Chili Pepper News

Remember the first time you picked up a bottle of hot sauce. More than likely, you didn’t start with Mad Dog, we know. Most of our hot sauces are for the truly dedicated out there. People tend to start with sauces in the 2000 to 5000 Scoville range.

 How many extreme chili pepper or hot sauces challenges have you seen over the past year? Three? Ten? Over one hundred? They’re all over YouTube and Facebook, so they’re damned difficult to miss.

It’s not as if Americans hold the rights to the heat-inducing condiments market. We don’t. Even though we’ve got some serious hot sauce talent here, and aisles and aisles of sauces in every grocery store to prove it… we still can’t take all the credit. Sriracha, for example, isn’t an American creation. We need to look east for the roots of this garlicky goodness in a bottle. Harissa comes from North Africa (they claim it as their own in Tunisia where they spread this paste on damn near everything they put in their mouths).

With more states voting on the legalization (in one form or another) of marijuana, getting high is a hot topic. At the moment, you can legally use marijuana recreationally in Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and, yes, Washington D.C. Medical use is legal in those states (and territory), as well as in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine. Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.