After receiving my bottle of Blair’s LeMillion Reserve #341 in the mail, I simply had to try Blair’s Sudden Death Sauce, which was free with purchase.

I enjoy extract sauces. They are the easiest way to get the old style burn that I first loved about hot sauces, before I had any heat tolerance built up or sense of what flavors I liked.

But most extract sauces on the market simply don’t taste very good. They add heat alright, but all you can taste is extract.

My usual extract sauce of choice, Mad Dog 357, is a good example. Great for heat, tolerable for taste. But I usually use it in small enough quantities that the taste doesn’t dominate the food.

Ingredients: Red Habanero Pods, Cayenne Chilies, White Vinegar, Soybean Oil, Pure Pepper Resin, Clover Honey, Key Lime Juice, Siberian Ginseng, Spices. Contains absolutely no preservatives or artificial ingredients.

On First Taste
I tried a drop of Blair’s Sudden Death on a cracker. The consistency is thick, and the pour is very slow. Also of note, the bottle didn’t have the ring of black crap at the top like my other extract sauces get. And the sauce looked fresher than most extracts, with chunks and bits floating around. I took my first taste rather gingerly, not sure of the heat level of this sauce. A second passed, then yup, it pretty much tasted like extract. The heat followed quickly, which was ample but tolerable. The burn lasted for about 5 minutes, and I didn’t get much flavor. But with my tongue appropriately “warmed up”, I set off to see if Blair has packed any subtle flavors in his sauce to be discovered.

The second taste I took surprised me. The extract taste was less pronounced than I expected. Rolling it around in my mouth was much more pleasant than my previous experience; it brought out other subtle flavors I didn’t expect. A citrusy lime is in the forefront, and a tinge of honey sweetness is detectable. The extract taste is there the whole way, but it isn’t harsh or chemical tasting. The cayenne flavor is stronger than the habanero flavor, which is a fun change of pace for a sauce this hot.

On Food
What better use for such a burner than in a Bloody Mary on a Sunday afternoon watching football? I mixed up my normal concoction of Bombay Sapphire Gin, Major Peter’s Bloody Mary Mix, and a few drops or Worcestershire. I added 4 drops of Blair’s Sudden Death, the same amount I usually add of MD357, and garnished with a dill pickle and 3 jalapeno and garlic stuffed olives.

The burn was noticeable, but it wasn’t as hot as I expected. No extract flavor came through to the drink, but it did add noticeable lime notes under the heat.

I added two more very generous splashes of Blair’s Sudden Death to bring the heat up to what I expected. And that amount sure kicked up the heat to a wonderfully blazing, rolling burn on each sip. And, despite the large amount used, no extract flavor came through. It tasted exactly like a stock Bloody Mary, maybe with a squeeze of lime added - but with terrific heat. I think I’ve found a new stock sauce for Football Season!

Conclusion:
Blair’s Sudden Death is a very good extract sauce, by my reckoning. In small doses it add exceptional heat while slightly enhancing flavor. It stands above many other extract sauces in that it tastes good on it’s own.

In the large scale of things, Blair’s Sudden Death isn’t a major improvement over my other extract sauces. Most of the time I use them in such small quantities that they don’t dominate the flavor of my food, so I really won’t notice the better taste in common usage. But that being said, Blair’s Sudden Death does taste better than just about any other extract sauce I’ve tried, and that’s worth recognizing.

Overall Rating: 8.4 out of 10.0

Danny Cash Trivia Contest
Question #3

Name the hot sauce that is prominently placed on Joey’s stove (Friends) in season 10

or for those that aren’t into Friends

What hot sauce does Tom Cruise have from his kitchen in War of the Worlds?

Rules:
1. Post a comment with your answer - Leave your correct email address as well.
2. First correct answer will recieve the gift tin, shipped from Danny Cash’s location in Colorado.
3. HSB reviewers are not eligible.
4. You may only win once, but feel free to answer as many questions as you can.
5. Questions will be posted each month at random.
6. Winners will be contacted by the HSB for delivery information.
7. Winning comments will be held until the winner is announced (end of day)

Prize
Winners will recieve (1) FireEaters Gift Tin. Each gift tin includes: 1 bottle of Danny Cash’s Bottled Up Anger, 1 bottle of Danny Cash’s Radical Heat, 1 bottle of Danny Cash Stays Cool, and 1 jar of Danny Cash’s Flaming Habanero Mustard.

