 Hello, I'm Dave DeWitt your host for heat up your life. I'm here in Miami for a serious investigation into the economic impact of the Fiery foods industry cut cut. What's the matter? It's not you. What? Hi, I'm Dave DeWitt in my more normal state and your host for heat up your life in our second episode We're gonna show you how chili pepper products are made from beginning to end it all starts with this and ends with this In the interest of people peppers and passion we dedicate this next hour to heat up your life and Now episode two from seed to salsa We're on a fiery quest We've come to sunny, Florida to interview the manufacturers of hot and spicy products and to discover what motivates these people to stay in the rather Unusual industry of fiery foods We have another mission as well We've heard tales that somewhere in the wilds of Florida There is a shrine to chili peppers so emotionally moving that adults have fallen to their knees and abject worship Join us as we search this fast chili shaped state for the shrine that is the holy grail to chili heads We'll return to the Florida quest in a moment, but first let's take a look at the early process of growing chili peppers Of course many chili heads create their own shrine to chilies in the form of a pepper garden They grow with such passionate devotion because they can't find the varieties they need for cooking in the markets I'm so devoted that I winter over my chilies in the greenhouse. So I'll always have a supply of fresh pods But the main use of my greenhouses for starting chili plants from seed Since most nurseries have limited varieties of chili seedlings for sale Chili head gardeners are forced to buy or trade for exotic seed in the dead of winter I searched seed catalogs to find new varieties that I'd never grown before Often most of my seed comes from collectors who offer their unusual varieties through listings in the seed savers exchange yearbook This year in addition to the New Mexican varieties that I'll roast peel and freeze I've selected New Mexico centennial Serrano Abanero Cayenne Bulgarian carrot lemon drop ahi Chinese yellow emperor and Bonnie peppers from Barbados After selecting the seeds, I prepare the plastic grow cells by filling them up with a mix of potting soil perlite and vermiculite I wet the mixture and place two seeds in each cell Each variety is carefully labeled with a tag and recorded in a log The cells are placed in trays and the trays positioned on heating coils for quicker germination At any time during the winter or spring prepare the garden site First always add organic material such as aged manure or compost Maneuver is particularly important because it is also your natural fertilizer Next is the mixing of the organic material into the soil I need the exercise so I use a shovel to loosen the garden, but feel free to use a rototiller Finally with the shovel I form the plot into rows and furrows for irrigating in the dry climate of New Mexico The pepper garden is now ready for the plants Meanwhile our search for hot stuff in Florida began in Miami, which is the gateway to the Caribbean At the busy Miami International Airport flights land every few minutes from numerous island nations and some of those flights carry chili peppers As we found out at PFM International Corporation a major importer There we met with CEO Kathy Hawkins who explained the importing procedure That's a complicated procedure. The first thing that happens is of course the airplane lands It gets cleared through customs as a whole and they bring the cargo over to their facility And the first thing that has to happen is the peppers have to be checked by the USDA Like protection and quarantine and what they're looking for is insects if they find an insect in your peppers or any produce that you're trying to Clear they'll take that insect and put it in a little jar send it over to the lab And the lab will determine whether that insect is a garden variety common everyday insect or whether it's something that's harmful to the U.S. Environment if it's harmful then two things can happen depending upon what it is they'll either make you fumigate your produce or They'll make you return it to the point of origin or they'll make you destroy it And that's all done at your expense on a random basis. You'll have the FDA Say that they want to inspect your produce and what they're looking for is Fertilizers or pesticides that are not allowed into the United States It's not clean and you have a real problem because that shipper will never be able to ship Product this product in the United States again Until he goes through a huge series of hurdles and he has a long process He can do it that it's something you just do not want to happen So all of my growers are very well aware of the fertilizers and pesticides that are allowed by the FDA to be used in This country because once you do it's a kiss of death You do not want that to happen So once all those hurdles are clear then you're free to distribute your produce to wherever it's going After the peppers clear customs USDA and the FDA They are carefully sorted to make certain that only the best pods are shipped to the fresh market Less than perfect pods are dried and flaked or they are ground into red abanero mash for use in making Caribbean style hot sauces Kathy we've heard rumors about some sort of shrine to chili peppers like the holy grail of chili peppers here in Florida Can you give us a hint about where we might find this shrine? The clue from Kathy Hawkins led me not to Germany but all the way across the state to st. Petersburg Which I soon found out should be called st. Peppersburg. I had heard tales of a German owned hot shop on a pier So I found my way to the st. Petersburg pier and found a convenient trolley to take me to the far end of the dock Could a hot shop be the sacred chili shrine? I didn't think so, but I'd have to cross-examine the Germans Well, I