This Sauce Is So Hot It Was Banned From The National Fiery Foods Show
There are many different types of hot sauce that you'll find at your local grocery store. From Frank's Red Hot to Sriracha, there are countless different varieties available to purchase. But if you've ever tried one particular sauce before, you would probably remember it. Introducing: Dave's Gourmet Insanity Sauce, which features ingredients like hot pepper, tomato paste, garlic, salt, onions, acid, and (perhaps surprisingly) not much else.
Created by Dave Hirschkop (a.k.a. the "Brigadier of Burn"), Dave's Gourmet Impossible Hot Sauce is the only sauce to ever be banned from the National Fiery Foods Show. According to HotSauce.com, the sauce is also an effective tool for stripping driveway grease stains and literally stripping waxed floors. But don't knock it till you try it; the sauce's culinary chops stand up to the heat. Dave's Gourmet Insanity Hot Sauce won the Best Sauce Award at the Hot & Spicy Food Festival of 1995 and was given the Best of Aisle Award by the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade in 1998, via Hot Sauce Depot. So, just how hot is it, exactly?
Origin of Insanity
The Scoville Scale is a measurement of a food's spiciness by gauging how much capsaicin it contains along with its sugar-to-water content ratio. HotSauce.com places Dave's Gourmet Insanity Sauce somewhere 250,000-1,000,000 Scoville Heat Units (SHU). For reference, Tabasco has an SHU between 30,000-50,000, per PepperheadsForLife. Scared yet? Or do you feel challenged to try it out? If the spicy thrill piques your interest instead of pushes you away, you aren't alone.
Before forming Dave's Gourmet at his old restaurant, Burrito Madness, Hirschkop began developing progressively hotter hot sauces to test out on the restaurant's unruly patrons as a pet project. The sauce was intended as a punishment of sorts because Hirschkop's creation was so debilitatingly spicy that it successfully achieved its purpose of disciplining visitors who reached a problematic-level of rowdiness. However, in a strange twist of fate a la Olivia Newton John, the Burrito Madness customers were into both the excruciating heat as well as the flavor, and kept coming back for a taste. Now, customers of Dave's Gourmet are doing the same.
Spicy thrill-seekers enter here
10 years ago, Hirschkop hopped on Reddit for an AMA ("Ask Me Anything"), in which users leave questions and comments for the original poster and the poster responds to them. In his self-introduction, Hirschkop professes to be the first person to start the "superhot" hot sauce trend, and there might be some truth to the claim: his Insanity sauce's slogan is literally, "Original Hottest Sauce in the Universe."
Most of the ensuing customer stories include themes of accidental over-indulgence and subsequent violent indigestion, vomiting, crying, screaming, panic, public humiliation, embarrassment in front of friends, and even shoveling snow from the ground into their mouth. One Reddit user stated that the experience of eating Dave's Insanity Sauce "involves fighting back the End of Days and the Four Horsemen along with it." And the best part is: people can't get enough.
If your tastebuds and curiosity are piqued, look no further. Spice savants can get their hands on a 5 ounce bottle of Dave's Gourmet Insanity Hot Sauce and its numerous variations for less than $10 a pop on the brand's website. For even more fun, thrill-seekers can purchase Dave's Gourmet Insanity Hot Sauce via HotSauce.com (tagline: "We Are Hot Sauce"), which sells the stuff by the gallon. For just $140 plus shipping, 128 fluid ounces of liquid fire can be all yours.