Meet Cleveland's Hot Ones: The Local Hot Sauces You Should Be Stocking to Kick Up the Flavor

By Douglas Trattner on Wed, Dec 6, 2023 at 5:00 am

In August of this year, chili pepper breeder Ed Currie secured the Guinness World Record for his latest creation, Pepper X, a cultivar so hot that it makes the dreaded Carolina Reaper seem wimpy by comparison. But even X, the “World’s Hottest Pepper,” fails to approach some of the demonic hot sauces on the market that promise hours of gastrointestinal discomfort in every drop.

Step into Chili’s Fire Pit in Mentor and you’ll unearth elixirs that clock in at around 16 million Scoville units, roughly 80 times hotter than a habanero. A local pioneer in the hot sauce world, owner Don Pesta opened the shop more than two decades ago because he saw the writing on the wall. While he does carry plenty of “novelty” sauces that will make a grown man cry, the bulk of his inventory is geared to a much wider audience.

“There are more than 10,000 different kinds out there, but I carry over 900 hot sauces – and that’s not counting the salsas, barbecue sauces and marinades,” Pesta says.

Pesta’s measure of the marketplace is a rough estimate, he says, what with brands continually coming and going. What is not conjecture is the fact that Americans are obsessed with hot sauce. To meet that ever-increasing demand, there is a local cadre of chefs, entrepreneurs and tinkerers eager to throw their hat in the ring with respect to commercially available options.

“They are such beautifully simple things to create, and they add so much depth of flavor to so many things,” says Clark Pope, maker of the Pope’s line of food products.

Pope has been crafting hot sauces in Cleveland for more than a decade. His Burning River has been a fixture product at holiday bazaars, markets and fleas, where the small, portable and affordable bottles are gobbled up for gifting.

“In Cleveland, people do such a great job of supporting themselves,” he says. “We are fierce defenders of our own reputation and we support local, I think, more so than many other communities.”

For this guide, we rounded up every local brand in Northeast Ohio that we could get our hands on, selecting one bottle from each when variety existed. We found a delicious assortment of products that range from mild to wild, sweet to tart, thin to chunky. When shopping for a new hot sauce, it’s smart to think about how it will be used; thinner sauces roll off foods while thicker ones adhere. And when it comes to heat levels, the phrase “to each their own” definitely applies.

Red Dawn

Look: A colorful, slightly dystopian label reveals a crimson sauce flecked with solids and spice.

Background: Don Pesta opened Chili’s Fire Pit in Mentor more than two decades ago. In addition to stocking roughly 900 different hot sauces from around the world, the owner carries his own brand of award-winning sauces, salsas and spice blends.

Asked how his house line of hot sauces fairs alongside some of the hottest, most buzzworthy brews out there, he says, fortunately, there isn’t much brand loyalty among shoppers.

“People are always looking for something new,” he explains. “If people want the heat, I’ve got the heat, if they want the sweet, I’ve got the sweet. It just depends on what you like. Hot sauce is like wine; you can have one person saying this is the best wine in the world and the next person says it sucks.”

Tasting notes: Pesta’s Red Dawn nails the balance between flavor, spice and heat, all delivered in a thick but pourable sauce. It starts tart on the tongue followed by waves of garlic, cayenne, habanero and freshly ground black pepper.

Uses: Pizza, pork chops, mac and cheese, Bloody Marys

Heat index: 5/10

Find it at: Chili’s Fire Pit, chilisfirepit.com

Photo by Mark Oprea

Davina Rae’s Hot Sauce

Look: Unlike the myriad glass bottles that line the condiment shelves, Davina’s comes in 7-ounce plastic bottles with pointy twist-open caps. The label design is clean, minimal and crisp, with simple text on a white and red background.

Background: Davina Romansky, a bartender at Firestone Country Club in Akron, couldn’t find the perfect hot sauce for the Bloody Marys that she was constantly whipping up for members. So she created her own.

“The owners put it on the menu,” explains Romansky. “A rep from Giant Eagle tasted it while there and said that if it was commercially produced they would sell it.”

Romansky and her colleague, Richard “Fuzz” Fausnight, branched out with Fuzz's Awesome Sauce, which is a mayo-based twist on the original. The owner doesn’t cut corners with respect to ingredients, using preserved lemons and whole roasted jalapenos, fresnos and habaneros for appreciable heat.

“I feel like spice is becoming a bigger thing with the younger generations,” she says. “I’ve noticed that they are really into heat.”

Tasting notes: This is a thicker sauce that grabs food, but it can also clog the small dispenser hole in the cap. That’s a small price to pay for beautiful habanero flavor, bold roasted garlic and aggressive but agreeable heat. Preserved lemons in the sauce give it an unexpected lemony blast that mellows when paired with food.

