- This is so cute!
- That's a golden ghost.
- Look how beautiful.
That's a ghost pepper?
I found that the flavors I love the most are often buried
in this thing that hurts.
- [Stephen] One of the hottest peppers in the world...
- My tongue is genetically inferior.
- [Noah] Your brain actually thinks that you're on fire.
- Okay, really hot.
It's so hot!
- Once you're in, you're in.
There's no going back.
- This is crazy.
This is such a beautiful day.
(groaning)
God, I hope it's good.
(breathing heavily)
(dramatic music)
I'm making a hot sauce.
It's actually something that I've been working on
for over a year.
I was thinking about how much I like doing fast food videos
and how much I like food, and how I wanted
to make a food for people.
Because I've had Nashville hot chicken, I've been more
and more into Korean and Chinese food.
And I've just been in this word of spice,
where everything is super delicious,
but also super, super spicy.
I was like, "I wish there was something this flavorful
"that didn't hurt my mouth so much."
I had trouble finding it, so I thought,
"Maybe I should make one."
It's been a year long journey just to get here
where today I will finally learn how to make a hot sauce.
How many times have you gotten pepper oil in your eye?
- The eye is not the worst one, believe it or not.
(laughing)
- I'm Noah Chaimberg, I'm the founder of Heatonist.
And we're sitting here in our hot sauce test garden
in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
- [Keith] And if you don't know who Heatonist is,
they're the company that does the sauces for Hot Ones.
They're just brilliant and we're excited to really go
and taste all the things they really have.
- [Noah] We grow stuff that you would never find
at the grocery store.
And we use that as kind of thought starters.
- It feels like in the last decade, hot sauce has got
its own community, society,
people just love hot sauce so much.
Why do you think that is?
- Globalization of flavor.
If you ask your parents, when they were a kid,
"How often did you eat Thai food?"
Or, "How often did you eat Mexican food?"
They would have said never.
But nowadays, if you ask any kid, they're eating everything.
People have been exposed to spice from a younger age.
And as anyone who loves the stuff knows,
once you're in, you're in.
There's no going back.
- My tongue is just genetically inferior.
(quirky music)
If somehow you don't know, I have a geographic tongue,
and fissured tongue.
Fissured tongue is when you have these deep cracks
in your tongue.
- [Noah] Whoa!
How did that happen?
- This is the tongue I was born with.
And also it has these little pink or white shapes on it.
And those shapes can move...
And that's why it's called geographic tongue,
because it kind of looks like a map.
They can flare up from things that are too spicy.
And then the fissured tongue makes it worse
because spice will get into those fissures
and my tongue will swell and keeping the spice in my tongue.
One in every hundred people have geographic tongue,
so we're out there.
And I found that the flavors I love the most
are often buried in this thing that hurts.
- What we say about hot sauce is it's food
that goes on food.
So we love it to have great flavor
that's gonna make your food something
that you're gonna enjoy even more.
Right now, we carry about a hundred different hot sauces.
From about 60 small batch producers from around the country
and from around the world.
We have sauce on the shelves right now from the
United States and Canada, Peru, Scandinavia, England,
Fiji, Japan, Australia, New Zealand.
From all over.
About a dozen of them are our own creations.
When Keith reached out first about making a hot sauce,
I was really excited because I thought he would bring
a really unique take and approach because he's so deep
into the details.
But in a way that's fun and really,
that's what hot sauce is all about.
It should be fun.
This is Sauce Bae, the tumeric hot sauce.
Little sweet, little heat.
- Ooh, that's a little...it's got heat.
About as high spice as I wanna go.
I'm not crying.
That's a good place for me to be.
Black peppery-ness, it seems good in it.
- Black pepper will give it a bit of a floral quality
that you get up the nose.
This one is from Butterfly Bakery in Vermont.
This is the Pink Peppercorn Gin.
- Oh wow!
- This one's got a blend of peppers.
So some red serranos and a little bit of habanero.
So you'll get a little more heat in the back.
- Is there like a fruit or citrus or something in there?
Tastes like it has something sweet.
- This sauce is made with garlic scapes which are kind
of an interesting ingredient
that does have sweetness to it.