heard about you folks I was told to track down the Germans in st. Petersburg and I think that maybe I have so tell me about your operation Now you came from Germany. I hear yes We did it was chili in Germany, but not our idea of chili We wrote the chili pepper book the first conference of German book about the subject, but that was not Chili enough so we moved to Florida and you're both manufacturers and retailers We run Suncoast Peppers with its own line of award-winning hot sauces and peppers on the pier a little shop of horrors And what is your best-selling hot sauce in this shop since 8 out of 10 people ask for the hottest? We have our own Hottest non extract sauce, which is the liquid acts and of course that's all natural that's all natural That's only have a narrow peppers and fresh ginger root and the pungency of the ginger adds to the heat And of course the extract sauces as you can see up there the widow Dave's insanity These are the extract sauces that always sell real well Since you're here in Florida, maybe you know something about what I've been hearing about a Shrine to chili peppers or something like this here in Florida I think the best bet down here would be if you saw the Boba Rosa gourmet place They make hot sauce. They make all kinds of fire food. So can you take me to this Boba Rosa place? Absolutely. Okay. Well, I'll follow you A Boba Rosa turned out to be the manufacturing company of the husband and wife team of Bob and Rosa Sometimes called Cindy Martin Things were getting very confusing on the trail of the chili shrine I caught them in clear water in the act of hand labeling some bottles of Florida heat hot sauce Now is this one of these super hot sauces I've been hearing so much about no sure this is a one that's made with the Florida produce It has a sunshine full of flavor. Aha, so it's not gonna kill me if I if I try some of this No, sir. Well, you know, I've been sent here to ask you a very important question I've been hearing all these rumors about some sort of a chili shrine here in Florida But I have no idea where it is. Can you give me a hint? Well, you know, I've heard about it But I tell you who you can go see who's that Ruskin rednecks the rednecks. Well, we'll just go see the rednecks But first back to Albuquerque and my pepper garden The next step in the garden after the final frost of the spring is to transplant the seedlings into the garden plot I dig small holes in the garden spacing the seedlings about a foot and a half apart Then the seedlings are placed in the hole tagged with their code number and watered thoroughly Then I mulch the seedlings with newspaper weighted down with soil to keep it in place Other pepper gardeners mulch with plastic film or grass clippings My home garden practices are quite a bit different from commercial chili growers at least in scale And there's no better place to see mass transplanting than at the famous McElhenney farm at Avery Island, Louisiana home of the renowned Tabasco sauce Here the Tabasco peppers are being placed in fields where they've been grown rotating with other crops for more than 125 years by the McElhenney company But the purpose of transplanting these seedlings is not specifically to make Tabasco sauce The pods will furnish pure seed for the McElhenney growing operations in central and South America There the Tabasco peppers will be harvested made into mash and returned to Avery Island for the final processing into the famous sauce during the summer months approximately 125,000 acres of peppers of all varieties are grown by farmers in the United States While we don't know the acreage for home gardeners, they face the same challenges in order to survive chilies have a few basic wants and needs Watering regular and measured watering is best and remember that over watering can lead to fungal diseases on the roots Fertilize it if you use manure in the plot as we suggested earlier It is unlikely that chilies will need further fertilization Weeding even with mulch those evil weeds will somehow find a way to grow Always pull them immediately never use herbicides Pest control use organic techniques when possible like netting over the chilies to keep off pests hot pepper wax containing capsaicin is a natural insecticide for aphids and white fly So barring a hailstorm extremely high winds a virus infection or chili loving rabbits your plants should look like these Far from the pepper fields of North America the chili growers of Jamaica plant their crops to a different tune in This exotic timeless land of Mento music and reggae aqua blue waters and engaging stiltman This job is in a beanstalk Juck in a beanstalk still man. I'm jacking the boo We discovered an amazing 10-year-old 12-foot-high chili plant Well, if anybody doubted that chili peppers are a perennial plant There'll be no doubt here because I'm standing in front of a gigantic plant here by the the great house And this is called an old ladies pepper. It's it's not the same thing as a Scotch bonnet as a matter of fact It's not even the same species. This is a capsicum annuum and You can see it's a fairly small pod and so forth But the way to really tell whether this is related to the Scotch bonnet is to open it up and taste it And that's what we're going to do. No, it does not have the Scotch bonnet aroma at all It's a completely different aroma and let's see what it tastes like It's hot, but it's not as flavorful as a Scotch bonnet. The old ladies pepper is what they call that no offense The Scotch bonnet the same species as the recently popular Abanero is the chili of choice in Jamaica and much of the Caribbean However, as our guide David Brown pointed out, there are many different Jamaican chilies We call these kitchen peppers, okay, and right away you can see it's going in the kitchen, right? All right, the reason why they call it kitchen pepper is that you will get it will go elsewhere in the garden But it will never