By Demons Be Driven

Last Saturday a friend of mine gave me a special gift: "The Source", a hot sauce from Original Juan Specialty Foods, who claims this product as the world's hottest hot sauce. According to legend as told by Original Juan Specialty Foods, the god that held the Source of all energy had to protect this source from other gods quarreling about it, and hid it so well that eventually it became nothing more than a legend--until now.

The 1 oz bottle is beautifully packaged in a box with a fetish figure on the outside, stating that "All things good or bad are driven by energy," implying that that this hot sauce is the source of this energy. It isn't really a sauce but a chili paste for those that like hot food.

We're used to hot food in our family. Tonight we had pumpkin soup by request of our daughter, and both of our children aged three and eight ask for chili sauce for their soup.

Pumpkin soup also means hot chili sauce to me, and preferably much hotter than requested by our children, so today was a perfect day to try The Source, which until now had been confined to a shelf out of children's reach.

Upon opening the box, I received the first indication of just how hot The Source might be. You rarely find foods with liability release labels, but the back label of the bottle made it explicit that:


An appropriate warning for a bottle claiming to contain hot sauce equivalent to 7.1 million Scoville units, meaning that it will have to be diluted 7.1 million times before the irritant active component causing chili to feel hot is undetectable, or about thirty times hotter than the hottest chili. In other words, whatever The Source is, it must have come straight from Hell.

The contents, a maroon paste, was to be applied with a plastic spatula. Wise from experience with hot chili, I scraped a barely visible amount off the spatula and mixed it into my bowl of soup.

It tasted wonderful. It was truly a great taste of fine chili, but as chili lovers can tell you, if hot chili feels hot right off the bat, get ready to burn, baby.

The sensation of a lit fuse came almost immediately. And it became hot. Burning, freaking hot. My nose started to run, and my eyes watered. If I had put anything more than just a pinch of the paste into my full bowl of soup, I swear I'd have had to see a doctor.

Yet the taste is addictive. I can't wait to experiment with this product in a dish that requires chili as a critical ingredient. I'm not sure which god held The Source, but I suspect he is to be found among those with horns and cloven hoofs.