We have Coconut Lime hot sauce.
- This smells so good.
- The coconut gives you a little bit of that body.
This one's interesting 'cause it has also a little bit
of agave.
- I love the silky texture.
We're three sauces in.
The tissues are coming out.
Pardon me, I'm just...
(clears throat)
Sinuses are opening up here.
- [Noah] This is that Lion's Mane Piri Piri.
- That's almost like marinara.
- Strangely familiar...
- Uh huh.
- There's the red bell pepper.
- All through my college, made roasted bell peppers
all the time.
And I want you to notice that yes, my nose is running,
I'm not crying.
- So I saved the hot one for last.
- [Keith] Oh gosh.
- An Assam hot sauce.
So inspired by the favors of India.
Little bit on the hotter side.
- I'm just gonna go ahead and cut myself a slice of bread.
You've got this delicious looking bread.
(sighs)
Indian spicy is so spicy.
Wow.
- [Noah] So really herbaceous.
- I could feel like the build of it now,
that if I kept eating this sauce,
it would be super overwhelming for me.
But it's really flavorful.
I liked how different this was.
Very unique.
And I think I want something
that other people haven't had before.
I love buffalo sauce.
Buffalo sauce is my favorite thing.
So I want it to have kinda like buffalo notes.
But I always see buffalo with ranch,
so I want some ranch notes.
And I want acidic stuff because I like my flavors
to be complicated.
And there's no chicken sauce out there in the world.
There's steak sauce, fish sauce.
There's no sauce just for chicken.
I really wanna make one that's just very delicious,
for chicken, for nuggets, for tenders, for wings.
- Butterfly Bakery and Claire in particular,
would be a great person to bring your sauce recipe
to the finish line because she's someone
where we can give a brief to and say,
"Here's what we're thinking."
- I'm Claire Georges, I own Butterfly Bakery
in Montpelier, Vermont.
- We love working with Claire because Claire is a chef
who you can give a concept to.
It could be something that sounds really weird,
but she's gonna find a way to make it delicious.
I would describe Claire as dependable, honest,
and inventive.
- We started out as a bakery,
but now we primarily make hot sauce.
2011, our farmer's market sales were kind of slumping.
There were a lot of leftover peppers at the farmer's market.
Started making a little hot sauce.
15 bottles in a batch.
People bought it all, we made a little bit more hot sauce,
people bought all of that.
In about a year, we might end up making
about 240,000 bottles of hot sauce.
(laughing)
- [Keith] Round it up to a cool 250,
you know what I'm saying?
(laughs)
- Quarter of a mil?
- [Keith] Pretty much!
(laughing)
- The crazy part about it is
it just keeps growing on its own.
People keep wanting the sauce that we're making.
This is Butterfly Bakery.
So we have two freezers.
This one is a little bit larger.
- Whoa.
Oh yeah.
- [Claire] Do you want a lantern?
- This is too funny.
Smells like a bunch of pizza ingredients to me.
Like when you're in the back of a pizza kitchen.
One of the more recent shipments of the 40,000 pounds
of peppers they bought this year,
and they have to use a lantern to read the peppers.
They got habaneros right here,
there's some red jalapenos, red serranos.
There's a pepper here form Bone Mountain.
- [Claire] Yes.
- Bone Mountain.
This is crazy.
Freezing cold.
So many peppers, and it's so loud.
It's so cold.
(exhaling heavily)
I have to leave, I have to leave, it's too cold.
I feel like the Indiana Jones of peppers.
The way you both opened the doors simultaneously earlier,
very Jurassic Park.
This is the funniest part.
(laughing)
(classical music)
- Hi, I'm Stephen Chamberlain.
I'm the owner of Dutchess Farm.
We grow lots of vegetables.
Particularly, we grow lots of hot peppers for Claire.
These are all ghost peppers over on this side.
One of the hottest peppers in the world,
these are the Bhut Jolokia.
- [Keith] The spiciest?
- Yes.
Claire really wants hot, hot.
(Claire laughing)
- [Keith] How long have you been growing peppers?
- [Stephen] Well, I used to grow some jalapenos--
- [Claire] And I realized I didn't have enough peppers.