“A slow delicious punch in the face.” - Joel Brown

We have a winner!
Congrats to Scott for coming up with the correct answer: Mad Cat Hot Sauce

In The War of the Worlds, Tom Cruise grabs a bottle of Habanero Tabasco.

Previous Trivia Questions:
DC Hot Trivia Question #1
DC Hot Trivia Question #2

Not long ago Google unveiled it’s free website analytics package, aptly titled Google Analytics. It’s been all over the internet news wire, so it was no real surprise when new signups were shut down due to the sheer volume of accounts being setup. I was fortunate enough to sign up the HSB on day 1 and for the past 2 weeks I’ve been gathering all sorts of interesting data. And I’m not even using it to its full potential.

You see, if I was trusting enough to allow Google access to the SNS ecom. data, I could go as far as to track ROI by ad type, determine overall keyword conversion and all other sorts of bells and whistles. But for now I’m content with just using the basics of the tool for HSB. After all this blog does no paid advertising and does not sell anything (although we do push the sauce).

So now you know all about what I don’t do with Google Analytics, let’s get into what I am doing with it. Or at least what I’m finding out from it.

Daily Visitors & Page Views

You can see from the graph above that HSB receives 2,000 unique visitors (on average) a day. In the image below, you can see that 21% of those visitors are returnees & 78% are newbs. That means at least 400 people return to HotSauceBlog.com on a daily basis .From the visitor recency graph (not pictured) you can see how many days between each return visit. Most returns happen on the same or next day, but there is also a spike on the recency graph 14 days out. So that means the visitors to HSB just keep coming back!

Geo Map Overlay
Alright, so now we know that HSB has lots of new visitors and repeat visitors, but where are all these people coming from?

Geo Map Overlay
The geo map overlay may just be my favorite tool of all, not because it’s particularly useful, but it’s just fun to see where all the visitors are coming from. In the graph above, you can see that the HSB is quite popular with the European crowd, but I certainly didn’t expect to see any visits from Africa, China & the Soviet Union.

Keyword Referrers
Now here’s where we get down to the nitty gritty of website traffic. I mentioned before that the HSB does not do any paid advertising, so how are people finding the blog? Good question.

The top referrer is of course Google, but it’s followed closely by direct visits (those typing in HotSauceBlog.com or bookmarks) then Yahoo!, MSN & AOL. Out of the top 10 referrering sources, the top 10 weirdest search terms used to find the HSB are:

• Rachel ray
• Hot wife blog
• Rachel ray hot
• chunky peanut cookies
• hot chick blog
• 18 and hot
• hot burning greetings
• wasabi seeds
• fake crab stomach problems (food poisoning anyone?)
• hot sauce diet

There are some weird people out there and I made sure to only post the G-rated terms!

So what the heck is the point of this post? Well, I was recently asked about the traffic levels for the blog & I also wanted to make sure that all the viewers (both makers & sellers) are aware of this exceptional free stats package. Hell, it’s free - give it a whirl. It’s also super easy to install.

What is too hot??? When you can’t taste the flavor of your food? When you can’t tell what type of food you are eating? When all you know is that your mouth is on fire, your tongue is burning and you can’t wait to grab that glass of milk? Where do we draw the line?

For some of us, the phrase “too hot” begins when we can no longer tell what we are eating. All we know is that our foreheads are dripping with sweat and our tongue is numb. Do we remember what we have eaten? A piece of chicken, a juicy portion of meat, or a spoonful of chili? It doesn’t matter- whatever we have consumed is too hot. The burning sensation has gradually evolved- overcoming our senses and interfering with rational thought. We don’t care what we have eaten - we simply don’t want to take another bite.

For others, the idea that our food is too hot does not begin until the portion is almost finished. Our mouths are slowly beginning to reject the last few bites of food as our bodies are seemingly catching on fire. Each bite adds to the intense inferno building within our bellies, yet we remain determined to consume our meal, however incendiary it might be. To give up when we are so close to the finish line is ludicrous, and we are left with a certain competitive streak- the meal may have been too hot, but we have come this far and by God we are going to finish it!

