Great Bottles Of Fire! -- Markets, Shops Are Ablaze With Hot-Sauce Craze

This place is hot.

People drift in, looking for a taste kick - and they get it. The Firehouse, a hole-in-the-wall shop in The Alley mall on Broadway, deals in hot pepper sauces and doles out samples. Those tiny dots of sauce on a plastic spoon may look ever-so innocent but they can send your mouth spiraling through the roof, as I'm learning this afternoon.

They can also bring flavor and punch - mild or murderous - to all sorts of dishes: chili, chowder, scrambled eggs, pizza, pasta, stir fries and more.

Puget Sounders are dipping into the incendiary potions as hot-sauce shops spring up around the area - Seattle Heat in downtown Seattle and Redmond, The Chili Inferno in Kirkland and Topanga Chile Traders in Issaquah, besides this store on Capitol Hill.

Since the first local store opened early last year, the number has flared up to five. The Firehouse, arriving in February, is the latest addition.

A few restaurants are getting into the act, too, displaying shelves of hot sauces for diners' choosing.

Hot-sauce parties have replaced wine tastings in some crowds, and collectors show off their colorful bottles in glass-fronted, refrigerated shelves.

Dick Pangallo of Seattle Heat often sees customers with collections of 50 to 100 bottles, and has heard of others with hundreds.

There's at least one club for fans of bottled flame, the Frequent Fryers, organized by The Firehouse for customers who buy a minimum amount of sauce. The most recent meeting drew about 350.

A young Microsoft cyberhead with money to burn shelled out $3,500 to buy one bottle of every hot sauce in the store, says owner Doug Austin, better known as D.J.

Albuquerque, N.M., is the country's hot-sauce capital, with at least 15 stores, Austin says, but Seattle is heating up nicely. The influx of people here from all over the country and the world - including many places with spicy-hot cuisines - gets much of the credit.

Hot topic

Austin, who plans to open stores in Bellingham and Portland, is handing out samples this afternoon along with a steady stream of hot-sauce lore. He's clearly in love with his subject.

Customers eat it up and add lore of their own as they taste their way through the array of sauces.

Austin had recommended I bring some milk. Good advice. Whole milk is about the most soothing antidote to a fiery sauce, and I find myself sipping it often. Or gulping it.

A mild offering, S'ole Jalapeno Pepper Sauce, is first up for tasting. The label calls it medium hot, but Austin rates it only a 2 on a heat scale of 1 though 10, and that seems about right. Flavored with onion, garlic, vinegar and unnamed spices, it's easy to take and is his biggest seller.

Fans of flavor

Those seasonings are worth a thought. Heat alone may fire up some sauce lovers, but more and more want flavor, too, and the most interesting products deliver it.

Garlic comes through in mild-to-medium-hot Jest Garlic Pepper Sauce; sweet, mild Toad Sweat Dessert Hot Sauce combines cocoa and lime juice with habanero peppers; and lime brings a nice tang to medium-hot Marie Sharp's Habanero Pepper Sauce.

That last is from the Caribbean, source of some of today's best hot sauces, in Austin's opinion, though sauces also come in from Mexico, Thailand, Louisiana's Cajun country, the Southwest and other regions.

We're moving up the heat scale; I'm guzzling more milk and wiping my brow. Iguana Habanero Pepper Sauce, at about 5 or 6, leaves my mouth burning but not before imparting a complex mix of flavors from carrots, onions, garlic, tomato paste and lime juice.

Many rank the habanero as the hottest of all peppers, but even it has sub-varieties with different heat levels; other ingredients, such as sweet carrots in the Iguana sauce, offer a counterpoint to the heat.

By now, five or six people crowd the tiny shop, tasting and talking. They're veterans, stoic as they take tongue to liquid fire, then offer assessments.

A regular, Scottie McDonell, stops in to buy a whole case of Lucifer's Damnation, a scorching sauce he'll mix with his own steak sauce to create a lively hybrid.

Slow burn

We move on to Ahi Amazona, one of the most intriguing sauces. Austin discovered it almost a dozen years ago in Cartagena, Colombia. He'd gone there to scout out hot sauces with the idea of marketing them in the U.S. Soon, he opened a shop in New Orleans, and later moved to Seattle.

Ahi Amazona calls itself a "fiery green sauce," and it certainly is that. But before I feel any heat, I'm treated to a tangy, slightly sweet, smoky flavor that hints of lime. It turns out there's no lime here, only green Amazon peppers, vinegar and salt, showing just how flavorful some peppers can be almost on their own.

Then the heat moves up, settling in for a long stay, even though I've sampled only the tiniest drop.

I'm out of milk, and feeling hot all over. It's the kind of pepper-linked rush that some find addictive. Austin puts it this way: "You absorb yourself into this 10-minute roller-coaster ride and your problems don't mean squat."

Mad Dog Inferno Hot Sauce - a 9 on the scale - is up next, but I have to bow out; I can't taste anything.

"You're about to go through the roof," Austin warns the others. "Take what you feel you can handle. Don't go crazy."

But these are old hands; they keep their cool. "I didn't like the flavor," says a young guy named Dave. "It's a nice hot, but there's almost a black licorice flavor to it."

Finally, it's time for Spontaneous Combustion, about a 9, and I decide I'm back in the game. It's made with "the hottest commercially grown habaneros, and to make it even more combustible we have added pure capsicum extract."

That hot-pepper extract is the killer. If there are other flavors here, I can't taste them. The heat is slow to set in, but once it does it takes over my head and doesn't want to leave. Long after, I feel the flame.

Still, as the samplings showed, some of these sauces are pretty darn cool.