So I sent out an email saying, "Oh my God, who has peppers?"
- [Keith] You weren't growing that many peppers.
- [Stephen] Right.
- [Keith] Until you needed lots of peppers.
- [Claire] We're the number one purchaser for Vermont grown
chili pepper in the world.
This year, we ordered 40,000 pounds of peppers.
- [Keith] That's crazy.
So almost all of this, is your fault?
(laughing)
So I'm gonna have at least 3,000 bottles made
for the first run.
How many pounds of peppers would equate
to about 3,000 bottles
- [Claire] About 500 pounds.
- This maybe would yield...
- [Stephen] 500 pounds.
- This much growth, just for me.
- [Claire] Yep.
- So Keith just needs one of these all to himself.
- That is a lot of chicken.
- That's a lot of chicken to eat.
And I'm willing to eat it.
This is so cute.
- That's a golden ghost.
- Look how beautiful!
That's a ghost pepper?
- Yeah.
- Yeah, that's hot.
- [Claire] Oh, yeah, don't eat that.
(laughing)
- [Keith] It looks so cute though, doesn't it?
Jesus, these look terrifying.
Oh my God.
Looks like it's killing itself.
You know, it's like
(growling)
Smells very cilantro-y, celery-y here.
- [Stephen] There is cilantro right near by.
(snaps fingers)
(Claire laughing)
Do you really smell that?
- [Keith] Uh huh, yeah.
I picked it up.
Claire, are these my peppers?
- [Claire] These are your peppers.
These are the peppers in your sauce.
- And why did you choose these peppers for my sauce?
(Claire laughing)
- [Claire] You wanted not to hot.
- [Keith] Yep.
- So we were gonna go with serrano jalapeno level,
then dial it back a little bit with the roasted peppers.
The serranos have a nice kind of brighter flavor.
Which would kind of balance the richness of your sauce.
Serranos turn red more easily in Vermont.
And you want a medium heat level,
here in Vermont, this is the pepper to go for!
- This is the pepper!
Are these spicy right off the vine?
Is it gonna burn my mouth if I eat this?
- Depends on your definition of hot.
- Does this look like a good one?
- That's beautiful.
(snapping)
- Wow, good snap.
So I wanna...
(crunching)
(dramatic music)
Oh, that's really hot.
(Claire laughing)
It's really hot! - So your second bite...
If you-- - It's really hot!
- When you eat something spicy that capsaicin
in the chili peppers is getting picked up by receptors
in your mouth, your brain actually thinks
that you're on fire.
- It's so hot!
Oh no!
- So your brain releases all these chemicals
to help deal with it.
It releases serotonin and endorphins and adrenalin.
You get excited.
- Woo!
It's hot!
- [Noah] And that's all your brain giving you what you need
to deal with what it perceives
as a really dangerous situation.
Reality is, it's not dangerous at all.
- This is such a beautiful day.
(laughing)
This is such beautiful experience.
Woo!
So this is what you use for a medium?
- Oh yeah.
- Flavor's good.
Took one little bite, look at these tears.
- [Noah] People get hooked on that rush of brain chemicals,
which is good and good for you.
- I couldn't sell something that is predominately
with this pepper without eating it.
I'd have to know what the pepper tastes like.
Okay, well that was very spicy.
(coughs)
I loved seeing the farm and seeing
where everything came from.
- [Claire] Anything you eat.
And it matters to where it comes from.
Can be something like this where we can visit
and meet the farmer and see the land and walk across.
Or it can be a big industrial farm that you're not allowed
to visit, that you're not allowed to see.
And who knows what else is growing in there.
But it all starts here.
- It was cool to hear about you needing this
and you coming in to supply that.
That's very neat.
I think that farmers willy nilly grow stuff
and just sell it to who willy nilly buys it.
Of course that's not how it works.
(cheerful music)
How do you approach somebody telling you
all the flavors they want and then make a sauce out of that?
- Well, I can taste in my head.
When we're talking about food, like, even right now,
I'm tasting it constantly.
- Butter.
- Yeah.
- Cinnamon.
- Yes, all of that.
- Wow.
- This is our warehouse over here.
