Whether you embrace turning up the heat or
dialing it down,
hot sauce can be that secret ingredient to add extra warmth to your
meals.
Dan T’s is a Canadian company that blends Old World and New World flavours in its
sauces, an innovative approach to help make them more
accessible and show there’s a lot more to hot sauce than just mild, medium and
hot.
“I’m actually like most people in that I don’t like
to be blasted with unbridled heat, nor nasally assaulted with great wafts of vinegar,” says Dan Taylor,
founder of Dan T’s. “While [our] sauces do run the gamut of heat levels, from mildly warm to really hot, they
all pride themselves in their unique flavour and balance of heat.”
Taylor began creating the hot-sauce varieties through a series of kitchen trials while
he was attending university. It didn’t take long for his passion for food to extend beyond the kitchen. In
1992, he founded Dan T’s, a company that prides itself on its wide range of sauces that appeal to even the
most timid palates. Paradiso is a line of chipotle pepper sauces, which are milder and sweeter, and Inferno
is a line of cayenne pepper sauces, which are spicier and more robust.
“Chipotle is a dried, smoked jalapeno pepper that has moderate heat and a wonderful
woody smoulder… It blends nicely with fruit flavours such as raspberry and orange, and even maple. The
Paradiso sauces are great when used as a finishing glaze for grilled meats,” he says, noting his favourite
sauce pairing is the Raspberry Chipotle with warm brie served on a baguette.
For the spicier varieties including Spiced Cayenne and WhiteHot Cayenne, Taylor says
it’s all about the taste.
“I love cayenne peppers. They’re long, sexy-slender
and dignified. They don’t give it all out on the first bite like some less prudent peppers… Cayenne warmth
builds slowly in the back of your mouth, and does not assault your lips with premature brashness,” he
explains. “I hold the warmest place in my heart for the original, Spiced Cayenne sauce. It is a culinary
chameleon that blends with other flavours without overpowering them. It’s a staple in our
house.”
» For more information on Dan T’s products, visit
dants.com
Scaling the
Heat
Whether you want to put a cap on the capsaicin or
feel the heat, the Scoville scale rates chili peppers from the world’s hottest
to the mildest. The scale is named after Wilbur
Scoville, an American pharmacist who created the scale in 1912 to rate the piquancy of chili peppers based on
their levels of capsaicin. To find out how your favourite pepper measures up, here are a few of the world’s
most famous:
15,000,000 to 16,000,000 Scoville heat units SHU
Pure capsaicin
Over 1,000,000 SHU
The world’s hottest chili peppers: Bhut Jolokia (ghost chili), Infinity chili and Naga
Viper
100,000 to 350,000 SHU
Habanero chili
30,000 to 50,000SHU
Cayenne pepper
5,000 to 10,000 SHU
Chipotle pepper
2,500 to 8,000 SHU
Jalapeno pepper
Up to 500 SHU
Banana pepper •
