Charbanero's Chile Chat

Naughty Norm's Hot Sauce was a company I was not familiar with until quite recently but after trying their brand new sauce I think people are going to start taking notice. To quote their website, " Naughty Norm’s officially started on October 13th, 2018 with the very first batch of Watch Your Mouth sauce" but he got his love for hot sauce from his aunt as a young child.  Naught Norm's came across my Instagram feed a couple weeks ago and this sauce immediately caught my eye. I didn't even know that a black jalapeno, aka the kaboom pepper, was a thing. That pepper and the deep dark brown color of the sauce made me sit up and pay attention. I'm glad I did.  Let's get into this very eclectic list of ingredients: black jalapeno peppers, ghost peppers, Carolina reaper peppers, black garlic, carrots, ghost powder, reaper powder, ancho chili, black pepper, smoked ghost pepper sea salt, smoked paprika, onion powder, dark brown sugar, molasses, blue agav...

I de cided  we should look at a sauce  w it h  a much more appro achable heat level. That brings us to a sauce from Rising Smoke SauceWorks fro m my friend Mike Palmatier out of the great state of North Carolina where they specialize in hot sauce and barbeque sauce. Mike believes "you should smoke 'em if you got 'em". As you probably guessed based on the name of the company, all of his sauces start with smoked peppers. Today we're looking at the Scovie Award winning Smoldering Embers. They classify this as a medium sauce on their scale. The bottle lists it as simply having "blistering heat".  Let's start with the ingredients: water, tomatoes,  vinegar, onion, smoked habanero pepper, roasted red pepper, garlic, salt, spices, and cayenne pepper. As you can see from the picture I've included, this sauce is bright red and you can see that it has texture and herbs/spices floating around in it. Its a thinner sauce but not watery by any stretch. The her...