bear and do as well as near the kitchen and in most case You didn't plant it it just grew up by itself So our old folks feel that it's a smoke from the wood fire because in those days most people cook with wood fire Right, and they claim it's a smoke from the kitchen that makes it do so well And so you push your hand right through the kitchen window and pick a pepper when you're cooking how handy that's great kitchen pepper As in Jamaica there is a long time chili pepper tradition in Louisiana Well, we're here in the Tabasco fields on Avery Island with Paul Macklehenning and These are beautiful. These plants are great. I just feel like I'm in heaven. They are they're doing well We've had a good bit of rain and they're just thriving and so Tell us the purpose of maintaining the fields on Avery Island. Well, we used to grow all of our pepper here We'd like to but We really the available the pool of Labor to pick them has kind of dried up so we we go to Latin America. This is a seed we grow about 50 acres of pepper here on the island and We grow them for to produce all of our seed we do produce some pepper mash for product But we keep this farm also as an experimental farm to make sure that our Cultivational practices and knowledge of farming on peppers is as up-to-date as it should be I see and so is the seed from These plants then transferred to Latin America so that the growers maintain a Uniform kind of crop exactly we we process the seed here. We dry it. We treat it with an antifungal Fungal with powder and we Cryo-vacate and then we send it down. We also put I think about 50 pounds in the bank vault in New Iberia As a as a protection against total disaster Well, I know that you're famous for your Tabasco's and so forth, but you're getting interested in a lot of other peppers now Right. Oh, yeah, we've we've got the jalapeno sauce. We're working on a habanero pepper sauce. We have a Cayenne blended pepper garlic hot sauce. We have all sorts of peppers We're working on besides the capsicum frutescens or the Tabasco variety with this the boom and hot and spicy foods that's gone on In this country We've seen a lot of imitators of your kind of product in terms of not necessarily the Tabasco But other pepper sauces and so forth how are all these competitors Affecting say your market position with Tabasco. Well surprisingly enough You would have thought our market share has eroded, but it really has actually only a fraction But it actually grew the last couple of years, but the whole industry is growing The interesting and fun thing for us is that our market share is is holding Tell me about your theory of why hot and spicy foods have become so popular in the last 20 years Well, it's a I think a whole bunch of things Mexican American food soul food Cajun Creole food southwestern chili craze All of those have taught people how to use chilies how to use pepper sauces how to use sauces And they've gotten people to kind of lose their fear I really think that nachos and and salsa picante sauce and salsa Where kids will just eat a lot of it either in the Mexican restaurant and home has educated them about peppers And it's just been a great boon to us all There's something warm and fuzzy about chili peppers that people can't resist. They love to touch them Toss them run their fingers through them. Well fondle them Warning chili heads who compulsively engage in this behavior should avoid touching sensitive body parts But now back to Florida I had been given the assignment of tracking down the rednecks which meant a trip back across the impressive Skyway Bridge to end up in the tiny town known as Ruskin Finding the rednecks was easy considering the large sign on the side of their building, but I was in for a surprise Yeah Really You know, you don't look much like a redneck to me Well, I don't know maybe you're redefining the term redneck amen to that we are redefining the term Well, why don't go inside and talk about it? We could do that So about how many rednecks are there in Ruskin anyway, oh Probably a whole cubby. Oh, I see this must be the laundry center for us Oh, that's your cooler. Okay So and how do you define redneck these days well we We read in our dictionary where rednecks were mostly poor mostly white mostly southern and that we were violent ignorant and bigoted Oh, well that got our hackles up So we decided to redefine redneck and that's what we've done So we're the new kind of redneck new kind of rednecks kinder gentler redneck new vote redneck No, well, maybe We're going back to how redneck was started Why how it got its name because of people who worked hard to take care of their families. They believed in God They believed in country, right? They were kind they help their neighbors And that's what a redneck's all about and they make hot sauce So Sandy tell me a little bit about your products. Okay, we have several different hot sauces Sweat thing is our hottest uh-huh and this one won first place in New Orleans in one of the national competitions And have sweet thing made out of mango with habanero And we have sissy thing for those who don't like it quite so hot and then we have tangy thing Before of our garlicky flavor Dave when we redefined the term redneck We also are the international headquarters for the American Redneck Society. Oh, so when we heard you were coming We wanted to make you an honorary member of the American Redneck Society. I'm touched and honored Well, we're we're happy to have you but there's some obligation that comes with it. Here is your certificate of membership Welcome to the American Redneck Society now here is a copy of your redneck creep. Oh, I see now in order to be a Member of the American Redneck Society. You have to promise a couple of things. So if you raise your hand, okay You promise by all the total I promise by all the total That's right that you will abide by the redneck that I will abide by the redneck