Chef Christiane Pereira of Taste of Brasil Café [http://www.tasteofbrasilcafe.com/Taste_of_Brasil/Home.html] apparently received enough compliments about her hot sauce that she decided to inaugurate a Kickstarter campaign to fund the production of her “I’m Hot Sauce” on a larger scale.
If you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, this online service provides a way for people to fund worthy projects that might not otherwise get off the ground. It’s a strategy for finding investors, and people who invest usually receive the product and some satisfaction from knowing they helped a worthy commercial venture.
Through Kickstarter, I’ve personally helped fund a cookbook entitled “Soup and Bread,” and I’ve given a hand to a manifesto about garlic, written by a chef friend of mine, Alan Lake, who was featured some years ago in a piece I did about, coincidentally, Taste of Brasil.
Click the link to find out more about how you can use Kickstarter to help Pereira crowdfund her new venture: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/715452961/im-hot-sauce-a-brazilian-hot-sauce-from-cristiane
We enjoy hot sauce, but I usually default to Sriracha, which is a good sauce, but it’s nice to have options. I bought a bottle of Pereira’s “I’m Hot Sauce,” and found it good-tasting (not something you can say about all hot sauce), and although it packed more heat than Sriracha, it was not stupid hot. Too often, many commercial hot sauces are just too damn hot; using them can be the nuclear option for your food because the powerful sauces pack little flavor and much searing heat, meaning all other flavors in the food are pretty much obliterated and all the eater feels is pain. There is, in fact, an odd theme of palatal and gastrointestinal distress that is pulled through advertisements for other sauces, with names like “Pain is Good Hot Sauce” and “Big Daddy’s Ass Burn.” You have to wonder why people buy hot sauce that promises such unpleasantness.
“I’m Hot Sauce” is not a super-hot sauce, but it does pack a decent amount of heat. I ate it on rice and on a piece of steak, and either way the flavor of the malagueta pepper comes through quite nicely. On the Scoville Scale of chili pepper heat, the malagueta comes in around 60,000 to 100,000 Scoville Units; by comparison, the Habanero is about 200,000.
I’m a fan of Taste of Brasil; I like the food, and I think it’s just fantastic that Oak Park has one of the few Brazilian restaurants in the Chicagoland area – and a very good one, at that.
In the past, I’ve praised the feijoada (the Brazilian national dish) there, and I’m sure this bean-based dish would go quite well with “I’m Hot Sauce.”
You have only until Wednesday, July 9, 2014 to help Pereira and Taste of Brasil by investing via Kickstarter in her campaign.
