Hot sauces more often being made in New Jersey

Photo courtesy Princes Farm StandAn increasing number of New Jerseyans are bottling and selling their own unique hot sauces.

There’s even a fall hot sauce show, Saucetoberfest, in Flemington. We found three Jersey-made hot sauces at Prince’s Farm Stand in Mountainside. Among the farm store’s jars of fiery pickles and milder salsas, there are hot sauces from Hunterdon and Passaic County. One maker is in nearby Fanwood.

Lorne Graham started experimenting with tongue-scorching sauces after having received gift plants of intensely hot Scotch Bonnet, Ghost and Carolina Reaper peppers. Before bottling his Hot Graham sauces last year, he consulted other craft makers in New York, New Jersey (he knows about a dozen here) and elsewhere. He got valuable pointers that helped bring three blends to market. They’re mild to hot. One uses beets.

“My wife and I are both professional musicians, and being musicians, our whole thing is just improvising,” he says. This extends to how his pepper sauces are used. The Warm Up, his mildest, is good in smoothies or with apple pie, he says. Even outside the social-media driven landscape of extreme food combinations, this sounds feasible — since the formula involves roasted pineapples, ginger and cilantro with gentle jalapeño heat.

Blending hot sauces is also a side business for two engineers, Nicole and Natalia Gonzalez. It’s a fun hobby and a nod to their family heritage. “We wanted to use ingredients that you would see in Puerto Rican food, and to tie that in with hot sauce, which is part of the family culture,” says Nicole. Their four Shipwreck Hot Sauce blends include combinations of roasted garlic and habanero, or mango, orange and poblano. The Captain is a citrus-forward blend with Mandarin oranges, lime, and a blend of peppers.

Their pique is a spicy vinegar infused with garlic, oranges and habanero chiles. The flavor-enhancing condiment also can be used in salad dress- ing. The hot sauces can be marinades, or blended with sour cream, which will tame heat in the resulting dip. But Gonzalez notes that their sauces aren’t extremely hot. “You are not going to kill your taste buds.”

Heather Prince Murphy, whose family owns Prince’s Farm Stand, is a vegetarian who enjoys spicy foods. She often uses hot sauces to enhance crisp tortillas filled with shredded lettuce, chopped red or Vidalia onions, salsa, sour cream and her home- made guacamole, with avocados, tomatoes and garlic.

“It’s like salad in a taco shell,” she says. The farm stand’s own salsas range from mild to medium, and varieties include tomatillo and fruit-flavored blends.

Co-owners John Kasper and his son, chef Jonathan. Photo Courtesy Whitehouse Station Sauce Company John Kasper, who runs Whitehouse Station Sauce Company with his son Jonathan, enjoys the combination of fruit and chile peppers, but says the brand took a slight departure with a new tomato-based table sauce. Introduced in May, it has already become a top seller, he says. It’s a seasoned blend of onions and garlic, cracked black pepper and Carolina Reaper chiles.

Kasper says his interest in hot sauces was piqued when a family member told him that frequent use of a home-blended hot sauce had helped with acid reflux, from which Kasper also suffered. While he makes no health claims for their sauce, he believes his acid-irritated esophagus has been soothed with increased hot sauce use.

“I literally eat it on everything,” he says. “I’ll take one of our fruit hot sauces and add it to plain Greek yogurt, and it gives it flavor and a little kick.” Before they went into business in 2013, Kasper was playing around with sauce combinations when his son, a Johnson & Wales-trained chef, showed him how they could be improved. Their brand now makes at least a dozen varieties, about half of which are available seasonally. While most of the formulations they sell were developed by the chef, John Kasper is to be credited with two of their recipes. “I came up with the jalapeño and the pumpkin-habanero that we do in the fall.”

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