit the Tabasco Country Store, and descend into the island’s salt mines. Each visitor receives a miniature bottle of Tabasco pepper sauce and a handful of recipes.

The McIlhenny Company sells more than 100 million bottles of Tabasco pepper sauce a year.

Tabasco pepper sauce bottles are labeled in fifteen languages and shipped to more than a hundred countries.

Americans use more Tabasco pepper sauce than any other nation, followed by the Japanese who sprinkle it on pizza and spaghetti.

The McIlhenny Company produced all its peppers on Avery Island until the late 1960s. Now more than 90 percent of the pepper crop is grown and harvested under the company’s direct supervision in Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, and Ecuador.

Fun BBQ facts:

Cooking on the good ol’ “Q” has become the number one summertime leisure activity among families with one in three households owning a grill.

Charcoal is still considered to be the favourite BBQ fuel with many grills still fuelled in the old school fashion. However, gas is quickly gaining in favour.

BBQ in no longer a male dominated activity. While 51% of males cha-cha with the charcoal 49% of women flamenco with the flames.

Smoking or indirect heat BBQ has quickly been building in popularity with many BBQs coming with chip containers for smoking built right in.

There are over 20,000 BBQ competitions in North America every year!

Ten per cent of households claim to grill year round. Now in January, that’s dedication!