Perhaps it’s just me, but one of the only expressly masculine things I engage in is my love of meat and hot sauce. Forget about sports and the feetballs and the puck-holes, and forget about dining at restaurants that have only waitresses with certain physical attributes. I love me some hot foods.

It’s always the quirky intellectual who’ll show up at a barbecue and start spouting off things about scovilles and scotch bonnets, that specialized knowledge surely winning friends, gaining attention and not a little bit of admiration from the ladies. I saw that guy, and became him. Minus the ladies. Did you know that a ‘chipotle’ is just a smoked jalapeño? Do you like me more now? See?

For this reason, I’ve always wanted to surround myself with hot sauce. Maybe it’s genetic – my grandpa grows his own chilies and at the end of every season, they’re dried and we make out own super-hot pepper, and my grandma will ask for whatever secret supply of hot sauce that any good Mexican restaurant can offer. And when it comes to sushi, I make a beeline for the Spicy Crunchy Roll. While I’m not combing the dusty back aisles of Marshalls (an excellent place to find bizarre, but occasionally questionable, hot sauces), The Amazing Hot Sauce of the Month Club is the best thing to supply my crazy spicy needs. Eggs, tuna, soup – you name it.

I’ve made no secret in discussing my adoration for the ‘Amazing Of The Month Clubs’ before. They offer a great, hand-picked variety of verified awesome, and I get a distinct pleasure in being surprised by a monthly delivery of… surprise. It used to come in the form of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse videotapes, and then, the Classic Marvel Figurine Collection. Clearly, I’m evolving. I can barely stop my beard at the rate it’s going.

Your monthly delivery of hot sauce comes with two safely packed bottles, described in an accompanying newsletter. I had the delight of receiving Hot Mama’s Habanero Hot Sauce XX, which is made in Belize of all places, and ‘Hot Chocolate’, another habanero sauce, this one from some mysterious place in the US, and made from ‘chocolate’ habaneros, which is actually a variety of pepper, and not some strange Wonkaish augmentation thereof. This is actually a darker variety of the regular habanero with an ‘unusual’ taste, can be dated back about 7000 years, and have a growing period longer than the average pepper. Though I’d not be opposed to the stranger, sweeter alternative either.

Your normal habanero is regarded as one of the hotter peppers, and ranges from 100,000 to 350,000 scovilles. A few peppers reach higher than this, but at that point, you’re probably putting yourself in physical danger. Anything above a million scovilles has been manufactured or chemically derived from the capsaicin found in peppers. So, dropping some chocolate pepper love on us this month was indeed a well-selected choice to give the hot sauce loving audience something that they might not have tried before.

And that’s what it’s all about – that amazing lottery of flavor that comes to you every month, and for less than 20 bucks a shipment, also. Like all of the other clubs, there’s a variety of time spans to decide from, but after only a few months, you’ll start to assemble your own colorful display of sauces for your kitchen cabinets or fridge. Which is really exciting. Click on over and check out another superb start to a great collection.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 18th, 2009 at 2:00 am and is filed under collecting fyi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.