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Jimmy Bannos admits when he first opened Heaven on Seven in Chicago some 36 years ago, most people didn’t really know much about hot sauces. In the last two decades, much has changed. Hot sauce has become one of the leading condiments and, as chef of the popular Chicago institution known for delicious Cajun/Creole cuisine, he’s particularly excited to see so many new hot sauces from different cultures originating outside the U.S. make it state-side. “Those cultures bringing their flavors [to the U.S.] have really expanded what is out there flavor-wise,” says Bannos.
Just released, Hot Sauce Nation details the history of hot sauces and how those sauces and chili peppers conquered America’s taste buds. In one chapter, Author Denver Nicks traces the history of the chili from its likely origins in an area of Bolivia, which he was surprised to learn all chilies come from, he says, to its introduction to Europe and the rest of the world. In another chapter, he examines the endorphin-heavy neurochemical reactions induced by hot sauce that make eating it so pleasurable.
Hot Sauce Nation: America’s Burning Obsession (Chicago Review Press; October 1, 2016) chronicles the... [+]
“Before the Columbian Exchange, there were no chilies outside of the Americas,” says Nicks. “Which is to say, when Christopher Columbus set sail for India in 1492, Indian food wasn’t spicy. Thai food wasn’t spicy (in the sense of “spicy’ as in the heat-pain that chilies impart). There was no spicy Chinese food. The Hungarians had no paprika. All of these cuisines that we think spiciness and chilies are so fundamental too, weren’t spicy at all. There’s a strong argument to be made that chilies are the Americas greatest gift to the world. ”
Chef Cleetus Friedman is no stranger to hot sauces. As a chef in Chicago, he often uses various sauces in his dishes. “I think most people like the challenge. With super spicy sauces, endorphins are released and cause a sense of euphoria, so I’m sure that people are loving that as well,” he says.
Interest and demand was so strong, Friedman launched his own hot sauce called Cleetus Heatus, available through his Crafted by Cleetus collection. He admits, it didn’t start off as a hot sauce.
“Cleetus Heatus started as a salsa, then Bloody Mary mix,” he explains. “Hot sauce was a natural progression. I love spicy, flavorful food and sometimes a dish just needs the extra kick that a good hot sauce can bring.”
When Bannos prepares dishes and intends to use a hot sauce, he looks for two things: flavor and heat before a sauce makes the cut. “It can be either or it can be both,” he says. “It really depends upon the dish and the hot sauces available.”
Aside from the four Bannos makes, he’s partial to Crystal Hot Sauce, which he believes pair with pretty much anything. It’s also a solid gateway sauce because it has more flavor than heat. Then customers move on to a Jalapeño-based sauce and work their way hotter & hotter. Then, before you know it, he says, they’re hooked.
“I also really love two newer hot sauces: Marie Sharp's Belizean Heat—just great! And Tabasco Reserve, barrel aged—so good!” he shares.
The Pleasurable Pain of Hot Sauce
As he was researching sauces, Nicks once had a double-dose of Scorpion Pepper tincture from Voodoo Chile that was something close to 3.278 million Scovilles (about 650 times hotter than Tabasco), he says, and describes the experience in the book.
“It was so overpoweringly painful that it was actually quite pleasant in the end,” says Nicks. “It was meditative, almost trance inducing, and flooded my brain with pain-killing chemicals in a way not all that dissimilar from the effect of illegal drugs. People joke sometimes about getting high eating really spicy food, but what they’re describing is actually a lot more like getting high the illicit way than they may know.”
Hot sauce isn’t for everyone but Nicks hopes that readers will be inspired to push themselves a bit further into the realm of spicy food than they were before.
“At a deeper level, I hope they’ll take away a renewed sense of adventure and lust for life and a new appreciation for pain and suffering because pain is what hot sauce is really all about,” he says. “Hot sauce shows us that pain can be good, that the human was built to suffer and sometimes likes to suffer, that pleasure and pain are forever entangled.”
Hot sauces show no signs of waning. Bannos is noticing many of the sauce companies trying to one-up each other as the hottest and focusing less on flavor. “Right now, the two hottest are the Carolina Reaper and Ghost Peppers—I see a lot of sauces using those now.”
Friedman is working on a Bourbon poblano perhaps some other fun peppers down the line.
For those who wonder what the story of hot sauce says about current affairs and politics today, Nicks says that story of hot sauce and of spicy food is one big morality play about how diversity and cultural exchange is good.
“The history of humanity over the last 500 years is a bummer most of the time, but hot sauce is often the bright spot in those dark epochs,” he answers. “The Indians got chilies through European colonialism. The slave trade helped bring spicy foods into the United States. Even in Mexico, where chilies have been eaten for millennia and where the arrival of Europeans meant the beginning of a genocide, mole today—sort of a spiritual ancestor of hot sauce—uses spices that came, originally, from Asia. A world in which everyone kept in their own ethnic or cultural or racial lane would be a world without hot sauce as we know it. Fuck that.”
