I tend to value good overall taste more than pure spiciness. There’s a good one that I get that is mildly spicy and mixed with passion fruit, very nice combination. I also adore chipotle sauces.
As for the Pace / Old El Paso / Chi Chi’s type of salsas, if you make your own just once you’ll never go back to the packaged stuff:
Diced fresh tomatos, very ripe
Finely diced fresh white or yellow onion
Finely diced fresh green pepper
Fresh diced jalapeño to taste
Lots of fresh chopped cilantro
Juice of several small Florida key limes or a large regular lime
In reality the Mexican food snob around here is probably me. I hand make my own flour tortillas and corn tortillas that are good enough to make an Aztec blush. In the case of the corn ones, I actually follow the traditional nixtamalization process of soaking dried white corn in a lime (as in calcium oxide) solution for three days and then running it through a hand mill. Fried in pork lard with refried beans (also hand made) and shredded chicken or pork with the salsa I posted earlier here… shockingly delicious.
Picked up the chipotle salt and a couple of dried Reapers from them the other day, the salt is fantastic, wonderfully smoky…and I’m not sure what to do with the Reapers yet…
I tried their Reaper sauce too, nowhere near as hot as I was expecting.
The other sauces they produce really do offer a nice taste, I’ve tried some other brands but usually I find a lot are just heat without any real flavour although I am partial to the habanero jam that Tesco sell.
Interesting topic. I have been trying to source some Carolina Reaper seeds but without success. I am reading that some of you guys are already growing it. Maybe someone can kindly help me out with some seeds . Many thanks.
Never been a fan of the ones based on capsaicin extract, I find it’s just lots of heat very little taste. At least with the super hot chillies they have a characteristic flavour to go with the heat.
Hello David here Google Pepper Joe. He developed the variety and has a very interesting website. I have personally bought seeds of many varieties from him and have had excellent germination rates. The super hots can be finicky to germinate.
“dave’s insanity hot sauce” is what I recommend to everyone who likes hot and hasn’t quite got enough out of the average store bought sauce. It’s about as hot as a sauce can be while still being usable.
Texas Petes, sriracha, and Franks Red Hot are my 3 typical go to hot sauces. A lot of the others I have tried I like at first, but end up getting an after taste of something I do not like.
I swear by Jim Duffy at Refining Fire Chiles for seeds and plants. I usually buy live plants from his site in season, but I have purchased seeds as well, and his stuff is top notch.
Reaper seeds and other superhot variants are a lot like flashlights - there are all kinds of vendors offering what they claim are Reaper seeds, and I’d guess half or more send random chile seeds and laugh their way to the bank, so cheaper isn’t always the way to go. Refining Fire is as solid as they get.
And a note on colon cleanser. In my younger days the convenient store down the street from the mill I worked at sold a 1lb beef and cheese burrito called “The Bomb”. I loved them, being gross and tasty at the same time. But I would call them my “unscheduled 15”, as in at some point in the day I would be spending 15 mins in the bathroom.
On another note, another thing I use quite frequently in the spicy world is crushed red pepper. I got a bottle that was sold in a spice grinder bottle kind of like a pepper mill, and I love it! I use it probably 3-4 days a week or more.
I love spicy foods, and can handle the heat with the best of them. When I go out for dinner and they serve wings, I will usually get the hottest they sell. But, as I will eat the spiciest foods I can get, if its so much heat the flavor gets killed, I wont care for it. It has got to have a good flavor, or flavor at all, to go with it