Ambitious culinary exploits may rise to obsession but can make fast friends in the process. Hot Sauce enthusiasts Eric List and Anna Sysko know that all too well. They both have made food, gardening and cooking a big part of their lives; Eric with his cider orchard and bee hives and Anna with her solar greenhouse and restaurant life. These activities consume nearly all their free time, and thus their friendship took root by sharing the fruits of their labors and cooking together in the Morning Glory Farm kitchen. These culinary exploits grew to become a very nourishing way to connect their families, listen to great music, and cook to their hearts delight.

Looking back over the past few years, Eric and Anna have shared many an afternoon working on some delicious creation. Apple picking, cider pressing, honey spinning, maple syrup boiling, pepper roasting all prefaced an evening meal and a sip or two of Eric’s mead. After playing around in the kitchen together, Eric asked Anna to help him develop a larger and more reliable recipe for his incredible hot sauce he was working on.

Anna contributed her  kitchen production skills and they set to work. After a good round of roasting plump roma tomatoes and smoking a worldly mix of hot peppers, they put the rest of the farm-produced  ingredients in a blender, simmered the sauce, and tasted. Both looked into each other’s wide open eyes tearing up with joy (and maybe a little from the spiciness) with the clear realization that they had created a  sauce the world desperately had NO IDEA that it NEEDED. The path was made clear; they HAD to make more of the best ultra-crafted, locally sourced, crazy-smokey-delicious  hot sauce this side of the Pacific and provide it to the world!

Finding the right licensed production space to make large quantities of product intended for sale is always the hardest part of a micro food business, as well as recipe development. Luckily, Anna had access to the kitchen at Cafe DiCocoa in Bethel after her work hours. After gathering their ingredients, the recipe development process began for both the Roja and the Verde. They worked off the base recipe to determine the final preparation by testing roasted onions and garlic versus unroasted, cilantro or no cilantro in the Verde, and whether lime juice would be tastier than apple cider vinegar. After agreeing on the final blend and preparation, they adjusted the acidity slightly to make sure pH was proper for bottling. Zoning in on this was slightly tedious but the result was something that they were sure to be able to reproduce and keep true to its original tantalizing flavor.

Now, where does that dazzling smokieness come from, you ask? Smoking peppers dates all the way back to the time of the Aztec’s, and is still the process for making Chipotles out of Jalapenos. Chipotles are the most popular of all dried peppers because of their deep flavor. Taking a cue from the Aztecs and thanks to a connection with another Bethel business, Eric secured the use of the wood-heated hot smoker at Smokin’ Good BBQ on their off days to smoke the peppers. All the various chile peppers grown for SmokeBomb sauces are hot smoked until the flavor is permeated through to the seeds, giving SmokeBomb it’s backdrop of fire and smoke!

Finally, it was time to start bottling! The recipe was finalized. The ingredients were gathered, smoked, roasted, and ready. The kitchen was clean and the bottles had arrived. Eric’s brother created  beautiful labels and the caps and seals were on hand. The last step was to lure some unwitting innocent friends to help Eric and Anna grind, and boil, and bottle for hours and hours until each batch was done.

The first bottling in December 2018 of SmokeBomb was completed just in time for Christmas, around hectic work schedules and busy kitchens. All of Bethel was warned that soon the sauce would be on the shelves and once they were, they started to fly! Egg dishes all over Western Maine  were transformed, people started noticing, including Anna’s brother, Dustin, who insisted on buying multiple cases of SmokeBomb. Dustin, a capsaicin enthusiast, has declared it was the very best hot sauce he has ever come across in his world-wide search for the next spicy thing to try. Others have fallen in love with it and sent the sauce to all  corners of the United States, and even to Japan! 

After the first bottling, Eric and Anna knew that they had done what they set out to do. Until the next harvest season when they would do it all over again but at TWICE the volume! They must be crazy, you think? Well, when one holds a holy grail of a recipe and has the drive and the friendship to produce it, it definitely should be like SmokeBomb and be crazy delicious!