We keep everything finished in here, ready to go out.
- What's the water for?
- Vinegar.
- It's vinegar?!
- Yes.
- This is just tubs of vinegar?
- [Claire] Yep.
- Could you pickle me?
(laughing)
I could become a pickle!
So there's definitely vinegar in my sauce?
- To be able to can it safely, it has to be acidified.
- Acidified!
- [Claire] Yes.
- That's a hot word.
Is it supposed to be like this, or like this?
- Technically yes, like that.
- Oh, perfect!
(laughing)
Feel like wearing a soccer goal!
- Oh, aprons.
- This is my sauce.
I'm actually making some of the sauce that I'll be selling.
We're just making a whole batch.
- We got 13 ingredients here.
Box of serranos.
Our pepper preppers de-stem them.
- [Keith] Did you say pepper prepper?
- Yes.
- [Keith] That's too fun isn't it.
And they look like fingers.
- [Claire] We're gonna put 'em in whole
and cook them down like that.
So then we got the garlic scapes, curly tops
of the garlic plant.
Farmers cut them off to encourage the bulb to grow bigger.
And they usually just compost 'em or feed 'em to the pigs.
- Pigs are eating well!
They're like the best green bean I've ever had.
Alarmingly sweet!
- Wow, it's like candy.
- It's like candy.
Into the bucket!
- [Claire] These are our maplewood smoked onions.
So these are Walla Walla onions.
They're huge.
The size of a baby's head.
- [Keith] Really nice onion earthiness also in there.
- [Claire] We do not add any sweetener.
- [Keith] Mmm, it's like a sweet onion popsicle.
(laughing)
Wow.
(splashing)
- [Claire] Salt and freshly ground black pepper.
- Into the bucket!
- So then we've got the herbs over here.
Your very classic ranch herb combo.
Dried chives, the dried parsley, and the dried dill.
- Into the bucket.
Into the bucket.
So much green.
- [Claire] Roasted red peppers.
- Oh, aren't they beautiful.
- Two ingredients here.
Oil on the top and Vermont maple syrup on the bottom.
- Maple Syrup - Yes.
We were aiming for ranch and ranch is always sweetened.
We actually don't use any refined sugar in any
of our products here.
We use maple syrup, it's our sweetener.
It just adds that nice earthiness, that nice richness.
- Oh, wow!
Maple syrup and oil!
- [Claire] He's doing great, making some yummy sauce.
- I love it when people give me compliments.
- Vinegar right--
- Oh vinegar!
The vinegar!
Vinegar!
(vinegar splashing)
Vinegar.
- [Claire] We cook it for one to two hours.
- Uh huh.
- This doesn't have all the safeties
of a home immersion blender.
Flick stuff-- - Okay, all right!
Don't bring it above.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I don't know how long it is 'cause I didn't put it in.
So I'm just guessing.
- [Claire] Now that it's mostly done,
we're gonna add the sour cream pour.
So it adds this nice tang, this nice mouth feel,
this nice richness to the sauce.
- Oh my gosh.
That was a workout.
I did not expect it to be so intense.
- Feel like I was just at the gym.
- [Keith] You must be strong!
You must be yoked!
- Here in New England, you get a lot of guys offering
to carry things.
And I'm like, "I'm good."
You guys wanna taste?
- [Keith] Yeah.
Straight from the pot!
♪ It must be love ♪
Oh, it's explosive.
It's like a wave of flavor that rushes over you.
It's not like any hot sauce I've ever had before.
Oh, it's so good.
It's definitely spicy.
I'm not running for the hills.
It's not chaos.
Puts a smile on your face.
It's right in those cheeks.
We're bottling the sauce.
- 204 degrees, so we're good.
- That's hot.
- It's hot.
It's hot.
Whoa!
It really shoots right out.
It is, wham!
- This is how we started.
Was hand bottling like this.
We do micro batches this way.
- [Keith] This is insane.
- [Claire] When you fill a bottle with 200 degrees sauce.
It kills anything that might happen to be in there.
We make sure that the rim is clean here.
There's a liner in here.
It slightly melts to the bottle itself,
forms a hermetic seal.
Turn it on it's side.
