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I like things hot. This past year, I’ve moved from cooking with jalapeño peppers to cooking with habanero peppers, which are 50 to 100 times as hot as jalapeños, to straight-up eating habaneros. (OK, only once. It was quite an adventure.) I’ve also become a fan of hot sauces, not only for taste but also for efficiency. Splashing on hot sauce is much faster than chopping up dozens of habaneros, which I have done without gloves. Once the capsaicin (the ingredient that makes peppers hot) was so strong that my hands started tingling.
The most efficient hot sauce I’ve found so far is Blair’s Death Sauce, simply because it’s the hottest. (Blair has to wear a protective suit while concocting his sauces.) Literally one drop is all one needs. (Though like any inveterate chili head, I have built up a tolerance and need several drops now to do the job.) Invisible Oranges writer Jess Blumensheid and reader bacon and blastbeats visited me recently. I nearly killed them with the stuff. I gave each a drop to sample. Jess immediately turned bright red. “That’s the hottest thing I’ve ever had,” she said. bacon choked and clutched his throat. They begged for water. Then they begged for something else. I gave them soy milk. Only a final administration of dark chocolate put out the fire. I was laughing so hard, I was nearly in tears.
Once one gets past the hotness, which admittedly is 75% of the appeal, Death Sauce is actually good. It is a line of sauces. In ascending hotness, the varieties are Sweet Death, Jalapeño Death, Original Death, Muerte Death, Pure Death, After Death, Sudden Death, Mega Death, and Ultra Death. (Blair’s also has a Reserve Collection that’s multiple times as hot as the Death Sauces. These come in limited editions and often fetch high eBay prices.) I have had Sudden Death and Mega Death. One would think that the hotter a sauce is, the less taste it has. But Mega Death actually tastes better than Sudden Death. Its tangy, smoky flavor hits first. Then its heat takes over. As Megadeth’s “Head Crusher” (from Endgame, out September 15 on Roadrunner) goes, “Now let the torture begin!”
I used to use this shit like ketchup until family intervention sent me back to square one.
Chili oil is my new tipple. Habenero, Scotch Bonnets. A tablespoon of the glistening lava over a curry and you may as well take your supper on the toilet.
Speaking of the new Asphyx (see Cosmo's photo caption if you didn't notice it the first time)… I have to say D…TBW is a real skull-fucker of an album. Totally badass. It's only August, but I'm just about prepared to declare "Scorbutics" as my favorite metal song of 2009.
I'm actually going to have to try this stuff.
I'm a sucker for hot things as well – I frequently enter restaurants and ask for their hottest hot sauce to put on fries, burgers, etc.
I find, however, that there's a point at which flavor is eliminated in favor of making a hotter sauce. So while I can handle the hotter foods, I prefer not to because it doesn't taste very good.
But if it's as you say, I'm going to need to try this death sauce.
I've also had a habanero raw once. In eighth grade, some kids brought in a plastic bag full of them and to prove how macho I was I took the one with the deepest color, bit it off the stem, chewed it and swallowed. A few seconds later I was dying for water, even though I knew it would be pointless.
They got another kid to have a habanero as well, but he accidentally rubbed his eyes after handling it and then threw up because he couldn't take it. Poor guy.
I've never heard of anybody barfing because of habanero pepper oil before, but I've had it in my eye, and it really sucks. The thing is that sometimes even washing your hands after cutting them isn't enough–you've got to wash your hands two or three times.
I've been a huge hot sauce fan my whole life (I did almost the exact same thing WZA talks about in eighth grade, except it was a bag of Dave's Insanity sauce). I don't eat a meal without a substantial quantity of hot pepper, but I always drew the line at pepper extract sauces like Blair's and Dave's, mostly because they taste bitter to me. And the whole pepper extract thing seems sort of like cheating. (My brother has a sauce even hotter than Blair's called "The Source" that, from my understanding, is essentially straight pepper extract in a bottle. An eyedropper's worth will heavily spice an entire pot of chili, he tells me, but it doesn't taste like anything).
I've always found it striking that three of my favorite things (hot sauce, beer, metal) all employ essentially the same visual design aesthetic.
Try Dave's Insanity Sauce made with Ghost Peppers. Hottest in the world.
http://saratogasalsaandspice.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products;_id=876
i'm a hot sauce fiend. i put 2-3 drops of mad dog 357 in my "shin ramyun" to kick it up a notch.
whiplash has their own hot sauce collection.
http://www.frommildtowild.com/xcart/home.php?cat=24
Anthony – YouTube offers much evidence that people vomit from excessive habanero consumption.
I have learned, the hard way, to wash my hands repeatedly after chopping habaneros.
I wouldn't even wanna go back to how brutal that was, haha. It was quite an experience of nuclear hot sauce assault.
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This is no joke, but a couple of years ago, a friend of mine was making pico de gallo and he mistakenly scratched his balls after chopping a bunch of raw habaneros. You know what happened next.
had it drunk once. caused a lot of pain. drank a lot of milk. niether mixed well with my drunkenness.
I tried this sauce when I was 11 or something. IT WAS THE HOTTEST FUCKING THING I'VE EVER HAD. I literally started screaming and running around my fucking house.
I'm talking about the Mega Death sauce BTW. I stupidly poured a ton all over my burger.
That new Megadeth song is surprisingly not bad.
seeing that you will be living in LA, you should make your way down to Long Beach pier. There is a little shop that sells hot sauces, and there is one by the name of Da Bomb, stupid name, but packs a punch! or you can just find another way of getting it.
Yeah, neglecting to warn me it was the second hottest sauce you've ever had, that wasn't cool! I thought I loved chocolate a lot, but when it was able to extinguish the fire of the death sauce, it put that relationship on a whole new level.
i've tried stuff called death paste–it's a paste you spread on, say, a tortilla before you roll it and that shit was hot! Any relation to the death sauce? anyway, i too can now eat rooster sauce like its candy and have moved on to hotter things. I read a story about the ghost pepper and it's 2.1 million btu's!! that's crazy. where do you find it??
Anon – Spiciness heat is measured in Scoville heat units; heating and cooling systems heat is measured in British thermal units (BTU). If you put "ghost pepper" into Google and select the "Shopping" option at the top, it will show you where to buy both the peppers and sauces made from them.
Death Paste is not related to Death Sauce. (Blair's does have a line of dry rubs called Death Rain – so metal!) A company called Rick's Test Kitchen makes Death Paste. It also makes a BBQ sauce called A Woman's Scorn.
Thanks for spreading the word on these amazing hot sauces. A friend had some Mega Death on hand recently while we were eating Thai Food and I foolishly put four sizable drops into my curry fried rice. Oh man.