Spice Up Your Life

About Us

We, that is, my son and I, are working to build a line of really tasty, very flavorful hot sauces and spicy condiments.

It started about five years ago, when I bought a few pots of hot pepper plants from the annual plant sale at the Kilbourn Park Organic Greenhouse. Those few pots yielded a surprising number of small, but quite hot peppers, which we chopped into our omelettes, sauces and other meals.

There was an over-abundance of peppers for our personal use. "What should we do with all this?" became a serious question, and the answer, "Let's try making some hot sauce", seemed the obvious solution.

The garden has expanded from a few pots to just over 50 square feet. We plan to grow and harvest 12 varieties this year, ranging from a sweet yellow one (We don't know the name and received the seeds from a friend who doesn't know either.) all the way through the blazing Carolina Reaper.

We harvest our home-grown peppers, buy spices and fresh vegetables, rent space in a shared commercial kitchen, and invent all of our own recipes. Every one has been tested by an outside lab to ensure it exceeds FDA requirements, and we carefully test each batch to ensure that our efforts are always in compliance.

We hope that you enjoy our offerings.

Frank & Chris

Crafting Flavorful Heat for You

At Flavor Chain Peppers, we specialize in small batch hot sauces and spicy condiments, and we've designed them to elevate your meals with bold flavors and the perfect amount of heat.

Our Passion for Flavor

Small Batch Excellence

Lots of things happen when you grow your own peppers to make your own hot sauces. We've learned, for example, that one individual plant can give peppers of wildly different heat levels. When still green, naturally, the heat levels are much lower, and the flavor is, well, 'greener'. But even two ripe, yellow, Hot Hungarian Wax peppers can vary significantly in heat level, and this also affects the flavor a bit.

Much like a craft beer that's been open-air yeasted, each batch might taste a bit differently than the one you tried previously. Not by much, you understand, but different.

So please, explore our unique range of handcrafted sauces, each made with care to ensure quality and taste. Discover how our products can transform your favorite dishes into unforgettable culinary experiences.

Capsaicin and other capsaicinoids are chemicals in plants and their fruits that give hot peppers their pungency. These chemicals evolved in plants to help ward off pests and insure propagation. Human culinary curiosity being what it is, our ancestors discovered spices and developed a taste for spicy foods for good reasons; seasoned foods not only taste better, our ancestors also learned that salt, acids (such as vinegar), and various peppers aid food preservation.

In 1912 an American pharmacist, William Scoville, developed a method to determine the heat level of the different hot peppers. The Scoville organoleptic test*, as he called it, involves making a preparation of a particular pepper, dried, weighed exactly, dissolved in alcohol, and weighed again. This solution is diluted with an equal weight of sugar water, and tasted by a panel of five expert tasters. The solution is then diluted with the same weight of sugar water, and tasted. The process continues until at least three of the judges can no longer sense heat in the solution. The result is given in Scoville Heat Units (SHU). The drawbacks to this system are obvious, the biggest one being "taste fatigue" after repeated tastings, and results can vary by 50% or more.

A newer, much more precise method, high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), can be used to analytically quantify the capsaicinoid level in a solution, and the results can be converted to Scoville Heat Units. It's a rather expensive test for small makers like us, and certainly lacks the fun factor.

All of this is to say that the SHU rating of any pepper will only get you so far. How many peppers, of which varieties, are in a recipe? What are the other ingredients, and how do they enhance or temper heat in a sauce or condiment? The only way to know is to try some out and see which ones appeal to you. Different sauces will go better, in your mouth, with different foods. While we can, and do, provide ideas and make suggestions, really the best thing to do is to try a few of these offerings and find out, in your own kitchen, and at your own table, what flavors you like best.

The pepper heat scale on the right gives you the SHUs of the varieties growing in our garden this year.

*Organoleptic properties are the aspects of food, water or other substances that create an individual experience via the senses—including taste, sight, smell, and touch. Wikipedia

Hot Hungarian Wax Pepper

Fish Pepper

Carolina Reaper Peppers

A Few Words About Spicy Peppers, William Scoville, and the Scoville Rating System

Our Pepper Garden

Starting with the Harvest

Next season always starts this season. In the Fall we select a number of each variety, dry them thoroughly, and save the seeds. This can be harder than it sounds; the dry peppers seem to acquire a devilish urge to snap open suddenly and send their much desired seeds flying in all directions.

Having carefully gathered seeds into properly labeled little cups, we place the lids on and store them until about mid-winter.

Then we prepare the potting soil, using our own special mix, put labels on the little 3" seedling pots (you can see them in the top photo), fill the cups with the mix, and drop a few seeds into each.

Trays full of cups are placed on heating pads and under grow lights. Then we wait. If you're a gardener of any sort, you understand that this waiting is the worst part.

But Mother Nature does her job, most seeds sprout, and then just need water and a little care until they are ready for the season. With some care and a little bit of luck, the garden gets really green and full.

These photos are of the garden in mid-June this year. There is nothing to harvest at this point, especially after Spring weather changes this year brutalized many of the plants, but it's very promising.

Now, at harvest time, the promise of Spring and Summer has come true. There is plenty to harvest and turn into sauce.

These are Ghost Peppers. They are almost green enough to provide an early harvest and a batch or two of Green Ghost sauce.

Here are Cayenne and Ghost plants . Both have consistently proved to be very productive look to be that way again this year.

These are my favorite peppers to grow! These green and white beauties were first cultivated in the Mid-Atlantic states, and were used to flavor many seafood recipes, so they were named "Fish". The bright white is a sharp and lovely contrast to the otherwise dark green leaves. The coloration extends to the peppers which are pale green and white, when they are small, changing to green and white stripes, then to red and white, (some get purple in the process) and finally a brilliant red when at their hottest.

They were amazing! I know you wanted bad and good, but they were both great! Good spice level, flavor, not vinergary. Amazing! My wife tried both and loved both!

J.K., Wheeling, IL

★★★★★

Please let us know what you like and don't like about our sauces. We carefully read every review; just send an email to: flavorchainpeppers@gmail.com