Seared and Burning: Dispatches from the 7th Annual NYC Hot Sauce Expo
“Milk! I need milk!” my fiance pleaded. I could see his face growing redder as he held his throat. He had unknowingly sampled one of the world’s hottest hot sauces. I briskly walked past the Stage of Doom to the Farmland Dairy booth, where attendees were grabbing cartons of milk off the table as fast as representatives in cow-printed t-shirts could hand them out. Hundreds of people at the 7th Annual NYC Hot Sauce Expo were seeking the relief of milk’s fat compounds, the only thing that could wash away the fire burning their taste buds.
Justin, my fiance, started getting into hot sauce about three years ago. It began with wings. Every Sunday following his kickball games with the local league, he goes to Wild Wing Cafe with the team. One afternoon, after a few beers and some peer pressure, he ordered the hottest wings on the menu. He couldn’t finish them. It was like trying to force yourself to eat molten lead when your head had already been scorched by flames.
But he wanted to see if he could go even hotter. He became obsessed with YouTube videos of people coughing and crying their way through the Scoville Scale: “Ghost Chilli Challenge,” “Marines Vs. Carolina Reaper Pepper,” “Indian Girl Eats 60 Bhut Jolokia Peppers.” I could not understand either the appeal of inflicting that level of pain on yourself or why it was so entertaining to watch. The hotter the reported Scoville Scale of the pepper, the more views the video had.
Scoville Scale ranking of peppers.
Since 1912, the Scoville Scale has been measuring the heat of peppers, which comes from capsaicin. A bell pepper has about 0 Scoville Heat Units (SHU), while a spicy jalapeño is measured at around 8,000 SHU. The hottest peppers in the world average between 1.5 million to 2 million SHU, which is close to half the SHU of police grade pepper spray. Justin started growing habaneros (150,000 SHU) on our patio and used them to create his own hot sauce. He started making a point to visit the local hot sauce shop whenever we traveled to a new city, always looking for something he hadn’t tried before. When I discovered that the country’s biggest hot sauce festival was in New York City, I knew I had to get him a VIP pass for his birthday.
“This is going to be so awesome!” He turned around to say as we entered the Brooklyn Expo Center. The parameters of the warehouse were lined with vendor booths with four more rows of hot sauce distributors filling the middle. Over 50 hot sauce makers were offering unlimited samples.
Justin at the 7th Annual NYC Hot Sauce Expo.
The first thing I noticed about hot sauce culture was that most of the enthusiasts, known as chiliheads, are men. The male to female ratio at the festival was about 5:1, with women being more likely to hang back as their male companions moved forward through the tasting lines. Even fewer women could be found serving samples from behind the booths. It was the only festival I have ever attended where the bathroom lines for women were significantly shorter and more expedited.
The second thing I noticed was the overlap with heavy metal culture. Men had long, wild hair and jerked their heads in approval as Black Sabbath roared from 8-foot speakers on either side of the stage. Flame logos could be seen on t-shirts, hot sauce labels, and inked into biceps. Skulls, pentagrams, and busty pin-up girls were also repeated markers of the aesthetic.
Justin sampled seven different sauces from a Louisiana maker at the first booth, then purchased a bottle of their spicy remoulade. I spotted a large man in a Hawaiian shirt with a walrus mustache and what I can only describe as a stuffed chicken hat flopped on his head. He was sitting next to a banner with a life-size photo of himself, still in the chicken hat, but slightly less gray-haired.
“Is that you?” Justin asked him.
“Yep,” the man chuckled as he pointed his thumb over his shoulder, “Just less fat.”
Justin took his picture with the man because his jovial assuredness suggested that he was some kind of hot sauce celebrity. Then we saw someone we did recognize, Ed Currie, creator of the Carolina Reaper pepper, at his booth for the PuckerButt Pepper Company. He was a demure man with glasses and a baseball cap who politely nodded when Justin shook his hand an congratulated him on creating the world’s hottest pepper. Justin declined to sample a sliver of a Carolina Reaper pepper, which a teenage boy was handling with gloves next to a 2012 plaque from the Guinness World Records declaring Smokin’ Ed’s Carolina Reaper to be the hottest chili (1,569,300 SHU).
