2K20 Q3 Update

  2K20 Q3 Update

After the last update was posted, it came to my attention that Roger Damptz of Burn Your Tongue, the hot sauce and all things spicy Ambassador of the West, was celebrating 11 years in business as of July 2020. So, a hearty congratulations from TSAAF and FOH, and here’s to many, many more. Roger and BYT have also had a couple of nice write-ups, both in Utah’s own Catalyst paper, as well as on crafthotsauce.com. If you use Facebook, definitely check out his page on Facebook for links to that and a bevy of other good stuff, including posts on some of the 700+ (!) sauces he has on the shelf. I believe he has also been working up a new website, as well, which you can check out at https: //burnyourtonguehotsauces. business.site/ (remove spaces). I am not going to link to Facebook, as they have decided to move to an insultingly stupid format, which I refuse to support, but if you still use it, you can just search from there.

Season 13 of The Hot Ones went up and I’ve posted that as well...yet another season I cannot do 100% and I’m a few more sauces behind now. I will note that by doing 2 particular sauces, it will catch me up on a number of seasons and I have both of those at hand, so I anticipate that gap between how many I’ve done that were on the show and how many left to lessen somewhat, at least in terms of overall seasonal coverage in 2021.

Also found a pretty cool blog by another chilehead named Kendall. I really dig it a lot and it’s one of the better ones I’ve seen, rivaling Scott’s back in his heyday. It’s called “Tasting The Heat.” Check it out at tastingtheheat dot com. He’s a pretty awesome guy, so major shout out to him, and he has wisely pictures of the ingredient panel for the sauces, something I wish I’d thought of when I started doing pictures (but will not be adding now).

I should observe another milestone, actually 4 milestones. The first two are in regards to the FOH YouTube video series. As of August 2020, the FOH series has reached 100 video entries, and I’ve added video support for a sauce in every year of TSAAF’s existence, including 2012, a “year” which had only 4 months. The total FOH content, as of this video, is 112, and 55 of those are in support of full review for sauces. The second milestone is that as of October 1, 2020, the FOH series will be reaching its first anniversary.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out the video series, please do. I have a lot of fun making those, which extend beyond the blog’s intentional focus only on hot sauces, to include other spicy foods, along with various applications of sauce usage and testing, which doesn’t get covered here. Links to the various playlists are in the widgets to the right, as well as in the various reviews themselves, and in the TOCs.

While I’m at it, I should mention that I also doubled my sauces at once (in 2019 I did 6 sauces), in a single mini-review*, but also made it a 2-part video, also the first for that, wherein I went through all the sauces that are in the Book of Pleasure & Pain Hot Sauce Challenge, though inadvertently. For this, I did12 sauces at once, *though 2 had already been previously reviewed. It did help me to test out my preparation a bit (maybe I will work my way to actual heat challenges, if I can get it tuned enough - if so, those will be for the FOH series only), though it was also a lot more challenging than I was expecting when I first thought up the idea. It is the 2nd dual posting between FOH and TSAAF. I also managed to throw in another double review on the blog to boot, though the video for that will be in Q4 sometime, due to the lag right now between the blog and the FOH video series.

Talked about the total posts to the blog for 2020 in the last update a bit and how it relates to previous years. So far, I’ve posted 33 total, which puts it higher than every year but 2013 (52). I also posted (repeatedly) in every month of this year, which has not happened since 2015 and only for 3 of the 8 years this blog has been running. This year will make 4, if I keep that streak running. I don’t see a reason why it wouldn’t.

I should also speak to the 3rd milestone, which is not here as of yet, but is coming soon. That is 200 full sauce reviews on this blog. I’ve already reviewed well over 200 sauces overall and probably tried well over a thousand spicy food things, and I know I said I didn’t think I was going to hit 200 full sauce reviews this year, but now I’m beginning to think I might be surprised if I don’t. I am, as of this writing, at the 196 mark and there is still a goodly amount of time to go in the year. I don’t believe, however, that I will cover that particular milestone with a separate post, as I did with the first 100. These quarterly updates are very extensive as-is.

The final milestone, which did get accomplished in Q3 with the arrival of the review of both Blair’s Original Death Sauce and the Pain Is Good #218 Louisiana sauce, is that Season One of The Hot Ones now has a review for all of the sauces I am doing and is thus complete. It will be the only season I am looking (or likely) to complete this year.

For Q3, I did a lot of blog maintenance, this past little while, after the last update, fixing some html errors I missed, as well as finally creating a database, so I can more appropriately check on how many reviews I’ve done in a much easier manner than previously, which always had the possibility of me missing something. I have added a few more photos for the full reviews and believe I’m now at less than 20 sauces needing pictures, which is slightly over the 10% mark of total sauces in the full review list. I also needed to teach myself a new way of doing the blog, thanks to Google electing to change how the blog operates. Thankfully, I don’t do anything overly demanding, in a technical sense.

