After fifteen years on a quiet side street, we just relocated our hot sauce shop to a new place which has in residence not one but two ghosts. At least that's what we were told as we transported our hundreds (or thousands) of bottles of hot sauce into our new spectered home, a sixty year old house on Main Street in Old Town Spring, Texas. We had one visitation the first week of our move, so what better time than now to share a little knowledge about our favorite variety of hot sauces - the spirited hot sauces made with the Ghost pepper.
Ghost pepper sauce is naturally hot, as it is formed with one of the hottest peppers in the world, the Jolokia pepper from north India and Bangladesh. The tale I have heard is if the pepper is grown on the north side of the Brahmaputra River it is branded the Bhut Jolokia, and if grown on the south side of the river, the same pepper is branded as the Naga Jolokia. Or is it the other way around? No matter. Whether you are dashing some Bhut Jolokia sauce on your dish, or sprinkle a sauce made with the Naga Jolokia sibling of the pepper, what matters is that till fairly recently the Ghost pepper was officially considered the hottest pepper known to man. With a Scoville rating higher than 1,000,000 units, the Ghost pepper made a great ingredient for the really hot, naturally hot, sauces.
If your passion is hot sauces, you know there is an entire genre of sauces made with chile extract. These sauces are hot but not naturally so, and as far as I am concerned these extract sauces are largely about heat but with close to zero attention given to the flavor. The Ghost pepper sauces, though, are the real McCoy, hot and bold with flavor. Of the fifteen or twenty Ghost pepper hot sauce brands we recommend, I have never tasted a bad one yet. To put the heat level into a quantifiable measure, a dash of Tabasco sauce packs a modest number of 2500 - 5,000 Scovile heat units. Put a sprinkle of Ghost pepper sauce on your tongue, and your getting a cool 1,000,000 Scoville heat units.
But now there are competitors on the pepper playing field, aiming to overthrow the Ghost pepper sauce from its place on the "hottest hot sauce" throne.
About the time the hot sauce makers embraced the Ghost pepper as the latest, greatest, hottest pepper for turning into a sauce, here comes the Naga Viper pepper that has been rated about 1,300,000 Scoville units.
And before we could even get our hands on any Naga Viper sauce, the realm of pepper lovers learns about an even newer pepper that, again, professes to be the hottest pepper on the planet, the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, with a Scoville rating of over 1,400,000.
Anything at this level of Scoville rating, naturally, is nuclear, so numbers become immaterial at this point.
I suppose it's great to be the best at something. In the world of peppers, growers would clearly translate the status of "best" pepper to being the "hottest" pepper. It is a highly coveted thing. For me, though, I'm content to just enjoy the Ghost pepper sauces which fit the bill for "fiery and full-of-flavor" wonderfully, both the Bhut Jolokia sauce version or the Naga Jolokia version, whichever side of the Brahmaputra River you find to be your favorite. In their local India, the Ghost peppers are smeared on fences to keep wild elephants away. In my house, Ghost pepper hot sauce is smeared on my sandwich, or used to make just about anything taste better.
Recently a patron came into the shop carrying a baggie containing one or two Ghost peppers that he grew in his garden. I haven't screwed up the courage to eat one yet but they sure are pretty.
Ghost pepper sauce is naturally hot, as it is formed with one of the hottest peppers in the world, the Jolokia pepper from north India and Bangladesh. The tale I have heard is if the pepper is grown on the north side of the Brahmaputra River it is branded the Bhut Jolokia, and if grown on the south side of the river, the same pepper is branded as the Naga Jolokia. Or is it the other way around? No matter. Whether you are dashing some Bhut Jolokia sauce on your dish, or sprinkle a sauce made with the Naga Jolokia sibling of the pepper, what matters is that till fairly recently the Ghost pepper was officially considered the hottest pepper known to man. With a Scoville rating higher than 1,000,000 units, the Ghost pepper made a great ingredient for the really hot, naturally hot, sauces.
If your passion is hot sauces, you know there is an entire genre of sauces made with chile extract. These sauces are hot but not naturally so, and as far as I am concerned these extract sauces are largely about heat but with close to zero attention given to the flavor. The Ghost pepper sauces, though, are the real McCoy, hot and bold with flavor. Of the fifteen or twenty Ghost pepper hot sauce brands we recommend, I have never tasted a bad one yet. To put the heat level into a quantifiable measure, a dash of Tabasco sauce packs a modest number of 2500 - 5,000 Scovile heat units. Put a sprinkle of Ghost pepper sauce on your tongue, and your getting a cool 1,000,000 Scoville heat units.
But now there are competitors on the pepper playing field, aiming to overthrow the Ghost pepper sauce from its place on the "hottest hot sauce" throne.
About the time the hot sauce makers embraced the Ghost pepper as the latest, greatest, hottest pepper for turning into a sauce, here comes the Naga Viper pepper that has been rated about 1,300,000 Scoville units.
And before we could even get our hands on any Naga Viper sauce, the realm of pepper lovers learns about an even newer pepper that, again, professes to be the hottest pepper on the planet, the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, with a Scoville rating of over 1,400,000.
Anything at this level of Scoville rating, naturally, is nuclear, so numbers become immaterial at this point.
I suppose it's great to be the best at something. In the world of peppers, growers would clearly translate the status of "best" pepper to being the "hottest" pepper. It is a highly coveted thing. For me, though, I'm content to just enjoy the Ghost pepper sauces which fit the bill for "fiery and full-of-flavor" wonderfully, both the Bhut Jolokia sauce version or the Naga Jolokia version, whichever side of the Brahmaputra River you find to be your favorite. In their local India, the Ghost peppers are smeared on fences to keep wild elephants away. In my house, Ghost pepper hot sauce is smeared on my sandwich, or used to make just about anything taste better.
Recently a patron came into the shop carrying a baggie containing one or two Ghost peppers that he grew in his garden. I haven't screwed up the courage to eat one yet but they sure are pretty.
About the Author:
Jay Potter, here sharing information about Ghost pepper sauce, is the owner of Simply Texas Gourmet Foods. Along with eating and selling hot sauces, he loves to educate readers about the world of hot sauces, including Ghost pepper hot sauce.
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