This Unique Local Hot Sauce Will Make You Rethink Spicy Food

By Anthony Todd in Food on May 9, 2016 2:06PM

The new sauce. Photo courtesy of GT Fish & Oyster.

If you go to the hot sauce aisle at your local supermarket, it's all about heat. The heat is sometimes marked in "Scoville units" (the scaled used to measure the heat of peppers), and it's sometimes denoted with fireworks or big red letters, but the message is usually the same: It's all about hot, hotter, hottest.

Not so for Scorch, the latest hot sauce from Chef Giuseppe Tentori and GT Fish & Oyster. Here, it's all about flavor. Fans of GT will be familiar with Tentori's two existing hot sauces, a red and a green version, but Tentori wanted to create something really new with Scorch. That's why he paired up with a farmer and a food scientist to create an heirloom product that combines the best of hot sauce with the flavors of citrus—without a single citrus fruit.

Tentori discovered a unique pepper, the Lemon Drop pepper from Peru, at a local farmers market. "They look like a jalepeño, but I tested it and said 'holy shit, that’s so hot,'" said Tentori. But the heat isn't the only thing that makes this pepper unique. "It doesn’t burn—you get a more citrus flavor, and it lingers in your mouth. It doesn’t burn like a habanero. I love that about it."

Tentori harvesting the peppers. Photo courtesy of GT Fish & Oyster.

Food scientist Sean McGrath, who Tentori enlisted to help him scale up the recipe, described it similarly. "The pepper tastes just like lemon, it’s amazing with oysters and seafood," he explained. "It also goes away—it doesn’t linger, and you can continue to eat."

But just finding an amazing pepper at a farmers market doesn't mean there is enough of it to bottle. They commissioned a local farmer to grow 800 pounds of these peppers, and McGrath worked to scale up the recipe to semi-industrial proportions. "If you make an error in a five pound recipe, it’s going to be compounded as you get bigger. If you’re off by .1 percent, that is now a 10 pound error when you scale up," explained McGrath.

It's also complicated because not all peppers are the same. "Chilis change throughout the year. I once made a sauce that was on a menu for 1000-unit chain, and it was a habanero sauce, and one crop varied considerably and suddenly we started getting complaints from consumers!" he said.

Peppers vary throughout the year, and the heat of a particular crop can change based on moisture and soil chemistry. That's why careful measurement and constant testing is key.

The sauce doesn't contain any added ingredients and, surprisingly once you taste it, it doesn't contain any citrus. Just peppers, vinegar and salt. "It’s not a very complex sauce—it lets the chili shine," said McGrath. The pepper is such a great citrus. It’s just like you’re eating chili and lemon."

For Scorch, McGrath and Tentori prepared about 4000 bottles. They will be served at GT Fish & Oyster, and are available at Mariano's for purchase. If it sells out, they might do another batch next year, but it all depends on the availability of the peppers, so if you want a taste of this sauce, buy it now.