"DO NOT TRY THIS SAUCE WITHOUT FOOD. CONSUMED NEAT THIS PRODUCT WILL BURN AND COULD CAUSE HARM."- The bottle.
Have you ever missed and slashed your ring while shaving your arse-crevice? Thought not. Well neither have I. However the sensation can't be too far removed from what your balloon knot feels like the morning after eating something with Dave's Ghost Pepper Sauce in it.
Produced by the institution (or should that be institutionalised?) Dave's Gourmet, Ghost Pepper Sauce is a lovely, awesomely fruity condiment made using naga jolokia peppers, a touch of garlic, some tomato purée, and a wee bit of lemon juice. It weighs in at a nose-streaming, sinus-purging 670,000 Scoville units, which makes it 112% the heat of Mad Dog .357, 335% the heat of Painmaker, 26,800% the heat of tabasco sauce. Even then, the hardened chillihead will have had hotter, as it's merely 44.7% the heat of Da Bomb Beyond Insanity and a derisory 9.4366% the heat of The Source.
Upon opening the bottle your nose will light up at its wonderful, fruity, almost citrus, smell. It looks fairly inoffensive, being a slightly orangey hue rather than the angry red that most ultra hot sauces are. I started by putting just one prong of a fork into it and licking that and my mouth threatened to declare independence. I swallowed a teaspoon of it and began to excrete from every orifice on my face, including my ears. Later that day, I could actually feel it tracking through my small intestine. But it was worth it, because it tastes so good! It doesn't have the grit that Dave's Insanity Sauce has, or the sharp sourness of Mad Dog Inferno. No, it's smooth, like the sort of lava that cools into obsidian.
I attempted to cook this with this stuff. I also threw in eight (8) habaneros and some Insanity Sauce as well. That stuff was a grenade of a dinner. Beautiful taste though, all fruity and aromatic as well as fiery hot. However, the problem came at about 4.00 pm the next day, when I'd just come back to the office from being at court and felt a sudden need to lay some cable. Running to the thunderbox like a bastard, I swiftly dropped my kexx and seated myself, noting the sensation in the pit of my stomach as being akin to what a sink probably feels like when you pull the plug out.
"Oh well," I thought, "better an eviction than a bad tenant."
Well, an eviction then duly took place, but it was not a smooth experience. Afterwards, my freckle was throbbing like an Internet Explorer logo on a dial-up connection. I had to dash to the sink, wet a handful of paper, and wipe with that because just wiping on its own wouldn't make it go. This was an experience wholly unfamiliar to me.
Did I learn from it? Not bloody likely, I've cooked with it many times since.
One word of warning, though - if you and your better half are of the ilk to use foodstuffs in the bedroom, please please please don't mistake the bottle of this for the K-Y jelly. You'll never live it down.
(IRON NODER 2011 6/30)