Uses: Bloody Marys (obviously), breakfast sandwiches, deviled eggs, pierogies, tacos, chicken wings

Heat index: 6/10

Find it at: Giant Eagle, davinaraes.com

Photo by Mark Oprea

Fuego

Look: Inside a slender wax-dipped bottle with a simple black-and-white label is a mossy green liquid for the Applewood Smoked Jalapeno.

Background: Ian Barrett makes his shelf-stable fermented hot sauces in the same Cleveland facility as Old Brooklyn Cheese and Mustard. Despite an increasingly crowded commercial kitchen, Barrett says that he refuses to entrust his recipe and production to a third-party co-packer.

“If you want to maintain a quality and a standard of product, going to a co-packer means that it’s going to be really hard,” he explains. “If you want to buy something local, small-batch, handmade, it’s nice to know that the brand on the bottle is the brand that is making the product.”

Just two years into production, Fuego sauces have earned industry recognition in the form of “Good Food” awards. All of the solid ingredients, including locally grown jalapenos, are cold smoked with applewood before going into fermentation. The final product is thinner than most, but it punches above its viscosity.

“If you can have a thinner sauce while still maintaining the body and big punch that’s behind it, I think that’s a nice sweet spot to be in,” says Barrett.

Tasting notes: This sauce is aggressively smoky, a trait that will appeal to some but not others. Vegetal flavors are balanced by pleasant tartness and mild spice.

Uses: Eggs, pizza, pierogies, chicken tenders, mixed with mayo to create a smoky aioli.

Heat index: 2/10

Find it at: Old Brooklyn Cheese Co., Meister Foods at the West Side Market, Lake Road Market, fuegofermentations.com

Photo by Mark Oprea

Llamacita

Look: It’s easy to see the vibrant red color of this Tomato Guajillo sauce through the 8-ounce glass bottle. The brand and product name are screen printed directly onto the glass, doing away with the need for a label. Naturally, there’s a cartoon llama on the front.

Background: Bianca Beach grew up in the Pacific Northwest, lived in Southern California, and winded up in sunny Cleveland Heights, where she never stopped dreaming of those sauce-drenched SoCal tacos. In late 2023, she debuted her line of taqueria-style sauces under the Llamacita brand.

“They are inspired by some of my favorite sauces at the taquerias I grew up going to and throughout my life,” she explains.

Beach prefers the label “taco sauces” over hot sauces because they aren’t all hot. More importantly, they have a silky-smooth texture, like the sauces that flow effortlessly through the tops of squeeze bottles at the local taqueria. After releasing a green sauce, orange sauce and yellow sauce, Beach unveiled her magnum opus.

“Red was the last to be born,” she says. “It took some time, I don’t want to say to perfect it, but it took many iterations.”

Tasting notes: This sauce may be smooth and pourable, but it isn’t thin, one-dimensional or bland. It smells like a warm bowl of Texas chili and overflows with earthy, smoky spice from the guajillo chiles. There’s tomato in the sauce but this isn’t a tomatoey sauce by any stretch. Other than a slight tickle in the back of the throat, this sauce is largely heat-free.

Uses: Micheladas, chili con carne, nachos, grilled steak, as a marinade for oven-roasted pork

Heat index: 1/10

Find it at: Miles Market, Nature’s Oasis, Wine Spot, llamacitafoods.com

Photo by Mark Oprea

Ol’ Dirty Sheets Hot Sauce

Look: A colorful hand-drawn label depicting laundry hanging on the line only partially blocks the dark, brooding brew within.

Background: Wooster natives Joshua Sheets and Jamie Smetzer launched their product in 2016. Sheets, a graduate of the Pennsylvania Institute of Culinary Arts, began messing around with homemade hot sauces and sharing it with friends. The rest, as they say, is history.

“We wanted to make hot sauce for hot sauce people,” says Sheets.

For Ol’ Dirty Sheets, the chef starts with Ohio-grown habanero, ghost, chipotle and arbol chilis. The peppers are blended with local maple syrup to create a hot sauce with a compelling and distinctive flavor profile.

Tasting notes: This sauce is dark, dank, smoky and fruity. The paste-like consistency and deep, complex flavors reminded me of a Oaxacan mole negro. A sneaky, creeping heat continues to build until it tops out mid-level. It’s all rounded out with a kiss of maple sweetness.

Uses: Enchiladas, loaded potatoes, marinades, tacos, breakfast sandwiches, chili

Heat index: 5/10

Find it at: Narrin’s at West Side Market, Local Roots Market, oldirtysheets.com

Photo by Mark Oprea

Heritage Fare Garlic Hot Sauce

Look: A tall, slender glass bottle is adorned with a lemon-yellow cap and red label with a sketch of a chef tasting his stovetop brew.

