Okay, once a week the wife has night class, which means I get the house to myself. Perfect time to do something stupid. The other night I decided to do a taste test of Blair’s 3 A.M. – Earlier this week a customer wrote me and asked if any physical harm would occur if he used a toothpick to put Blair’s 3 A.M. directly on his tongue. I told him no, not when used properly, which is true – but the more I got to thinking about it, the more I wondered what would happen. Could hot sauce physically harm me? It just so happened that I had a bottle of 3 A.M. that was cracked and leaking, so I decided it would be perfect for me to try.
For those of you that are unaware of the heat level of 3 A.M. it’s #7 on Sweat ‘N Spice’s list of the
hottest hot sauces in the world. That’s right 1,500,000 ~ 2,000,000 Scoville units of heat. Tabasco has only 2,500 so that means Blair’s 3 A.M has 800 times the heat as Tabasco. Mmmmmm…..this might hurt.
When opening a bottle of Blair’s 3 A.M. it’s important to be prepared. Clean the area you are going to be working on and use gloves! I cannot stress this enough, the extract will get all over your hands, even if your not working with a leaking bottle. Wear gloves! You’ll thank me later.
Now that we’ve opened the bottle, here’s a comparison between an unopened bottle, so that you can see what they look like. Doesn’t look to scary, but I’m sure my nose hairs sponatenously combusted once I got the bottle open.
To try the sauce, I settled on a few pieces of Vermont cheddar and a toothpick. When trying a new hot sauce for the first time, I suggest using cheese or some other dairy product as your medium, that way if you’ve overestimated your heat tolerance, at least some of the pain will be displaced.
Here goes nothing!
On to the cheese went the extract and here goes nothing.
I never knew how hard it is to hold a piece of cheese on my tongue while trying to take a picture. And trying to keep the Blair’s 3 A.M. away from my lips.
I’m not going to say it wasn’t hot, because it is hot, very hot. But because I tasted it with cheese and didn’t get any on my lips, the burning sensation lasted only about 20 minutes and it wasn’t bad at all. I liked it of course. I finished off the rest of the cheese, each with a drop of the 3 A.M – In moderation I’ve found this extract sauce to be very enjoyable. I tasted only the flavor of the cheese and not the extract – just heat. Very nice. I think I might make some chili this weekend and use the leftovers in that. We’ll see how that heats things up.
Would you take this shot?
Blair’s 3 A.M. is the real deal – very thick and potent – not a sauce to be taken lightly. Enjoy!