Creed. Amen. Amen. Give me five You are a proud member. Well, that's your bumper. Thank you very much Now we're asking the redneck folks. I've heard that in Florida somewhere There's this shrine to chili peppers where people actually worship. Could you give me some hint of where I could go to find this place? Go see the widow Defined the widow I had to go back across the magnificent Skyway Bridge again and return to the st. Petersburg Pier Where I discovered that the widow was not a person but rather an extremely potent sauce We're here on the st. Petersburg Pier with Brent Ancrum who's the manufacturer of this particular sauce That's called widow and brand my question for you is why would you call a sauce widow instead of calling it like? Brent's hot sauce or something like that? well As my wife would probably point out it's unlikely that the market would swarm to Brent's hot sauce and quite frankly We want to label in a name that Sort of indicates what might be in that bottle some idea of how it might perform like deadly like deadly. Yes Exactly, so what makes this sauce so deadly? Well, this is a First time for my company to combine a new product, which is a water soluble olio resin Which is important because it mixes well with water soluble other organic Parts such as Caribbean red habaneros that we use as a base for this product But it's a 1 million unit water soluble capsaicin and when added to the already pungent pods Gives us an extreme burn. How's this doing? Is it selling well for you? We have been extremely pleased We sold out of it at the Florida fiery food show in October when it was introduced So you glue this little spider onto the onto the jar for promotional purposes, I guess Yeah, and that was kind of funny because I originally found this spider I assumed I could get more and had to go all the way through an oriental trading company to get 28,000 spiders at a time Okay, I have to ask you sort of a funny question We're here in Florida and we keep hearing rumors of some sort of shrine to chili peppers Do you have any idea of where we could go to find this shrine? That's really supposed to be a state-held secret However Probably a good place to start would be over west palm beach Charlie shannell mire and he makes this stuff doesn't well charlie is my packer Yeah, he makes all my products over there and it's it's it's an interesting event to observe actually So turns out well, you'll see when you get there. Okay. Well, we'll go see him. Thanks, Brent. All right Interesting is hardly the word to describe what we encountered at sauce crafters in west palm beach Scary would be a better term when you work with one million scoville unit olio resin to make a super hot sauce You'd better be careful The widow sauce is poured into the bottling machine And carefully hand bottled Once the widow is in the jar it is safety sealed labeled And then it's time for all the spiders After witnessing the spectacle of making the widow I asked charlie the most important question Charlie we're looking for a chili pepper shrine of some sort here in florida Could you give us any hints on where we could find this shrine? Go see tahiti joe dave Tahiti joe. Thanks charlie But before we look for tahiti joe, it's time to check out my own personal pepper harvest You know, this is one of my favorite times of the year because after working for months and months and months in your garden The chilies are finally ripe and ready to be picked and I've picked five of my favorite chilies that I grew this year And here they are first A very very wonderful ornamental chili. This is new mech centennial and one of the reasons I like this particular chili Is because it has multicolored pods on the plant for nearly the entire summer And you can use these to do edging to do borders Then make a very very vivid display of chilies. They're also edible. You can use these just like a chili piquin Next if you like salsas boy, I tell you it's hard to beat a serrano chili for making a really good pico de gallo salsa These come in both green and red. They mature to red The reds have a lot more sugar in them than the greens so the flavor comes out a little bit more And you combine these with chopped tomatoes and onions a little cilantro some vinegar Boy, you've got a wonderful pico de gallo salsa Next the hottest chili in the world. We grew some of these. These are the orange habaneros from the yucatan peninsula And I tell you they may be hot But you can tone them down when you make a hot sauce because you can use a fruit or a vegetable base to dilute the extreme heat Of the habaneros now these have a wonderful fruity aroma too and that's uh one of their distinguishing characteristics Now for people who like cajun food boy, it's hard to beat a cayenne chili Look at this beautiful red cayenne and you can use this to make a hot sauce too Louisiana style or you can chop it up and use it in cajun and creole dishes Now I would be remiss living in new mexico if I didn't grow some new mexican chilis And I did and this is one of my favorites. This is one of the largest chilis in the world This is the new mechs big gym now. This is not the longest one that i've ever seen This is about eight or nine inches long. I've seen them as long as 14 inches And you roast them and peel them and then stuff them to make chilis rianos At the same time we hobbyists are harvesting our bountiful crops in home gardens The commercial growers are busy too from august to november pickers in the fields of southern new mexico harvest first the green chilis And then the red later in the year Some red chili is machine harvested, but all the green chili must be hand picked to avoid damaging the tender pods From the handheld buckets the chilis are transferred to large wooden bins that can be handled by machinery The bins are loaded onto trucks for transportation to processing plants Where they will be washed and then either processed or transferred