It touches the 200 degree sauce
against the inside of the cap.
You wanna try?
- I do, but I feel like I'm gonna
embarrass myself pretty quickly.
Oh!
- [Claire] So you wanna make sure that the rim is clean.
You see there's sauce on the rim.
- (beep)
(Claire laughing)
(beep)!
- Just wipe it off.
Yep, that's all you need to do.
- Wow, this is my first ever bottle of hot sauce.
Oh no!
(dramatic music)
Oh no!
What do I do?
- Toss a little back in there.
The most important thing is that this is clean
and that the threads are clean.
- Oh okay.
Oh no!
I got it on the side!
Is it hot enough?
Yeah!
It's hot enough!
Super hot.
Look I almost match.
(laughing)
- That's a good color.
- I love this color.
This is a nice autumnal brown.
This is bottled now.
How long until it expires?
- The official expiration date is about two years.
In reality, it's hermetically sealed,
nothing is gonna go wrong inside that bottle.
- So forever.
- Pretty much.
- So it could be a wine.
Mwah!
My wife's maid of honor from our wedding, Natalie,
she's made our wedding invites,
she's just a tremendous graphic designer.
The label itself went through a lot of changes.
We kind of went a few places.
The first one had most of my body in the chicken bucket
and it was like just a little too cartoonish.
I want it to be still a cartoon but a little more realistic.
So we went back and forth on notes.
We got all these little emojis that are very faint,
you can barely see them.
But they're all ingredients in the sauce.
In this box are my finished bottles
of Keith's Chicken Sauce.
♪ Nah, nah, nah, nah! ♪
Oh, wow!
Look at it.
(laughing)
It's hilarious.
It has a fucking barcode!
It's got nutrition facts.
You get to have a little Keith's face
in your fridge looking back at you.
Every time you open that door and reach for the butter,
hi Kieth.
We have this beautiful story, "Dear friend,
"by enjoying this sauce on your favorite chicken,
"you and I are sharing an experience of delicious flavors,
"gentle heat, amazing ingredients, and intimate,
"universal harmony.
"It's also great on pizza."
(choir singing)
- It's just the right amount of heat
to bring out the flavors of the pizza, I love it.
- I'm getting a lot of dill notes.
The pickle presence is fantastic.
- Oh wow!
It pours out so thick!
Well, it's not too hot, so I can have a lot of it.
Oh, it's still got a little kick to it.
(laughing)
- This is certified dope.
Gets the Zach Kornfeld dope seal of approval.
- [Keith] Really?!
(makes explosion noise)
- I only eat very hot.
Because I'm a spice demon.
Mmm, that's really good Keith.
It's not as mild as I thought it would be.
It's got a little kick to it at the end.
- I feel like I could chug it.
- [Keith] Oh my God.
- Yeah!
That pretty good as a beverage.
My mouth is on fire right now.
- It tastes almost like it was cooked together
in a pot by someone personally.
- It's spicy, it's not overwhelming.
It would go good with ranch.
It's awesome!
Legitimately, I can't believe you're doing this.
This is very cool.
- Nailed it!
- [Keith and Zach] Woo!
- It's available now, you can buy it right now.
There's a link in the description.
You can get it today.
You can eat the flavors I've designed on the food
that I've reviewed.
On Instagram on Twitter, Tweet at me, tag me
in what you're eating it with.
Keith's Chicken Sauce, a not too hot sauce
for chicken and other stuff.
What's exciting to you about making my sauce.
- We make a lot of sauce.
It had never even occurred to me to make a sauce like this.
And you thought of it.
- [Keith] Go on.
Go on please. - It was incredible.
And I never would have thought of this flavor on my own.
It's totally unique.
- Well, maybe with my sauce, 'cause it'll be a huge success,
right world?
We'll get that 250K bottles up
to a million K bottles a year!
I'll have 750,000 bottles of only my sauce.
Unlikely, but we can try right?
- We can totally try.
- That's what I do on the channel.
- I know how to do that.
- 750,000 bottles of it!
- [Claire] I don't know how long
we're supposed to keep walking for.
- [Keith] I never know, you just stop at some point.
(Claire laughing)
(upbeat music)