Culinary and Artistic Creativity at the New York Hot Sauce Festival

This past weekend (April 20 - 21, 2013), the New York Hot Sauce Expo brought over 50 vendors to Williamsburg, Brooklyn for two full days of gourmet foods, beer, and cocktails.  Hot sauce vendors from all across America showcased their sauces at the East River State Park with plenty of hot sauce samplings.

This was an event of culinary and artistic creativity dedicated to just hot sauce! We sampled unique hot sauce flavors and beautiful packaging that gave each bottle of sauce a life of its own.  Unlike supermarket hot sauces that are very much lacking in flavor, hot sauce makers here created complex flavor profiles that will jazz up any dish to gourmet status without a culinary degree.  We found hot sauces flavored with everything from honey to mangos to mustard seeds!

Dirty Dick Hot Sauce - Hot sauce with a tropical twist of bananas and mangoes for a nice subtle sweet tast profile

NW Elixirs won second place at this Hot Sauce Expo.  Their hot sauce is tastefully packaged in old fashioned elixir bottles, making them the perfect gift for spice lovers.

Torchbearer Sauces has a different comic personality created for each flavor, and we love that it's all NATURAL and preservative FREE.

The Sultry Flavor is a medium all purpose spicy sauce - very tasty, this one has won 18 hot sauce awards!

Their Zombie Apocalypse sauce is made with Ghost Chilis, the hottest pepper of them all!

Four Roses Bourbon, a small batch distillery in Kentucky served these refreshing cocktails - recipe included in this picture.

Empire Biscuits served their artisanal southern biscuits with berry preserves and goat cheese.  They will be opening this summer in the Lower East Side, serving up biscuits with herbed butter and gourmet jams.

Brewla serves up their guilt free all natural tea infusion popsicles.  Our favorite flavors were the Root Beer Float and Peach Ginger White Tea (actually we like them all but if we wanted to devour a box in one afternoon, we'd pick these two).  These popsicles were a perfect way to take a break from the hot sauce tasting!