And for those select few who consider incendiary eating a hobby and an art, nothing can ever be too hot. These brave souls will never admit that anything is too hot. Each fiery meal is a flavorful banquet; each spicy dish is a savory treat. A meal prepared from the fiery flames of Hell would elicit only a raised eyebrow or slight nod from these fanatical chileheads. These die-hard aficionados search the world for the spiciest dish, the portion of food that is too hot to handle. They are contestants in an unrivaled game of strength - to back away from a meal that is too hot is a symbol of defeat. After all those claims of bravado- Nothing can ever be too hot!- and after all those preliminary years of preparation consuming mild flavored dishes, these lunatics would rather catch on fire than declare their meal too hot.

Most of the normal population has a heat level that can be reached without any hot sauce or pepper extract addition. I, for one, cry uncle when I am forced to eat a restaurant dish labeled hot or spicy. For me, I draw the line when I can no longer tell what I am eating and when the sweat begins to drip into my expensive meal. But these chileheads demand respect. Whether they are consuming their meal to piss me off (as my beloved husband usually does), to prove a point, or to reinforce their status as a chilehead, these lunatics will never back down and never accept defeat. Expect to see them burst into flames before admitting that their meal is too hot.

If you are in the Manhattan area today, pick up a copy of the NY Post. Blair & I were asked to tour around the city and sample what have been deemed some of the ‘hottest’ dishes they could find. You can see in the 2 page article that we had a good time touring around, although the dishes were not nearly hot enough - with the exception of the extract curry from Brick Lane Curry House.

The article is also available online. NY Post

Points of Reference:
- Original Review of Caliente Lager
- Brick Lane Curry House
- Blair’s Website: Extreme Food.com
- Nick’s Website: Sweat ‘N Spice Hot Sauces

As reported previously, Blair has long been working on a complete re-vamp of his Q Heat line. Each hot sauce will be packaged in a larger (8.44 fl oz vs. 6.7 fl oz) rounded flask, featuring a swanky label design and a new recipe.

Chipotle Slam has always been my favorite of the four so at the chance to taste the new recipe, I happily cracked open the new one.

When you first open the bottle your nose will be greeted with a full-bodied smokey smell, almost like a BBQ sauce. The new recipe is noticeably thicker in consistency then the original Chipotle Slam - which means it will stick better to your favorite foods.

Take Note: The new Blair Q heats will feature a best before date - from which you can figure out the born on date (subtract 2 years). This puppy was whelped just over a week ago - that’s some fresh sauce (hell, I had it since it was just 5 days old).

The taste of this ‘exotic’ hot sauce is hard to describe, not because it’s a bad tasting sauce but because it tastes so good. I could literally drink this straight out of the bottle if I wasn’t thinking about what food to put it on next.

To steal a line from a friend “I think my tongue just orgasmed!”

Serisouly, this sauce is that good. The heat hits your tongue first (thanks to the habaneros) and then the chipotles follow and hit you with the full bodied smokey taste.

Compare the bottles side by side and it’s easy to see how many changes these sauces have undergone. Blair has gone from high-end hot sauce to high-end gourmet sauce. I would expect these new concoctions to be winning a few awards in the future.

Ingredient Comparison:
Previous Ingredient List: Red and orange habaneros, vinegar, fresh cayenne, smashed garlic, chipotle, lime juice, cilantro, fresh herbs and spices

New Ingredient List: Habanero chiles, purified water, lime juice, carrots, white vinegar, red jalapeno chilies, chipotle chilies (smoked jalapenos), fresh garlic, salt, tomato paste, cilantro, cayenne chilies, cane sugar, paprika, onion powder, spices and vitamin c.

The ingredient lists are basically the same, but you can see that a lot more work has gone into the new recipe (and a lot more peppers).

Try this sauce on anything you can find that’s not nailed down. I’ve gone through 1/2 the bottle by just tasting it straight and the other half is slowly deteriorating as each meal passes.

The new Chipotle Slam’s will be available on or before December 5th, so you have some time to think about your stocking stuffer list.

Ingredients: Cayenne, scotch bonnet and thai peppers with vinegar, spices and salt.

Purgatory Out of Body Experience is NOT a very hot sauce. I think my husband could eat it! It is very sort of Tex Mex in flavour. Excellent to top pizza, fajitas, tacos. I liked it on a plain tortilla chip but it is too mild for flavoured chips.

