Welcome to Good Hurts!

Good Hurts is dedicated to the best hurts on Earth: spicy foods.
I'm Russell. I teach English, write poetry, but most importantly, I am a spice aficionado and I dedicate myself to categorizing, reviewing, and torturing myself with the spiciest foods and sauces this great world has to offer, all so you can know about the most brutal, benevolent, and best bangs for your buck. Email me at hotfreakrussell@gmail.com


Enjoy, and feel the burn.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Video Kaboom: Russell vs. Buffalo Cantina Seppuku Wings Challenge



WARNING: DO NOT TRY AT HOME...OR ANYWHERE.

Cajun Bayou: The official favorite Louisiana Hot Sauce of Good Hurts

Apologies for the 10 day gap in reviews...the GoodHurtsTron5000 needed to be taken out behind the woodshed and "corrected." Now I have a new Mac and nothing to stop me from communicating with the outside world. Please be patient...the video of my toppling the Buffalo Cantina wing challenge and losing a piece of my soul doing it will be up soon!


Like UFOs in our skies, Louisiana hot sauce has plenty of people who claim to have seen the best evidence out there (of flavor, heat, and other taste mysteries) that a particular brand is really amazing. Like UFOs, fleeting samples of the stuff come in and out leaving hot sauce fans to wonder which kind really proves that the stuff can hold a culinary key to the future in a world where hotter and hotter insanity sauces are landing every day. Like UFOs, Tabasco is the Roswell incident, the benchmark Louisiana hot sauce with time on its side and the widest base of believers. And like UFOs, this grainy photo was the only one I could find of a rich, shiny sauce that I believe can trump the countless other sauces like it. Floating between a Louisiana and Picante sauce (a la Salsa Huichal, Cholula, and others) this sauce is worth investigating.

Let's Look at the Facts: My best friends in the world at Original Juan's can count this sauce among their wide variety of interesting hot sauces. And why not? It's a sauce that enters a whole other division of hot sauces...one filled with similar flavor but possibly the widest fanbase. It's pretty simple...created from a cayenne pepper mash, in which the red peppers are crushed up and left in a (usually enclosed) vat of vinegar and aged, this sauce can boast that the only thing it rests on is its fresh cayenne flavor, since there are no additives or preservatives and no sugar.
For a company that uses such creative packaging, Cajun Bayou keeps it simple: simple package, simple label, and simply effective.

Good Hurts: What can I say? This is a hot sauce meant for flavor, not knock you socks off heat. I would be interested to see a really hot Cajun sauce someday...but I dream. For now, this sauce has almost no heat, even for those of especially weak spice constitutions. This is a sauce for the elderly and babies as well as anyone who wants to explore the endlessly similar corridors that Louisiana sauce offers: salt, cayenne pepper, and vinegar. Flavor is really what's important in this hot sauce.

Flavor: This is a special sauce because the first thing the pops into your mind when you eat it won't be "tangy!" Tabasco, Frank's Red Hot, Trappey's, and other heavy hitters in the Louisiana industry have sauces that have a tart jolt of salty vinegar at the beginning, but this one is much more understated, pushing it close to the smoothness of Cholula and its Picante family members. It's also very vinegar-y, though, which means that it's going to be really good with something starchy and not very acidic. I think this sauce is ideal for a lot of foods you might not otherwise want to end up puckering up for by using too much of the other guys' sauces.

Availability: This sauce is on their website, of course, but don't expect to find this sauce in too many grocery stores worldwide. While Original Juan's has some decent distribution, this sauce might have too much competition to get it in stores where Original Juan's other, well, original products can shine. If you find it, I recommend it thoroughly. If not, it might be worth ordering if you're sick of being let down by the too-salty grind.


Good for: This is the shining point of this sauce. What Louisiana sauce lacks in heat, it makes up for in versatility. This sauce is no different. Pour it liberally on pizza, pita chips, fries, or my personal favorite, kettle chips, for a deep south take on the classic British chips n' vinegar. The salty sauce isn't too tangy to overpower your favorites, but adds a tasty savory kick. I could eat bowl after bowl of kettle chips and this sauce if I didn't care about my pesky liver and completely pickling it.

Review:
Heat: 1/2 star
Flavor: ***
My Review: 7/10

As far as Louisiana hot sauce goes, this is as good as it can get. Don't forget to watch the skies...er, the swamps, for the latest and greatest from the wide world of cayenne.

Friday, January 8, 2010

Pain 100%: Nature's brutal wrath, one drop at a time


In a world of so many hidden messages, many obfuscated further by carefully crafted rhetoric, bright, catchy images, and downplayed pratfalls, it's refreshing to know that Original Juan's, the most important name in Kansas City, has banged out an all-natural hot sauce for the organic hot freak in your life. What they've come up with definitely isn't for the feint of heart, but should be embraced by true pepperheads looking for a chemical-free fix of fire.

