Mega Death Sauce
 |
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!”
