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Do you pine for that burning sensation on your tongue, that knife-edge balance between pleasure and searing pain?
Do you automatically reach for the hot sauce without tasting a dish — any dish — looking forward to being drenched in sweat once you’ve chowed down?
If so, Eva and I have a question for you fellow spicy food lovers…
Hot Ones is a wildly popular show in which host Sean Evans sits down with celebs and a plank of chicken wings (or a vegetarian alternative, depending on the guest) doused in increasingly hotter sauces.
Between testing the mettle of their spice tolerance, Evans peppers the guest with questions, as they cope with the increasing heat.
Some of Evans’ guests navigate the hot sauces with ease, while others visibly struggle to keep it together, making for some hilarious interactions.
My personal favourite was the recent appearance of late-night TV host turned podcaster Conan O’Brien, whose reactions were over the top, although Gordon Ramsay’s episode, predictably peppered with swears, is a close second.
I’m a hot sauce fan, as is evident by the 10-12 bottles in my fridge. There’s the standard Sriracha and Cholula in there, but also a handful from Thunder Bay’s Heartbeat Hot Sauce — the red-hot Scorpion has appeared on Hot Ones, and is excellent, but my favourite is probably the medium-hot Camp Sauce, which works as easily with a stir fry as it does in a curry or burger.
Heartbeat Hot Sauce of Thunder Bay.
There are also a few hot sauces in the fridge that we’ve picked up on the road, including a four-pack of scalding sauces we recently grabbed for my son while we were away.
This quartet of mini bottles of hot sauce nabbed in San Diego includes, ahem, Ass Blaster.
I’m tempted to call my body’s reaction to increasingly hotter sauces “volcanic,” but that implies some sort of bodily eruption, which I assure you does NOT happen.
However, as I eat increasingly hotter sauces, the top of my bald head lets off steam, if you will, and starts to sweat.
I know I’ve gone too far if I touch the top of my chrome dome and my hand is visibly wet. But some mild cranial perspiration? Perfection.
Anyway, as an homage to Hot Ones, and to see just how hot local sauce makers (is there a term for that? Sauciers? Let’s go with sauciers) are willing to go, Eva and I will be sitting down to do our own local hot-sauce taste-off in the near-ish future.
Local sauciers such as 1882 Fruit-Based Hot Sauce and Intergalactic Sauces are on our radar — what other made-in-Manitoba hot sauces are out there that we should try?
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