Let's look at the facts: Located in the "Meltdown" section of their hot sauce area of their site, Pain 100% is a simple take on habaneros, some of the hottest peppers under the sun. While the effects food additives (like thickening gums) are sketchy and blurred, Pain 100% boasts all natural ingredients, though some of its spices could benefit from some elaboration. This sauce is all about the raw power of the habanero, and all other spices and flavors come second. No frills, no gimmicks, and no kidding around: this sauce is thick, bright, and hot.

Good Hurts: The raw habanero is hot as hell, and this sauce is packed full of raw seeds and the orange-red color unmistakeably associated with the pepper. This sauce packs a wallop, too, and will definitely be too much for regular people looking to pep up a burrito. This is a sauce that toes many lines: after a few mouthfuls, you'll be aching bad; it's not hot enough, however, to just be a food additive. The real truth of this sauce --which is lip-burning and tongue titillating to its very core--is that it's a hot freak's standard hot sauce. Simple, habanero-rich, and thick, this hot sauce is one made for people who want to dump it on heavy and sniffle, weep, and cough their way through their favorite foods.


Flavor: The sparse ingredients say a lot: habanero peppers, water, and the Earthy garden zest of fresh tomatoes in the form of thick (there's that word again) tomato paste. Lastly, the label adds, are "salt and spices" and "natural pepper flavoring." Whether or not this is extract or actual ground up peppers remains unsolved. Whatever the spices are, they are all but whispers between waves of intense, lingering heat.

Availibilty: Besides rockin' the KC, Pain 100%, along with a number of other exciting Original Juan's sauces (no, they don't pay or sponsor me. They just make damn good sauce) are surprisingly available at many finer groceries and gourmet food stores.

Good for: Because the habanero is such a sharp, acidic pepper, it really overwhelms a lot of other flavors. This sauce is best accepted for what it really is: an all-natural habanero showcase. Not hot enough to destroy your soul, but hot enough to really make the rest of your meal a tear-jerking expressway to habanero hell, Pain 100% stands in an interesting place. It's best to just pour over pizza, burritos, rice, or other starchy foods that won't grind up against the power of the habanero.


Review:
Heat: ****
Flavor: **
My Review: 8.0/10


A solid, simple habanero sauce for hot freaks to slather recklessly and for food adventurers to have an organic good time gettin' burned.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Seppuku Challenge at Buffalo Cantina completed! Why did I do it? A letter from the editor



Dear Good Hurts readers,

I'm not one to try to talk down to an audience, and I'm not one to try to use a hot sauce review blog to lay out intertextual puzzles and connect-the-dots meaning(s) between images and representations of peppers and what it says about life and the universe as we know it.
I will, however, say that the picture I used for an editor photo here does look an awful lot like a complex labyrinth and is fitting for my experience on the night of January 2nd. That's the night I went to Buffalo Cantina in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and completed the Seppeku challenge.
The serrano peppers, fresh habaneros, and pour after pour of fine-ground red pepper is negligible in the face of a (not so) healthy capfull of habanero extract. Think about how delicious vanilla extract smells, but how awful it tastes. Pepper extract is used in commercial pepper sprays and even mace of bear spray. The stuff isn't really meant for consumption.
With a group of 6 friends cheering me on and dozens more concerned back in Iowa, I tore into the toughest physical challenge of my life. 12 wings drenched in killer Seppeku sauce, needing to be completed in 3 mere minutes. After 4 wings I couldn't taste anything. After 7 I couldn't swallow. With tears in my eyes and a burning charred throat, I powered down the final three wings in the last 30 seconds and tipped my chair over in victory. The thrill was short lived, however, as I downed half a gallon of milk and cup after cup of water (note to spice novices: never drink water to relieve pepper pain. It just pushes the spice further across your tongue and offers temporary relief. It's like struggling in quicksand). What followed was a ringing in my ears and horrible agony just beyond the layer of skin I call my face while an uncomfortable silence fell over the restaurant.
The stomach ache afterwards was the worst, though, and for a few minutes I wondered if I would ever really feel OK again. It was a like I had a brick covered in glass dust wedged between my sternum and intestines, simultaneously cutting my innards and blocking the ensuing flow of blood. I never vomited, but I did sleep from 1 to 5 AM, intermittently waking to go into the bathroom in brutal stomach pain. At 5, I realized I wasn't going back to sleep. I had a plane to catch home and needed to be up at 6. But as I watched the sun rise over the small buildings in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and cut ashen lines from the cables of the Verrizano Bridge, I came as close to a reconciliation with mortality as I think I can ever come.
I did the challenge because I wanted to realize my mortal boundaries as best I can in this lifetime. I'm not in good shape, and training for an athletic contest and succeeding might take me a long, long time. But I have a high threshold for pain, and I really pushed it. I would say that completing spicy food eating challenges is fanfare for the average person looking for a rock-star rush: a restaurant cheering you on, an endorphin rush to succeed, and a brutal capsicum-induced crash. That'd be the rock star OD'ing after their big show.
The Good Hurts editorial team (read: my girlfriend) is hard at work on compiling the footage into a magnum opus video. Until that's up, enjoy the sauce reviews and our twitter page.

Happy New Years,
Russell