to protos wholesalers selling to the fresh market New mexican chilis are sold fresh dried canned frozen powdered and manufactured into hundreds of products More than a thousand miles south of new mexico It seems like it's always chili harvest time at llamar said the huge open-air mercado in mexico city We explored the market with chili expert jose marmalero And i'll look we have some red jalapeños, but i understand they're not really called jalapeños in mexico city, right? That's right. They you know here in mexico city what we know as jalapeños They know them as cuares mania cuares mania has something to do with lint in the lint season right Cuaresma is a word for lint so apparently they use them during lint and That's why they got them why are all these different names for the chilis everybody every region has a different name for their Own chilis and it gets confusing and these are called chilis de audible because they they grow tall like a tree Hence the name audible that's correct and right over here We have some green versions of the same chilis de audible right yes It is it is it is very rare to find chile de arbol in the green And in the red mature form we only know them in united states in the dried form and look down here Look at the size of these cuares manios i guess we right or jalapeños some of them Nearly four inches long yes remarkable Lamar said market has an absolute wealth of chilis with dozens of varieties from every region in mexico at very reasonable prices The familiar chilis are all here like the poblanos which when dried are called anchos together They are probably the most popular chilis used in cooking in mexico The more exotic chilis are the canarios which were transferred from the andes of south america and are grown in the mountainous regions of mexico Another exotic chili is the chipotle a smoked chili But as jose explains the terminology of the different types of chipotles like moras and moritas can be very confusing All smoked chilis are chipotless chili being chili and buckly being smoked So all moras moritas are all chipotless the differences some are serrano some are jalapeños Some come from veracruz some come from cuervla some come from chiapas therefore they get different Varieties of chili and a different wood to smoke them. That's why we have all this spectrum of aroma. Okay. Let's smell one here This is a mortar. That's a mortar smoke jalapeño. Yeah very nice Sometimes the eating of peppers comes in hidden form This is resalex the paprika oleo resin extraction facility in radium springs new mexico Here the oleo resin the oil containing red pigment is extracted from the non pungent paprika First locally grown pods are crushed and the seeds separated out for later planting The crushed pods are pelletized and the pellets are transferred to the tower where they are treated with a solvent hexane Which dissolves out the oils To make a complicated story short The hexane is evaporated off for future use and the spent paprika pellets are loaded up and sold as cattle feed The resulting oil is transferred from the tower to the packaging room While samples are analyzed in the resalex laboratory to make sure it meets customers specifications We spoke with resalex owner lou bayad Tell me about some of the uses of this oleo resin paprika that you produce here People use it all the time they're not aware of it because it's a very subtle thing But it's used in pepperoni a lot of meat products like baloney sausage Is animal feed for poultry For seasonings and salad dressings soups Mayonnaise number a whole broad range. Does it add any flavor to these products or just color? It's mostly it's practically awful coloring. The flavor is so diluted that it's almost non detectable What would these meats look like without the oleo resin paprika? They wouldn't be very palatable. They'd look pale and and gray and very unpleasant Especially the baloney. Is oleo resin paprika the number one food coloring now? Oh, well, it is as far as natural food color You know, there are many dyes artificial colors out in the market But there's a lot of concern about the health hazard of that So as a natural red food color Oleo resin paprika is number one The resalex plant was fascinating, but it couldn't really be called a shrine to chilis My latest mission on the search for the chili pepper shrine was to find Tahiti In florida tahiti joe that is I thought that the people in the fiery foods industry certainly had wacky names for themselves as well as their products But then florida was not exactly normal I probably find the shrine in the sunken monkey jungle parrot garden or one of the other state attractions like rodent world Hey joe Good to see you. How you doing? Okay, you know, this may be florida, but it looks like tahiti to me That's right. Might be he any one having any other way. Okay, take a seat. Thanks So joe, uh, tell me about making Polynesian sauces in florida Well, I find it exciting Yeah, it's got the heat that people are looking for but with the flavor and the honey and the clam juice that I use for our tropical blend It just turns out delicious Apparently, uh, a lot of people like it because all my sauces have won all major awards Oh, oh, this is my wife charlotte. Most people call her mrs. Tahiti joe. Hi mrs. Tahiti joe. You're the one who made the cookie Oh my gosh, can I try one of these cookies? Of course go right ahead Now this is the cookie that was entered into the scoby competition the scoby awards for the best hot and spicy products And it beat out 400 other products So i'm gonna try one of these, uh, mrs. Tahiti joe's hot chip and arrow cookies I see why it won. This is fantastic So joe while we're down here in florida, we're looking for some kind of chili pepper shrine or something Could could you help us out? Well, your best bet is uh go over down to the swamp and you gotta talk to the gator people the gator people Yes Oh great now I