Crazy Hot

From seed to bottle, Taos Hum hot sauce makers fire their dreams

by

One way to save chile pepper seeds is to spread them in a thin layer on the dashboard of the Subaru right after harvest. Crack the windows a little so it doesn’t get too baking hot in there. Check on the tiny discs every day—they’re among the most precious items on the farm and you’ll need them for next year. Mark them carefully so you know which ones will bloom first, which will be bright orange, which will have thick flesh.

For Northern New Mexican farmers and foodies Joe and Loe Marcoline, such improvisation is the only way to make a go of it. While the dashboard method didn’t turn out to be the best tactic last season, it helped them continue cultivating peppers from the Andes, the Caribbean, China and Africa that can thrive in the high desert.

Their Taos Hum hot sauce is the textbook definition of farm to table: a value-added, closed-loop regional product that goes from the foot of the Sangre de Cristos to the shelves of grocery stores and the menus of restaurants. In the last three years, it has not only hit the top reaches of heat scales, but also billboards and popularity.

Sales have soared, too.

The Marcolines first hoped their land would be a place where they could grow their own food, but that shifted quickly to selling vegetables at the Taos Farmers Market as well. Lugging squash and tomatoes to market week after week wasn’t covering the cost, however. Baskets of bright habaneros and cayennes got oohs and ahs, yet people only bought one or two to take home.

Today, buyers are taking home bottles and sending them across the globe as gifts. And what they are buying is unlike anything else on the shelves. The peppers in Taos Hum hot sauce aren’t just exotic, hard-to-find varieties, they’re also 100% grown from seed on an off-the-grid, 5-acre patch of earth between the Rio Truchas and a vast section of federal land.

Walking Trout Farm gets its name from folklore that says the fish traverse west from the Truchas to the Rio Grande across dry land. Drivers from the highway dip into and across arroyos and climb past cottonwoods of impressive girth to snag a view of the farm’s seven grow houses. Out of sight, gravity moves springwater downhill to a storage tank and holding pond. Solar panels gear up not only the pumps for the irrigation system, but also the walk-in cooler and other production essentials.

In April, Joe ducks into a humid shack where classical music plays softly. After a few months of warmth from a wood-fired hot-water system connected to computerized heat probes, 2- to 3-inch pepper seedlings reach toward the light.

Farm manager Julia Espinosa and another worker pop in and out of the open door, rapidly moving plants from densely packed trays into bigger containers and into the ground. There’s always so much to be done, and some peppers won’t be ready to harvest until winter is nearly setting in again.

This is the first year Taos Hum has been able to hire long-term help. As the season progresses from planting to weeding to harvest, then to processing, work ramps up.

In December 2019, production included a 30-foot trailer loaded with 55-gallon drums full of peppers rumbling over La Veta pass, Joe explains. “My truck is 20 years old, the diesel that can pull that trailer. I got to Walsenburg and there was 10 inches of snow; it’s coming down faster than my windshield wipers could go. I’ve got Elvis leg…On the way back it’s double the weight because now you’ve got the glass” bottles containing the sauce.

After that, Joe also had to double as the company’s salesman and distributor when the one he’d signed up to work with backed out. But every leap got the small business further off the ground, and Loe says Joe thinks big.

“We thought it would be great to grow our own food,” she explains of their plans when they bought the land in 2010. Joe had been working as a professional geohyrdologic engineer and he and Loe met when he spent six years in Canada completing a doctoral program before returning to New Mexico. They soon married and she moved south.

“Joe can’t do anything small,” Loe tells SFR, her smile detectable over the phone. “Our small kitchen garden I imagined morphed into a huge farm garden.”

Then came years at the Taos Farmers Market and long weekends that blurred into late nights after their day jobs—his as a college teacher in Española and a project manager in Questa, hers in philanthropy in Santa Fe.

“It took a lot of our time,” she says. “So we thought, ‘What can we do with our land that is within our threshold?’ And he did some test batches of the hot sauce and we just had so much fun with it. The hot sauce market is maybe today where the microbrew market was. It’s a niche market. We wanted to do something complimentary and not compete with something that our community already does well.”

The plan panned out. While Northern New Mexico does peppers, few do peppers like these.

Considering hybrid-cross varieties that they’re working to cultivate along with new varieties and those that they’ve grown the last three years, nearly two dozen different kinds in a rainbow of colors grew in the ground this season, most of them in covered frame houses that help retain humidity.

Of course, there’s green chile, jalapeño, habanero and cayenne in several colors. But also cherry bomb, three cultivars of bhut jolokia or “ghost,” aji limo, ami amarillo, pot seven, fatalii, Carolina reaper and viper, to name a few.

And don’t forget the pepper that’s seeing its name in lights: Trinidad Moruga chocolate scorpion (so named, in part, for its dark-reddish-brownish hue, distinctive wrinkles and pointed “tail.”)

It’s listed currently as the hottest pepper tested by the New Mexico State University Chile Pepper Institute and is one of the three hottest Hum sauces—at least for now.

