One thing you should know about growing hot peppers in Connecticut is that it is a labor of love, which is old folks’ way of saying “a pain in the behind”. We get frost into late May and the soil temperatures don’t cooperate until mid- to late- June. Then, in mid-October, it starts getting cold again. This means a few things for our operation:

• We have to start peppers from seed, beginning in April, for them to have a fighting chance of producing a decent size crop. This, too, is expensive, as it means we have to keep the heat mats and LED lighting running in the greenhouse to keep the seedlings alive and thriving.
• Many of our plants really hit their stride, in terms of production, early October, right as the weather is making it nearly impossible for the plants to survive. This means that, every year, we end up with a bunch of green (unripe) peppers that could have been somebody. They could have been a contender.

Last year, I thought, well, I’ll bet these not-yet-ripe peppers still have some amount of flavor, though probably not much heat. So I used my traditional recipe and made a green sauce that I labeled as verde que te quiero verde. I bottled it, filling about 60 bottles in all. I tasted it. It tasted good. I threw out all 60 bottles.

I threw out the bottles because I don’t want to make sauce that tastes good. My name is on the bottle; even if it’s not for everybody, I need to know that it tastes great. Exceptional. Better than anything else I could buy.

The truth is, even as I was bottling the sauce, I was tasting it, as I always do, but in this case, because I was so desperate not to see the peppers go to waste, I was lying to myself. “It’s not bad.” “It just needs a little more spice.” And none of this was true; this sauce was not going to be great, because the peppers themselves didn’t taste great.

Intensely flavorful (and sometimes intensely spicy) peppers are what make our sauce what it is. Yes, we are meticulous about the process we use to extract and develop the flavors, and yes, we are careful to complement these flavors with other spices, truffle oil, and just enough vinegar to let it flow (and to keep the pH low enough so that our sauces don’t need to be refrigerated.) But the heart of a great pepper sauce is great peppers.

This is a big reason why I make it a point to grow our own peppers, even though we are geographically ill-suited to do so. I am the (self-appointed) head of Quality Control at Hawke Sauce, which means that I have to control the quality of the peppers we grow - selecting the mixture of seeds to plant each year, using no artificial pesticides, growing in rich soil, spacing out waterings to maximize flavor and heat - and the quality of the product itself. Nobody is ever going to care as much as I do about the quality of Hawke Sauce, because nobody else has their name on the label. This is why I am proud to certify that each and every bottle of Hawke Sauce is the best it can possibly be.