The initial smell is a mix of cumin and tomato sauce…. No vinegar, not much pepper. The taste is the same… a small hit of heat, with a strong cumin flavour. The ingredients list just mentions cayenne, scotch bonnet, and Thai peppers, pureed with vinegar and spices and salt. It’s not overly salty…. or overly hot. The Scotch Bonnets must be minimal. But it is very tasty ….

I loved it on pizza. Definitely not for the heat seekers, but a nice sauce that really adds a lot of flavour on food, and includes a recipe for wings on the side, with an offer to write for more recipes.

I would buy it again.

Working with websites on a daily basis is somewhat frustrating for me. You see, as a niche gourmet myself I tend to surf a lot of the hot sauce websites on the net and am quite shocked at the number of bad mistakes (either design or code wise) that exist, even within a select handful of websites. If you are in this list, consider it free advice. I thought about writing this article without examples so as not to offend anyone, but then that wouldn’t really drive home the point, now would it? If I can spot these mistakes then so can your customers.

1. Sound - Do not use sound effects/catchy tunes that play when a visitor hits your homepage (or any page for that matter). 80% of the time the noise and or jingle is going to scare away your customers before they even get a chance to look at your products. Plus it’s just annoying. There is no need to tell users what website they are on.

2. Cross Browser Verification - With over 100 million downloads, FireFox is the 2nd most popular web browser in the world. (Internet Explorer is #1 of course.) You’ll find the more internet savvy your customers are, the greater chances of them being a FireFox user. Have you ever stop to cross-check your site in FireFox? You should - with each and every page you develop. CSS errors are quite common but fortunately are also quite easy to fix.

3. 404 Pages & Incomplete Pages - Never ever use one of those annoying construction zone .gifs - Simply don’t put the page up and don’t link to it until it’s ready to be seen by the world.

4. Making it too hard to buy - If you’re a niche gourmet looking to make it big and get your own following of customers, you need to make it easy for them to buy your products. Do not make a customer call or email for your product pricing and/or ordering information. Yes, some devout few will hunt you down in the middle of Antarctica for another hook up but 95% of visitors will leave your site and find a site that’s willing to let them checkout online. PayPal works well for folks with only a few products and lower sales volume.

5. Bad Images / Copying Images - Yes it’s easy to right click and copy images, but it’s also easier then ever to take good digital photos. Do not copy photos from other sites - especially images with copyright imprints on them. Don’t know how to take good product photos? Tough. Learn to or pay someone to take them - copying images will only get you in trouble down the road. Owners of copyrighted photos can go as far to reach out to your ISP or hosting provider and shut your site down completely. And if you are caught using copyrighted images on eBay your listings can be pulled down through the use of eBay’s Vero Program.

If you have bought the ‘rights’ to a set of photos you may find you are in for an unpleasant surprise. Half of the time permission has not been granted for the use of those photos and if the copyright owner spots you using them, you will have to take them down, no matter what you paid. It’s your responsibility to investigate the source of the photos before purchasing, otherwise you may face legal action down the road.

6. Spam Tactics
a. Duplicate Domains - Tsk, tsk - Publishing your site on two different domains is never a good idea. Having duplicate sites can cause one or all of your sites to be banned in one or all of the major search engines, plus you wind up confusing your online customers.
b. Spamming Blogs - Blogs are more popular then ever, with something like 10 blogs being created every minute (maybe much more). But as nice as blogs can be for reviews and general knowledge share, it is never wise to traipse around online, leaving ‘please come to my site and buy something’ comments everywhere. It’s perfectly okay to leave comments on blogs with your company information, provided you actually have something to say that’s worth a damn. But did you know most blogs now use the no-follow tags in the comments section due to the abuse spammers have put them through? Chances are, all the begging for visits will just be a waste of your time.
c. Hidden Text - Just don’t do it. Long gone are the days of white on white paragraphs with 100’s of keywords. Below the fold is very common and easy for customers to spot. And if your customers can see it, then your competitors can see it which means they can also report it. And if the spam report is actually read, then one morning you will wake up, check your sites rankings and find nothing, not even a trace of your website within the search engine databases. Google can be a mean beast that way.

7. Animated Gifs - Along the same lines as those dreadful ‘Under Construction’ .gifs with flashing lights, any animated gif is just a bad idea.