“This year we are boosting our raw green,” Joe explains as he munches a jalapeño straight from a plant in late September. “It’s already hot but we are making it crazy hot. We’ve got these big mama mustards, they are green scorpions—just crazy hot. We have kind of broken into some of the challenge stuff. That is what sells: the hottest thing you’ve got. Even though our model is really flavor. We aren’t going to have the same thing all the time. We aren’t striving for consistency, we are just trying to improve. Some peppers do better some years, some do worse.”

Taos Hum’s retail line began with four sauces. This spring the lineup included nine flavors, ranging from mild to super hot. By September, three new flavors had been blended and a new hot oil was making waves. Loe wasn’t kidding.

The load bottled in Colorado in 2019 was about 1,500 cases. The next season’s crop yielded 2,000 cases, and this year’s looks to top 2,300—the equivalent of about 1,100 gallons.

Today, after blending peppers with hand-crafted vinegar at a commercial kitchen in Taos, the bottling operation takes place 60 to 200 gallons at a time at Apple Canyon Gourmet in Albuquerque under the supervision of co-owners Anna and Greg Shawver.

Bright pink liquid splashes into sparkling bottles on the commercial packing line in early summer as the team processes prickly pear hot sauce, a mild blend that includes red ghost peppers along with the cactus fruit and a dash of honey.

Other varieties are not so forgiving, causing burning sensations in eyes and mouths for workers.

“There’s a couple that atomize in the air and, I mean, you sound like you have been smoking nine packs a day,” Greg says. “This stuff is hot. His tagline is ‘make it stop’ and there are times when I feel that!”

Like Taos Hum, Apple Canyon experienced an increase in volume during the pandemic. The packer has been in place for 20 years and plans to move into a new facility early next year to keep up. Anna reports so many local restaurants entered into product-development plans to market a shelf-stable salsa or sauce over the last year that Apple Canyon now has a waiting list for that service.

“They needed to add something else for revenue with fewer people in-person,” she says, “something they could ship or do online.”

While internet sales are important to the Marcolines’ business model, clicks alone aren’t driving that old diesel. Loe says the cartoon pepper labels and the popular lore of the hum—an ill-defined noise or vibration that some people experience in the mountain town—contribute to the growth.

Their products were already in stores and breweries around the Enchanted Circle in the spring of 2020 as the pandemic was ramping up. About the same time, Albuquerque-based restaurant chain Twisters was looking for a way to make its spicy fried chicken sandwich stand out. The mass-produced Tabasco scorpion version didn’t do the trick, but Taos Hum popped up on marketing manager Gabriella Martinez’s Instagram feed, and when testers tried it, they knew it was a winner.

“I made the mistake of trying it on a spoon and I was in tears for a solid 20 minutes,” Martinez tells SFR. Twisters’ Scorpion Ranch sandwich debuted in May 2020 with Taos Hum branded billboards and fanfare for its 20 locations in Albuquerque, Rio Rancho, Bernalillo and Denver, and quickly began to comprise 3% of sales—a proportion Martinez says is notable.

Why is it so popular? It’s the crazy heat, she says.

“We were looking to get our faces melted off,” she says. “We wanted something that was intense and super special…I get the little beads of sweat. You almost, like, fight through it. I think it’s the ability to have this new sense kind of ignited. It’s a little zap that elevates everything...It has the novelty about it. People love the intriguing feeling: ‘How am I going to react to it?’ It’s almost like the curiosity that, ‘I know it’s going to be hot, but I’m going to try it.’ Everybody wants to conquer something.”

Now the chain serves Loaded Dynamite Fries with the sauce and in mid-September launched a new secret sauce in its Outlaw Burger that features a caramelized serrano blend from Taos Hum.

Dave DeWitt, one of New Mexico’s de facto pepper experts, says the enthusiasm around ever-hotter peppers is akin to adventure-seeking.

“A lot of people say chile peppers are like culinary bungee jumping: How hot is this going to be and how hot can they take it?” he says.

DeWitt is the founder of the Fiery Foods Show (set to return to Sandia Resort and Casino in March of 2022 for those with proof of vaccination) and author of 50 food books. His most recent title, Chile Peppers: A Global History, recounts his travels to famous pepper regions and places that aren’t known for pepper but where people nonetheless grow and use them. And you bet it features Trinidad scorpions and aji limos.

DeWitt organizes the annual Scovie awards in conjunction with the 33-year-old show, so named after Wilbur Scoville, the scientist who invented the measurement scale used to rate pepper heat.

“Last year we had 600 entries. This year we had 1,050, which tells you that either we are getting more successful or there are a lot more people out there making products with chile peppers,” he says. “I think there are more manufacturers than ever. When we first started this, people were saying chile peppers are a fad. If they are a fad, it’s a fad that has lasted thousands of years and I see no end in sight for it.”

The Marcolines do not see an end either. Expansion in the Santa Fe market has the couple’s sauces for sale at not just places like La Montañita Co-op, but also the Food King on Cerrillos Road and Gift and Gourmet and The Chile Shop on the Plaza. They are excited about the future, when the offspring of cross-cultivated aji limo and ami amarillo pepper they’ve nicknamed “Taos Peruvian” are doing exactly what they are hoping for: ripening early into a sunny orange color with a distinctive citrusy burn.