had to drive to the everglades and find some gator people It would be just my luck to find the shrine in the middle of the swamp guarded by a rabid pack of alligators Forging ahead I tromped through the swamps of south florida not knowing if danger lay ahead Hey, i'm looking for a buddy at gator hammock. Well, hop on board and we'll go find him. Okay, thanks Fortunately, I ran into jimmy an expert airboat captain who vowed to deliver me safely to my remote destination Not content to sit idle. I scanned the dense horizon for clues to the elusive chili pepper shrine Awesome scenery nervous neighbors We soon reached my destination gator hammock where buddy taylor awaits my arrival Perhaps the quest for the chili shrine will end here in the swamp Are you buddy? Yeah, I am. Good to meet you. I'm david wit. Oh, hi I've been looking all over the swamps for you. They said to go to the gator hammock place And I was just wondering how do you get the gators up in the hammocks? Oh, man It ain't that kind of hammock. Uh, the gator hammock is a uh name Just put together with the gators and the hammock is a group of trees We call it down here in the south sort of like a rise in the swamp exactly and you named your sauce that right I did and what about your sauce here? Uh, this gator sauce, uh, does this have any gator parts in it? No, it's okay. No gators. That's just in the name. That's just our good old logo with gator fans And there's gators where I live. So that's kind of where the gator hammock come from I gotta tell you buddy I've been told that there's a shrine to chili peppers somewhere here in florida And I was sent to you to try to help me find it. You got any ideas? Oh, yeah, you got to go to key west Key west uh wearing key west Just go to key west just go to key west and i'll find it. You'll find it. You cannot miss it. Okay. Well, thanks a lot But before making the journey to key west we took some side trips to learn about other methods of processing chilies The state of hua haka has the largest number of rare and unusual cultivated chilies in the country More than 60 varieties are grown only in hua haka and nowhere else in mexico To find these chilies all we had to do was visit the mercado There we spoke with chili vendor eliceo ramirez And again, jose marmel lejo assisted in helping us to understand these interesting chilies and their culinary usage Over here, we have some very unusual chilies that are found nowhere else in the world. These are pasilla de hua haka pasilla de hua haka They're stuffed right right they're used mainly the big ones for stuffing You can make a salsa or you can have them pickled in escabeche. Oh, I see. Okay. These uh chihuacles here I'm growing some of these in my garden in albuquerque. Uh, some seeds brought back by my friend jim patin from this very market But I ask him what they're used for I guess they're used for the black mollies. That's correct Mainly for the mole negro, but there's also one of the seven mollies called chichillo also calls for it Oh, okay. These uh, these bright red chilies here the onza. Is that uh, how you say chili onza? It's it's used exclusively in sauces, correct? You got it I'm understanding this better and better the more we go to these markets. I'm starting to get it What about this chihuacle amarillo? Again one of the seven mollies The amarillo calls for both the chihuacle amarillo and the amarillo Would you ask alicea why he got so interested in in selling chilies? Well, he used to sell the perishables tomatoes and lettuce and the like and he was not uh, he was not happy Seeing all these vegetables going bad. So he decided to go into the dry soft that lasts longer He's been very successful. Yes. Well, he has a lot of chilies here Gracias At the market in oaxaca, you can have your mole paste custom ground The selected dried chilies are rehydrated and combined with roasted tomatoes and as many as 20 different herbs and spices Then a trip to the mole narrow A mole narrow is someone who uses a molino or mill to grind either mole paste or chocolate from the beans The ingredients are placed in the top of the molino and ground to the desired consistency In some markets thicker slightly dehydrated mole paste are packaged and sold The mole paste are used to make thick stews with meats and spices Oaxaca is famous for its seven uniquely different molays In both mexico and the united states chilies that are harvested fresh must be processed to have the tough outer skin removed The quickest and easiest way to do that in new mexico is to visit a professional chili roaster Ten-year-old tim sickler. Perhaps the youngest pro chili roaster in the country took care of us So tim, how long you've been roasted chilies? This is my third year your third year and you make some money at this And what are you going to use that money for? Well, I'm planning to buy a horse buy a horse. Yes horses don't eat chili No, not that I think of okay. Well, I'll tell you what let's fire up these chilies already Tim then opens the drum and pours the green chili pods into it The drum is slowly turned over propane gas jets so that the chilies are roasted on each side evenly The point here is not to let the chili burn to a crisp but to blister the pods enough so that the skin separates from the flesh The blistered chilies are turned out into plastic bags for transport Be sure to remove them from the bag as soon as possible and peel them quickly to avoid bacterial growth Thanks a lot, tim. See you next year Any fresh green chilies can also be roasted and peeled at home without a professional chili roaster Simply use your outdoor grill or oven roaster to blister the chilies turning often When they are completely blistered remove them from the grill and place in a plastic bag After letting the chili steam for a few minutes peel off the skin remove the seeds and chop the chili Place the chili in plastic ice cube trays and freeze After the cubes