Some of you know I frequently enjoy spicy foods. Some have tasted my "Salsa Del Muerte" (and yes, I know it's grammatically incorrect, but that's where the funny comes from) which is basically salsa with as many habanero peppers as I can stand to put in it, along with the tomatoes, onions, cilantro, a bit of garlic, lime juice and salt.. This is especially fun when you whizz up the food processor and basically fill the house with noxious gases. And also when you get some on your cuticles, and you have a phantom burn at random times for several weeks afterwards. But man, is it good.
A few months ago I saw some Xochitl Habanero Salsa and thought I'd give it a try. I bought it, brought it home, and poured a bunch in to a bowl and got myself a bowl of chips. I should have heeded the warning of the smell wafting off of it, but I figured "hey, salsa, good!" I load up a chip and take a bite, and my head is on fire. This stuff was rough! But I plow through a few more chips, thinking, "Well, it's salsa, not hot sauce, so I'm just being a wimp." But after a few more chips, I steal some of my wife and kid's Amy Mild salsa to cut it with. I end up at about a 4 to 1 ratio of Amy's to Xochitl and it's still one of the most blazingly hot salsas I've ever eaten, but at least I can eat it.
I then look at the Xochitl ingredients, and it's habaneros, onions, and salt. Nothing else. No tomatoes, vinegar or lime juice, cilantro, other peppers, nothing. So it basically is hot sauce, they just labeled it "salsa" and sold it in a wide jar. I then read some hot pepper aficionado boards and find out this is what the serious pepperheads--the one with their pain receptors completely destroyed--use as their salsa.
I find a light smear--maybe 1/4 of a teaspoon--on a burrito before I fill it makes a mean hot burrito. A drop in anything basically makes anything hot. It is hotter than almost any non-extract hot sauce I have eaten. It has a sharp, salty flavor, and the onions do nothing more than bolster the sheer intensity.
If you like hot things, then get some of this (I got mine at Whole Foods, of course.) It's a lot of fun.