The thrash metal stopped as a short, mulleted man in cowboy boots walked onto the stage to announce the start of the 2019 Hot Sauce Hall of Fame induction ceremony. He was wearing a fiery red blazer with a dragon crest on the left side. Chicken-hat-man, who turned out to be the founder of Peppers.com, Chip Hearn, joined him while stuffing his arms into his own red blazer. The old guard shook hands with the new generation of star growers and distributors in a rowdier version of The Master’s Tournament’s Green Jacket Ceremony.
Lesser heroes of heat emerged as the day progressed. A crowd was gathering around the Rattler’s hot sauce booth, where the owner wore a straw cowboy hat and a red flannel vest with a rattlesnake logo on the back and the sleeves ripped off. He had a long rattail segmented by Dothraki knots. “He has one knot for each person who has died from his hot sauce,” I whispered to our friend Drew.
“You can tell how hot the sauce is by the people serving it,” Drew said. “You see those guys over there?” He was pointing to the booth for Fuego Box, a subscription hot sauce of the month club, which was being run by 20-something clean-cut bros. “That booth is safe. The one next to them though,” he was now pointing a booth covered in flaming “Hellfire” logos run by stout men with hair like Gaelic warriors. “That stuff is going to be really fucking hot.”
I was starting to wonder if, for chiliheads, it was all about the adrenaline. For me, someone with a low tolerance for capsaicin, every hot sauce tastes the same — like an uncomfortable burn. “There are different kinds of burns,” Justin explained. “They are all really unique, and you just get these flavors that don’t taste like anything else.”
I preferred observing other people’s reactions to the sauces. Every time I witnessed Justin and Drew tear up and cough after a sample I became more deterred to the prospect of toasting my own taste buds. Justin couldn’t be trusted to gauge the heat for me. Too many times in our relationship he has implored me to try a sauce, promising that he hadn’t detected any spice, only to leave me twitching my face with the unexpected singe of pepper. The Spicy Shark table had clearly arranged their sauces by Scoville rating, and I was encouraged by the name of their least spicy sauce, “Nurse Shark.” Nurse Shark sounded comforting, safe. I could handle a sauce with “nurse” in the name.
Have you ever been at the start of a rollercoaster and, as the car climbed to the top of the first drop, wondered if boarding the ride had been a huge mistake? That’s the feeling the moment you’re about to taste a hot sauce that you know is probably too much for you. You aren’t totally sure what is about to happen, but you know you are in for some kind of ride. Nurse Shark spread across my tongue with the sear of hot cheese before rising up through my sinuses. Heart rate building, I was too alarmed to notice any flavor at first, and wondered if I should make plans to grab some milk of my own before the pain got worse. Then, it was over. The fire dissipated and I was left with a tasty, bright, and slightly grassy flavor. It was a fun jolt, and I could see how someone would want to get on that ride again.
For the bravest of chiliheads, the Reaper is king. Seeing “Carolina Reaper” in a sauce is shorthand for “incredibly hot.” Most of the distributors at the festival used Reapers for their hottest sauces, which were also often their most popular. At Spicy Shark, their Reaper-heavy sauce was called “Megalodon.” Megalodon would kill me. Anything with a Carolina Reaper would probably kill me. At Puckerbutt, Drew risked licking a small flake of a Reaper, which he said was enough. He took a break from samples for a while.
There are people out there who can eat Carolina Reapers whole. The official Guinness World Record Carolina Reaper Contest is held at the expo each year. Contestants eat as many peppers as they can in one minute, and then must make it through the following minute without barfing or drinking anything. The world record is 22 peppers. In 2018, one contestant described the feeling to be like forcing fire briquettes down your throat. Another contestant ended up in the hospital three days later with “Thunderclap” headaches.
How hot can you go? That’s the fun for chiliheads. But it’s hard to know your limits, as Justin and Drew discovered while working their way through the samples from Wiltshire Chilli Farm.
“This one is really good,” Justin nodded
“Yeah, we’re based in England,” the owner said. “So it’s nice to have something to warm you up in the cold winters.”
“What’s that one?” Justin was pointing to a sauce at the top of the display pyramid that was being dispensed through what looked like a large, upside-down syringe.
“You want to try our God Slayer sauce?” the owner chirped. He squeezed something behind the display that caused red droplets to bubble through two plastic tubes and into the dispenser. He spurted a semicircle of thick, dark red paste onto a cracker and handed it to Justin, smiling. At 6.4 million SHU, God Slayer is considered by some to be one of the hottest sauces on the market. This had not been explained to Justin and Drew before they tried it.