are frozen place them in resealable bags And you have a convenient source of whatever amount of green chili that you need even a single cube Instead of an iceberg of green chili to hack apart Before the days of freezers green chili was preserved differently. It was still roasted and peeled but then dried Here at the romero farm in ancone north of espanola in northern new mexico The traditional methods are still used to make what is called chili posado or chili of the past The green chili grown on the farm is expected to last for a year So hundreds of pounds must be processed After roasting and peeling the flesh of the pot is placed in an orno or outdoor oven for drying Another method is to dry the chili on screens in the warm fall sun After drying the chili posado can be stored in a glass jar indefinitely But most people dry their chili in the red form and across new mexico they do it in many innovative ways Some like the chili express here in hatch dry it on their roof This farmer conveniently leaves his red chili harvest in these flatbed trailers Others fashion drying racks from all kinds of materials like this one made from pvc pipe A more traditional way to preserve red chilies is simply to tie them into strings or ristras Originally the pods would be pulled off the ristras as needed in the kitchen But these days the ristras are as much of a house decoration as a culinary supply We dropped in on the ristraman in messiah in southern new mexico When there's chili drying on the roof you know the place is authentic Owner chris alexander told us about his fiery enterprise How many acres do you have in uh in this field? Well right here we have six acres of chili With all different varieties uh planted in here that we use to string our ristras with I see this is like right in downtown messiah This is right in the historical core of old messiah This is the last agricultural uh field that's in the historical core of messiah Amazing So chris this is uh your crew here making ristras. Why don't you uh sort of describe to us how they're doing it? Well first of all we take and make all our ristras using uh a bailing uh twine And uh we double tie it we add three pieces of chili in between two lines And uh position the chili so that it'll be in its proper lane position And then we uh take a lighter weight uh cord and we tie the top of it down And we find by uh placing the chili in between the cords and securing it with a knot on top This helps the ristra from falling apart How long does it take somebody to make one of these ristras say that's uh four feet long? A four foot ristra takes approximately 20 minutes to build or to string and uh it's rather tedious uh type of work but uh it's uh Got its benefits in the way that uh we're able to create a ristra to reflect the different colors Well most ristras you see are the dark red kind but you've got some orange ones and some yellow ones I see what are what are these that's a sunrise chili that's a new type of pepper and it's uh a very popular In the different ristras that we make it dries to a translucent gold tone And uh this has been on the market probably two years And uh so we're one of the very first to have this in this type of a ristra Chris told us that he was so busy making ristras that he had never tracked how many he sold each year But it was a lot He said that he was particularly proud of his chili ristra operation in messiah because it preserved his own heritage Our family heritage uh dates back to eight generations approximately 400 years in old messiah And uh my mother's family were some of the very first to ever inhabit this area Along with the conquistadors when they came into the country Well my family heritage in new mexico only goes back 25 years, but they've been hot ones You know making chili powders is a pretty simple procedure What you need is a spice mill like this one or a coffee grinder dedicated to chilis Or you're going to have some pretty hot coffee and of course you need chilis Virtually any variety of chili can be used as long as it's dry enough and will snap like this That'll make a good powder now if the chili is pliable like this on show Just put it in a 200 degree oven until it does snap like this and you'll make great powders Now of course when you make these powders you're going to be creating chili fumes The fumes and cashews to sneeze incessantly I once sneezed 50 times in a row, so I like to use a little protection Another important chili processing technique is the making of pepper mash the basic ingredient of many chili products Fresh cayenne chilis arrive at the Cervantes enterprises plant in Vado, New Mexico The pods are shoveled out of trucks and onto conveyor belts where workers sort them and remove any damaged ones The pods are then washed to remove debris and dirt from the harvesting operation They are transferred to a hammer mill where they are ground into a thick liquid. This is the mash Salt is added as a preservative and the mash is pumped into storage tanks New Mexico cayenne mash is then transferred by tanker truck to Louisiana where it is further processed into the famous Louisiana hot sauce Back on Avery Island working with a different kind of pepper mash as a way of life And the method used for Tabasco mash is basically the same one invented by Paul McElhenney's great grandfather headman Okay, Paul, what's going on here? This is the aged pepper mash. Uh, we check this for color and aroma If it weren't quite so hot, I might taste it too This is before it's mixed with vinegar Which extracts the color of the heat and the aroma from the pepper It certainly is pungent. The fumes just come right at you Exactly and and this is aged for three years in the barrels and then we mix it slowly for About 28 days with very strong vinegar 100 grain vinegar and then we extract the seeds and the skins So Tabasco is different from a lot of other products because we don't grind up the seeds