8. Page Titles & Meta Tags - Hello people, if you have a website, please o please make sure your title tags and meta tags describe your company. No, you don’t have to optimize them for search engines but you do need to optimize them for your visitors. The title tags are the links that appear in the search engines and the meta description is often the page description (this varies from engine to engine). My ‘favorites’ are those that completely miss this step in the website building process and thus the title on their company website is ‘Title’

9. Too Much Flash / Flash Intros - Flash is bad for search engines. Flash may be very pretty and come with all sorts of bells and whistles for your customers to play with, but really, if your site is 100% flash - then your customers are going to have a pretty hard time finding you.

10. Not Having a Website? - This is a no brainier. If you have a sauce or a product on the market, or are even thinking about putting one out there, buy yourself a domain name. At least setup a one page blurb about your company with working contact information. Also, setup a company email. I loathe seeing company emails being sent from Yahoo or Hotmail accounts (and now Gmail). Think of it this way, if your domain is in your email address, that’s just another way to promote your site.

11. Long / Hard to understand domain names - Sweat ‘N Spice certainly falls victim to this one. When telling someone to go to Sweat ‘N Spice .com they typically reply ‘Sweat AND Spice .com’? So to prevent any misdirected customers, I simply purchased the domain SweatANDSpice.com and set up a redirect on it so that it automatically directs visitors and spiders to the SweatNSpice.com domain. Problem solved. And since the redirect is a 301 (permanently moved), there are no duplicate domain penalties to be had.

12. Old stuff. When your site is so out dated that visitors can no longer remember the last time they saw a different product on the home page, it’s definitely time to sit down and do some work. If your customers don’t feel that you’re up to date and constantly updating the product lines and associated items, then they will find another store to buy from.

13. Copying Anything Else - Need I say more? Hell, if your going to copy something so blatantly, at least do it with a bit of style (Copy of MoHotta). Sometimes the copycat websites are legitimate spawn of the original, but then that brings us right back to the duplicate content penalties & confusing your customers.

There are plently more to list, that’s for sure. If I’ve missed one of your ‘favorite’ offenders, please drop a note below - this may render a follow up article…

20 Pepper Cranberry Jam

Ingredients: Sugar, cranberries, chile pepper blend, water, pectin, vinegar, citric acid, butter (less than 1% as antifoam).

Alright, so I took a shortcut for Thanksgiving dinner… I skipped the cranberries. With just a small group eating here and knowing that I would be cooking in a kitchen the size of a cubical, I took them off of my must cook list earlier in the week. But as luck would have it, a sample of 20 Pepper Cranberry Jam landed on my doorstop the day before the turkey fiesta.

I was already familiar with Red Lion’s 20 Pepper Hot Sauce, so I knew I could expect at least a bit of heat out of this jam. The smell of unidentified chile peppers is masked with the sweetness of the cranberries. My nose almost stared drooling.

Initial Taste: Strong tart cranberry flavor followed by the heat of the peppers. The heat is quite minimal, not even enough for the nose water works to start up, but the heat that there is works nicely with the cranberries. The jam is interspersed with bit of fruit and peppers, giving the jam a nice thick texture without the large chunks.

Final Verdict:
This stuff was made for the turkey leftovers of chileheads across the world. I slathered the jam on the turkey in lieu of the typical cranberry sauce and couldn’t have been happier. I was so full my back teeth were floating, but I was already thinking about making myself up a turkey sandwich with a nice layer of this 20 Pepper Cranberry Jam. Seriously, great stuff for the holidays!

Red Lion Spicy Foods Company was established in 1998 by Chip Welsh. Chip had been growing chiles in his home garden in Red Lion, PA for several years, using the crop to produce a wide variety of fresh, home-made chile products. His salsa was a hit with friends and neighbors, and the hobby soon turned into a small business.
Red Lion Spicy Foods
420 W. Broadway Red Lion, PA 17356
Phone - 717-244-0227 or 610-373-8378
Fax - 717-244-7348

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Later today all of this will be turned into a beautiful meal. Until then, enjoy my habanero pepper poppers recipe.

Dinner!

There you have it, Thanksgiving dinner at our house. This dinner was fantastic from start to finish. I started cooking around 10am and we ate dinner at 430. More details and recipes to follow, once I digest everything.