Almost instantly, Justin’s jaw dropped and his mouth pulled back as he did his best to lift his chin up toward the air. He couldn’t talk at first, but I saw the shock register in his eyes. “Milk! I need milk!” He was finally able to beg. In the next hour, he downed four cartons of milk. Drew rushed to the Farmland Dairy booth and had them spray whipped cream directly into his mouth. Both of them decided that copious amounts of dairy were the major culprits of the stomach aches they experienced later.
Drew seeking relief after the God Slayer hot sauce.
“It was just burning in my throat and would not go away,” Justin said. Drew agreed. We all took a break to go outside in the sun for a bit where I pulled a small bottle of Pepto-Bismal out from my purse and poured a dose for each of them. Several bypassers gave us the thumbs-up or commented that we’d had a great idea. “That’s a good girlfriend,” one young man shouted as I handed Justin his dose.
Even after the guys felt ready to get back to sampling, they stuck to the milder stuff for a while, asking vendors “This won’t kill me right?” with concerned stares. At one booth a man who was clearly tired of hearing this question closed his eyes as he shook his head. “We’re all-natural. Not like those guys,” he said, tilting his head in the direction of Wiltshire Chilli Farms.
It turns out that there’s a purest movement among chiliheads. Most hot sauces are made with a combination of peppers, kinds of vinegar, and spices, with the heat coming from the peppers. Hot sauce makers try to make their products stand out by getting creative with unexpected pairings: ghost peppers and blueberries, black truffle and red chili, vanilla bourbon and habanero. When using all-natural ingredients, you’re limited in terms of how hot you can go. The hottest peppers on the Scoville Scale peak at about 2 million SHU, and the addition of fruits, oils, and spices only mitigate the heat. To make sauces like God Slayer, you’ve got to add capsaicin extract.
For some in the hot sauce community, the capsaicin extract method is cheating. To please the chiliheads there’s a constant race to develop the next hottest pepper or the newest, blistering all-natural sauce.
The Hellfire Hot Sauce booth, flaming around its untamed mercenaries, had attracted some of the largest crowds of the day. Attendees could frequently be seen red-faced and chugging milk to the side of the large banner printed with a winged satanic figure. The rumor was that they had the hottest all-natural sauces at the festival.
“Y’all have to try that booth before we leave,” I said to the boys, who craned their heads in trepidation. They looked bleary and drunk. Everyone at this expo looked drunk. I convinced them that they would regret not at least trying one of the main attractions, and surprised myself with the amount of schadenfreude I was still craving, even after having watched them both suffer dozens of times in the last few hours. What morbid curiosity was driving me to see what this hot sauce would do to them?
“You’re gonna want to start on the other side,” one of the Hellfire reps told Justin as he approached the booth from the right.
“They get hotter as you go from the left?” Justin asked.
“Yep. If you started from here you might not make it.”
Hellfire Hot Sauce uses their own 10 point ranking system to measure heat. First, the boys tried a mustard-colored sauce with a blonde, topless demon-lady stirring a bubbling cauldron on the label: Devil’s Gold (4/10). “Good,” Justin and Drew agreed.
Next was Blueberry Hell (5/10), one of their most popular sauces, which was wrapped in a label featuring a pile of round, sapphire skulls. Justin felt reassured that the heat wasn’t so bad and started to think he would be able to make it through this gauntlet. Then the representative behind the booth picked up a bottle marked by a fire-breathing skull with horns shaping the top corners of a pentagram: Pure Hell (6/10).
“Whew!” Justin exhaled. He stepped away from the booth and leaned forward, sucking his breaths through pursed lips. “God!”
Drew, unaware that Justin had decided he was done, was moving on to the next sauce. Firearrhea (8/10) was marked by a naked demon screaming on a toilet surrounded by hot, orange flames. “Ugh, you gave me a lot,” Drew said after the rep poured a thick tablespoon of sauce on a cracker. “You’ll be fine,” the rep said. “The cracker helps.”
Drew licked the edge of the dollop before going limp. It was as if he’d just swallowed a boulder. His head went back and the top part of his body was leaning to one side. I thought he might vomit. Justin had gone to the bathroom and Drew was having trouble responding to my inquiries as to whether he needed milk, a bucket, or an ambulance. I was surprised to see Drew rise up to lean toward the booth with his sampler spoon outreached. “One more,” he said.