and skins You don't cook it either Don't cook it. Don't don't you use a very strong vinegar Don't add any colorings or or stabilizers What we do Dave is is the day the peppers are harvested and of course it's just the bright Red ripest red as juicy as peppers We we grind them up with about eight percent salt really Avery Island salt Of course ground salt and that mash then actively ferments or works For about 30 to 60 days. It's not a fermentation like in the production of alcohol, but it is a fermentation And then the mash stays in the barrels for three years We bring all of the mash here to Avery Island and finish the aging here Then after the aging we clean off the oxidized mash from the top We drain off the brine and we inspect each barrel And then we slowly mix the aged mash with 100 grain vinegar So tell me how you manufacture the Tabasco sauce But we take the aged drain inspected mash Which is what this is here We add a very strong 100 grain vinegar Mix it slowly for four weeks and then extract or strain off the seeds and the skins So how many peppers do you think went into that one scoop there? Well an awful lot a lot more than you think It takes a lot of peppers to make because we take the seeds and the skins out Which is a big part of the bulk so it takes a lot of peppers to make a about two ounce bottle of Tabasco sauce I think I think grand pair would be Doing triple back flips right now knowing how successful his little Cottage industry business has become Brand name is is probably one of the most Famous brand names all over the world Like Coca-Cola Ford Xerox It's it's a trademark easily recognized just about everywhere not in the United States But all over the globe We print our carton in 19 foreign languages and we sell to over 100 foreign countries We were before Campbell's Andy Warhol actually Andy Warhol before he died wanted to do a Tabasco thing and in our infinite lack of wisdom occasionally We didn't do it Pace Picante sauce the best-selling salsa in the United States and possibly the world has been manufactured since the 1950s Now owned by Campbell soup paces the largest corporate user of jalapeños And has helped to introduce many americans to the joys of eating hot and spicy foods The fiery foods industry continues to grow at more than 10 percent a year in the united states Estimated salsa sales in the year 2000 are one billion dollars Estimated hot sauce sales are a quarter of a billion dollars Total estimated sales in the fiery foods industry for both food and non-food products are 2.5 billion dollars Most of the consumers of these hot and spicy products are considered to be normal average human beings But then there are the chili heads those semi-addicted cult followers of the pungent pods And when those chili heads migrate to the conch republic of key west anything can happen It was totally appropriate that a chili pepper shrine would be found in key west the wackiest city in america Perhaps the parrot heads would all turn into chili heads After I arrived in key west and found a place to stay I began to search in earnest for the chili pepper shrine It wasn't with the parrot heads I looked high I looked low Finally in desperation. I started asking the locals about the shrine You know I'm looking for some sort of a chili pepper shrine. Do you know anything about that? A friendly vendor directed me to a pity cab driver with the intriguing name of malagata Hi there. Hi. How are you doing today? I'm looking for the chili pepper shrine. You supposed to be able to find some place, uh I'll tell you what we can give it a shot. Why don't you hop in? Okay, we'll do So began a long afternoon of searching the streets of key west and she was charging a dollar a minute plus a tip The quest for the shrine was getting expensive, but I refused to give up No shrine at sloppy joes the famous watering hole of earnest hemmiway No shrine along the waterfront But then malagata told me that her channeler had just informed her telepathically that she should take me to the mall Specifically a small tourist mall that housed yet another hot shop. This one called logically enough peppers of key west We're here at peppers of key west with mike fatica and mike You know, I like this chili pepper paraphernalia because I'm wearing a chili pepper shirt But what is all this stuff? Well, we have chili pepper ashtray lotion dispenser Salt and pepper shakers they have an s and a p so you don't get confused. Okay cocktail glass We love cocktails here at key west Sauce and bowl or a chili bowl. Okay. That's a good thing. I see you have some swizzle sticks here We have some swizzle sticks. Oh, that's handsome. We have little pencils chili pepper pencils Everybody needs that. Absolutely. And you have the chili pepper lights down here I see the chili pepper napkin holder all this chili pepper paraphernalia even a clock We have a chili pepper clock for all these chili heads who love the hot sauces that you have in your shop Now I've got to tell you that I was sent down here on a mission to find the chili pepper shrine I've searched all over florida. I was sent to key west. You've got to help it You've got to find the chili pepper shrine. Dave, that's not going to be a problem. You came to the right place Why don't you meet me at 12 o'clock at the hogs breath saloon? I arrived at the hogs breath saloon at high noon with high expectations I surveyed the crowd and everything seemed normal enough. No shrine in sight But now the customers were beginning to act strangely, but remember we were in the conch republic And there it was at last the shrine the most sacred object to native florida chili heads In fact, it was a moving shrine very moving indeed the peppermobile Well, we found the shrine to chilies the holy grail of chili heads and it turns out to be a honda We've also traced the trail of chilies from seed to salsa. I'm dave d wit bidding you a fond farewell from wacky key west