I guess since I’m on the numbers, as I alluded to last update, I may as well start going  through some of them. The average score, across all sauces, is about midway between 4 and 5. This is also, incidentally, skewed higher, as I usually buy sauces I believe I will enjoy. The list currently sits at 13 sauces with an overall score of 0, 14 sauces at 1, 13 sauces at 2, 22 sauces at 3, 26 sauces at 4, 28 sauces at 5, 31 sauces at 6, 26 sauces at 7, 16 sauces at 8, 7 sauces at 9 and NO sauces at 10. This is by design, as I structured the rating system so that no one element would be able to dominate the ratings, and also, to a degree, some of the criteria are in opposition to each other. This means that the odds of having a perfect 10 across the board are exceedingly unlikely.  I have also done video support for at least one sauce of every score level that has sauces in it.

Of the alphabet, all letters are represented, except for K, U, X, Y. I’m going to loosely keep an eye out for sauces/sauce makers starting with those letters, though the only one I’m really surprised about is the “K”. I do have one of those “K” sauces sitting on deck and plan on getting to it before the end of the year, though. As to the rest, I can’t find any makers for either the “U” or “X”, so those look to be waiting a while longer... The best represented letter is “C”, with 20 entries, being carried on the back of the best represented sauce company, CaJohn’s, both on the blog with 12 and on the FOH video series with 5.

Continuing on, as mentioned, I have 196 full reviews on the blog. Of those, at least 24 (I have not gone through every title quite yet) are either discontinued entirely OR have been reformulated and do not match the sauce I reviewed any longer. 55 of them already have videos. Looking over the back catalog, I’m thinking that I probably will go to a ratings cut-off.  There is little point in me going through and buying a bunch of sauces that are rated at 0 - 2, as I will be keeping some of them just long enough to shoot the video, thereby ruining whatever food I put it on, and only to be binned immediately at the conclusion of recording. This range may also be increased to 0 - 3. On that low rating side, there are 21 sauces without video support, only one of which, Zatarain’s, which was a 1, I will consider doing, and that only because I hear fairly regular whining about the actual review.

That is a definite exception, though. This year, for instance, I had the Grace Scotch Bonnet sauce at hand and wound up tossing it entirely and not even filming a video at all. I do have limits. If manufacturers or whoever want to offer up some of those sauces for that purpose, I’ll accept them and at least consider shooting a video, but I don’t see any wisdom in spending my money to do that again, unless this becomes something more than a fun, casual hobby.

So, between the discontinued, the low rated, and the ones already done, I have a playground of around a hundred sauces or so that I could conceivably obtain for the purposes of FOH. I still need to check into availability of a lot of them, but I’ve already identified 15 that will be more of a priority. My suspicion is that once those are concluded, the higher rated ones will be more of a priority, though that will probably take realistically beyond 2021.

On the brighter side, for this year, I have 5 SOTY contenders right now (Private Selection Calabrian, Arthur Wayne Limitless, Monroy’s Death By Kraken, Tonguespank Scotch Whiskey Trinidad Scorpion & Mikey V’s Sweet Ghost Pepper, if you haven’t read them yet and are interested in checking them out), which is a great relief to me, as the last few years it has been nearly right down to the wire. Of those, Calabrian works well with the widest variety of things and was eaten the fastest, Limitless packed the biggest wallop, and the Sweet Ghost Pepper is, by far, the best-tasting).

Speaking of SOTYs, here is the current breakdown: There have been 8, as I write this, in the history of this blog. Of those 8, 3 are discontinued. Of the 5 remaining, 3 have had videos done. Of the 2 remaining, 1 of them I’m going to try to get to this year, but it may not make it (Happy Beaver). The other one I bought with the intention of doing a video, only to find it has been reformulated. That is the Born To Hula Ghost Of Ancho. As that sauce is based on the Habanero Ancho from them, and which has evidently also been reformulated, the result is a sauce that would be pushing to break a 5 and nowhere near any SOTY criteria for me. They took what was a delectable sauce and utterly ruined it, to the point where it is very nearly an unpalatable abomination. If you’re interested in the exact mechanism, it appears they scrambled the ingredients order (amplifying the astringency notably with the lime) and moved from onion powder to actual onions. So, needless to say, I will not be doing a video of that, as it is no longer the same sauce, nor will I be consuming it again, beyond what I tried before I noticed that awful change. I have noticed this with some of the other sauces in the backlog, so I now will need to directly review everything, as in at least 2 different online sources for the ingredient list OR bottle in hand,  for any of the past sauces, a prospect which pleases me about as much as you might expect. Cumulatively, of the 8 SOTYs for this blog, 4 are no longer available, either at all, or in their reviewed form.

As always, if you have any suggestions on anything you could care to see in the world of spicy foods, drop me a line and I’ll definitely try to get to it.