Most of the Hellfire labels had art that looked slightly dated to me. The color palettes weren’t very sophisticated and the shading around all the intricate flames and figures from the underworld were flat and amateurish - like a bad tattoo. I appreciated the clean lines and minimal color scheme of First Blood (9/10), which had fat crimson streams oozing down a bright, white label. I saw Drew lightly touch his tongue to the spoon and step back, shaking his head before a guy to the other side of me leaned over like he was going to throw up. I stepped back too.
“Holy shit,” Justin laughed, having returned from the bathroom, “I just saw this guy in there. I was at the sink and he ran in and put his whole face under the running water. He was screaming, ‘AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!’ Then, some other random guy started filming it. It was crazy.”
“Where’s Drew?” I asked, looking around the crowd.
“I don’t know. I saw him walking outside. He said he was done.”
At that moment a younger guy reached between us to casually request that someone at Hellfire, “Just give me the hottest sauce you’ve got,” before walking away with his spoon dripping and full.
Drew after he almost died at the Hellfire Hot Sauce booth.
We found Drew reclining on the ground outside with his sunglasses on. “I think I died,” he said. “It was worse than the God Slayer.” Justin and Drew said that while the God Slayer had burned their throats, the Hellfire sauces incinerated their insides and made them feel like their intestines were in danger of dissolving. “I got concerned when my heart started beating irregularly.”
The Reaper, the God Slayer, Pure Hell — so much of the culture seemed to be about death. The imagery subverted the idea of fiery torture to make it sexy, fun, and exciting. Kill your tastebuds and they’ll come back stronger.
The Hellfire sauces were the last they both tried that day. Justin had already accumulated so many sauces that his VIP tote bag had become too heavy for me to lift. We spent the rest of the afternoon watching some of the competitions that happened each hour. The expo had already crowned winners for the Spicy Taco from Hell and The World’s Hottest Ramen challenges. The day was about to end with crowds gathering to see who would be the champion of the Spicy Pizza of Doom.
A scratchy warmth started to irritate my eyes as soon as the MC opened up the pizza boxes on stage. He strode belly-forward and hips turned out, as though he had just dismounted a horse. His gray hair was in a long ponytail under his baseball cap, and the sleeves had been torn off his oversized denim vest.
“This guy could only be the MC at a hot sauce festival,” Drew buzzed in my ear.
“Not true,” I countered, “He could also be the manager of a Harley-Davidson store in Myrtle Beach.”
The MC was describing the toppings, “Each of these 10 pizzas is covered in a bunch of the hottest peppers out there. Then we’ve added a special sauce by High River Sauces. It’s hot. It’s like being kicked in the face by an elephant.” The rules were simple: Contestants had 15 minutes to eat the pizza. Whoever finished first, or ate the most, would be the winner. Pint-sized cartons of milk would be placed in front of each contestant, but if they drank anything during the competition, they would be out.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen so many people look so miserable while eating Brooklyn-style pizza. One of the returning champions chomped through with determination, stacking his slices top-to-top with crust on either side. The contestant from Philadelphia, a smaller, pale man, was the first to turn tomato-red. He looked like he was choking. He shook his head through 10 minutes of the competition before finally running off the stage as the crowd booed.
In the end, a guy from Boston won, much to the disappointment of the MC. “This is a sad day for New York,” he said. “Some guy from Boston comes to our city and kicks our asses in a pizza competition. That’s fucked up. Alright, we’re gonna give him the trophy now, so everyone flick him off for the official picture.”
The next morning was rough for Justin. He was still blaming the milk for the stomach ache, but he couldn’t deny the fact that his lower intestines were burning. I’m guessing the Spicy Pizza of Doom challengers were each spending an agonizing morning in the bathroom.
“What’s the appeal?” I asked him. “I’ve been trying to figure out why people are so into this.”
“Some people might think it’s a macho thing,” he shrugged, “and maybe it is a little of that — guys trying to see who can handle the hottest stuff. But I didn’t get into it because of that, even though I’m the ‘hot wing’ guy in our friend group now. It’s more that it’s something that makes you different.”
I imagined if my North Carolina hometown tried to host a hot sauce expo that it might attract a few dozen people at most. Something so niche could only sustain a crowd of hundreds in a big city. That’s why Justin was so happy there. That’s why he was already making plans to attend next year. He was finally able to be with the creators, celebrities, champions and other culinary contrarians who, against all rationale, like to set their mouths on fire.
Photo by Elle Hughes on Unsplash