Background: Heritage Fare has a long, proud history in Cleveland. Wendell Turner launched the business some 30 years ago to fill a niche in the soul food world, a category overlooked by the big commercial brands of the day. To help boost sales of his triple-washed collard greens, he paired them with a special herb and spice blend for home cooks. The company’s Savory Soul Sauce has been the go-to rib sauce for decades and the Garlic Hot Sauce continues to find favor with a new generation of chefs, home cooks and foodies.

Tasting notes: If you enjoy bright, thin, mildly spiced hot sauces like Crystal, Tabasco and Frank’s RedHot, you’ll adore Heritage Fare. What it lacks in pomp and flash, it makes up for in versatility, affordability and broad appeal. Tart, tangy and bright, the sauce has a pronounced garlic and vinegar twang with wee heat.

Uses: Scrambled eggs, cooked greens, soups and stews, fried green tomatoes, grilled chicken.

Heat index: 2/10

Find it at: Good Company, heritagefare.net

Photo by Mark Oprea

Killik

Look: In the ETA, a clear glass bottle with bold black text contains an olive-colored sauce.

Background: Mike Killik and his father both suffered heart attacks within a week of each other. Only the younger Killik survived. To cut back on his sodium intake, Mike began experimenting with fermented hot sauces, which contain less sodium than conventional hot sauces when properly made. It didn’t take long for the former restaurant veteran to land on a winning formula.

“Seeing how great chefs work, I learned to keep things simple,” he explains. “I didn’t want to overwork and overprocess them; I wanted to make it as scratch as we can.”

Killik’s straightforward recipe starts with poblanos, jalapenos, onion and garlic, which are fermented in brine, blended and bottled. Along with the green ETA, Killik crafts red-hued ZETA and DELTA varieties, all made at Cleveland’s Hildebrandt Building.

Tasting notes: Like most fermented hot sauces, ETA has an unmistakable funkiness that develops in the process. But the pasteurization process tampers that down, along with the heat level, which is modest. It’s a loose but slightly chunky product that straddles the fence between salsa and sauce.

Uses: Eggs, pizza, grilled fish, fish tacos, roasted chicken

Heat index: 2/10

Find it at: Dean Supply, Market District, Lakewood Hardware, Juneberry, killikhsc.com

Photo by Mark Oprea

Not Yo’ Daddy’s Mexican Hot Sauce

Look: A vibrant pumpkin-orange sauce shines through a thin glass bottle with an off-white label and black wax-topped cap.

Backstory: “When my dad shared this recipe he made me promise that I wouldn’t sell it,” says Cristina Gonzalez Alcala. “I think he meant the recipe not the sauce.” At least, she adds, that’s what she’s going with.

Developed in the family’s hometown of Durango, Mexico, the sauce is described as a “typical salsa roja” that would be found throughout that region. The boldly spiced salsa pairs well with beef, the number-one commodity in that Mexican state.

Since inheriting the recipe from her father, Gonzalez Alcala has been making each batch by hand in an Akron kitchen. Fortunately for chili heads, she has not tempered the original recipe for mousy gringos.

“People have been misusing the term ‘hot,’” she states. “Other than the water and vinegar, the peppers are the main ingredient.”

Tasting notes: Those chilis include heaps of ghost peppers and scotch bonnets, which provide almighty heat, but also fruity, floral flavor. A rich bouquet of Mexican chilis and spices makes this one of the most distinctive and appealing sauces in the bunch. Neither loose nor gloopy, the salsa flows easily while clinging to foods.

Uses: Straight on tortilla chips, avocado toast, ceviche, poke bowls, rub on a pork loin

Heat index: 7/10

Find it at: Leaf, Sweet Mary's Bakery, River Merchant, notyodaddys.com

Photo by Mark Oprea

Pope’s

Look: A classic look for a classic sauce in the Burning River option. A mostly white label with a black “Burning River” banner and a two-color illustration of a tomato and chili pepper.

Background: Clark Pope has been making commercial food products in Cleveland under the Pope’s brand for more than a decade. After the successful launch of his Bloody Mary sauce, he moved on to hot sauce, which was born out of a love for gardening, cooking and entertaining.

“The beautiful thing about this hot sauce is that it’s just as simple as the day is long,” Pope explains.
Over the years, Pope has earned a level of trust and confidence among local food-product shoppers, who eagerly snatch up his latest creations. He also has become a respected mentor for other food-focused entrepreneurs looking to follow in his footsteps.

Tasting notes: This is the type of hot sauce you would make in your kitchen at home if you had a little know-how, a lot of confidence and a bumper crop of tomatoes and hot peppers. The ingredients list might as well be the recipe: peppers, tomatoes, onion, garlic and apple cider vinegar. It’s a delightfully fresh, vibrant but uncomplicated sauce that goes on anything and everything.

Uses: Scrambled eggs, pizza, quesadillas, mac and cheese, meatloaf

Heat index:3/10

Find it at: The Wine Spot, Heinen’s, Market District, popeskitchen.com