Others skip the slow fuse and get right to it, blowing your head off and ensuring, as some enthusiasts euphemistically suggest, a “red eye” in the morning. More vividly I once came across a chilli sauce called, simply, “Red Rectum”.
I’ve seen people nearly come to blows over choices for the pepper’s carrying vehicle — vinegar, oils, or just water — and whether the end result is tinged with fruit or smoke or sweetness. They even argue about how to spell it. Most use “chilli”, though that can be confused with the Tex-Mex meat stew. The Spanish spell it “chile” and the context normally prevents us from mistaking it for the country.
Hot sauces are sometimes an after-thought, a condiment; other times they are a crucial ingredient.
The Crystal brand sauce is indispensable for proper Buffalo chicken wings and most people I know would never use anything but the grand old lady of New Orleans, Tabasco, to polka-dot their oysters.
At the Kaalgat Kudu, the pizza joint in the Klein Karoo town De Rust, hot sauce comes to the table in old Grolsch bottles and is made of chillies, vinegar, garlic, salt, Peppadews and ginger.
The Scoville scale measures the way the chemical compound capsaicin dances on our tongues, affecting their nerve endings.
A bell pepper, for example, would have the lowest calibration on the scale and a jalapeño clocks in at around 5 000.
The newly bred Trinidad Moruga Scorpion measures over two million units and has recently dethroned the Indian Bhut Jolokia, or ghost chilli, itself some 200 times hotter than a jalapeño. It’s so hot that airport police have been known to confiscate these souvenir sauces as potential hijacking weapons.
In South Africa, our fondness for the burn presumably comes from immigrant cuisines: Portuguese peri-peri sauce (a local version is called Veri-Peri) or Indian and Malay curries. A recent padstal (farm stall) inventory offered these brands and more: Malawi Gold, Zulu Fire Sauce, Umfolozi Chilli Sauce, Bushman’s Peperoncino, Nali (which someone on one blog called “devil spit”) and Chuckleberry’s was billed as providing a “Chuck Norris hot” level.
Whether you’re pumping up the endorphin rush from caramel corn, chocolate cake or even roasted Brussels sprouts, a chilli sauce — even as simple as puréed vinegar, chillies and salt — will warm your cockles (or something) this winter.