Dave's Gourmet Ghost Pepper Sauce

Ghost peppers, also known as bhut jolokia, are an extremely-spicy pepper, a specially-bred hybrid hotter than anything nature ever grew on her own. Not the hottest pepper ever bred by madmen, but pretty insane. They also are the first ingredient in Gourmet Dave's Ghost Pepper Sauce. I have never eaten anything which had ghost peppers added directly to it -- except for this sauce, and one other sauce in which the ghost peppers are the 4th ingredient, which is downright bland compared to Gourmet Dave's stuff and which I won't mention by name.

According to this chart, which looks pretty authoritative, ghost peppers measure 855,000 – 1,041,427 on the Scoville scale of spiciness, or 208.29 times hotter than a jalapeño. Gourmet Dave's Ghost Pepper Sauce measures 650,000 on the Scoville scale, 130 times hotter than a jalapeño. Or more than 250 times hotter than original Tobasco sauce. Around 300 times as hot as Sriracha.

Or as much as 1/3 as hot as standard US grade pepper spray, used by police for riot control.

I do not recommend tasting Gourmet Dave's Ghost Pepper sauce by itself. I have done that, and am going to be very, very careful not to do it again. Tasting a drop -- I repeat: a drop -- of the stuff made me feel as if I had seriously injured myself. A half hour later I felt okay, but I was surprised that I felt okay.

Much the same goes for handling the sauce and then rubbing my eye.

If I accidentally do drink another unmixed drop of the stuff, and there's nothing else in sight to eat or drink except Sriracha, I will unscrew the top of the Sriracha bottle and chug it. Because that will cool me off. I'm not joking and I'm not exaggerating.

You know what? I don't recommend this stuff at all. Like the movie Revolver, Dave's Gourmet Ghost Pepper Sauce is quite simply not for most people. It's in a whole different league from most hot sauces which have XXX's and warnings on their labels. Even Gourmet Dave's own Insanity Sauce, which won some sort of Hottest Sauce in the World contest some time before the Ghost Pepper sauce appeared, scores only 180,000 on the Scoville scale, which means that the Ghost Pepper sauce is more than 3/12 times as hot.

So what do I do with the stuff? I fix an entree with another sort of sauce, into which I have carefully mixed a drop of the Ghost Pepper Sauce. One drop -- one SMALL drop -- for an entree. And I'm pretty hardcore when it comes to spicy food. I just ate such an entree about an hour ago, and I'm still exhilarated, my eyes are still watering, my forehead is still sweaty and my belly is still burning. All from one little drop mixed into an entire entree of soothing blandness. One little bottle of the stuff will last me a long time even though I use it every day. And it's not just sheer hotness: the ghost peppers also have a distinctive citrusy flavor.

Don't touch! you've been warned!