Ready. Set. Go. | Habgoblin Hotsauce

This article was published to an internal workplace newsletter, “Ready. Set. Go.” and has been reproduced in it’s entirety here. ~~Some information is redacted due to the sensitive nature of the work, and may be revealed when deemed appropriate.~~ *Edit: As of June 2020, the redaction has been removed!

Talkin’ Sauce with Joel Hasse

Dec 19, 2019 | Author: Anthony Fonte

Habgoblin, a Hot Sauce out of the Pacific Northwest, is Hot. And Joel Hasse from the Visual Arts Services Group in San Diego makes sure to keep it that way.

It all started in a Portland pepper garden with an unusually high yield of peppers. Joel tended the garden which gave him a break from working with computers all day.

“It’s been a far-off dream of mine to someday just have a pepper farm and work with your hands, living the life of making a product from seed to bottle.” With so many peppers on-hand, and only so many pepper appropriate meals in a day, Joel needed to do something with all of them – so he decided to try out a little bit of his dream. Hasse just needed bottles.

At the time Hasse’s day-job was at Laika Studios working on digital stop-motion projects like Missing Link and Kubo in the Rapid Prototyping department – the Area 51 of Laika. At the time it was some top-secret stop-motion techniques, so we won’t reveal anything here.

What we can talk about is His at-home rapid prototyping, which included experimenting with fresh pepper recipes and sauce ideas. Hasse would tweak and shift ideas, gradually focusing more and more on hot sauces. Using his Fiancé as a test subject, he continued to evolve ideas into new
sauces that showed off the fresh pepper flavors.

Hasse took one of his recipes, which is now known as “Fiery Habanero,” and bottled it up. He brought the bottle in to work and gave it to his supervisor at Laika.

To his surprise bottles came back empty a few days later with a paid refill request. He knew he was onto something.

“I had to rip open a portal in time and high five my 15 year-old-self.” Hasse didn’t want to lose the momentum, and pitched an idea to his friend.

Make a hot sauce company – that’s the idea. Hasse’s friend, who is from the restaurant business, was all in. Joel would focus on the sauce, and his friend worked on the logistics, such as creating a LLC and planning out the business, distribution, and other logistics. It was a new venture for Hasse.

“You have to take it one step at a time,” said Hasse. Turning a hobby into a business is difficult, especially the law and business overhead when you really just want to work with your hands and get away from computers.

Fast forward to now – The sauce experiment is now a company. Habgoblin Hot Sauce is available online, through the Made in Oregon store chain, and his friends home Restaurant group in Eugene; Glenwood Restaurants. It’s a growing business and Hasse wants to keep experimenting with flavors.

When cooking sauces, Hasse focuses on using his senses, tasting and tweaking until he likes it. Feedback from his fiancé is still important too. “I know I’m on to something when she keeps eating through the burn.”

Once a recipe is locked in Hasse gets ready for sauce manufacturing in a larger scale, which is a marathon effort. Some of the biggest batches required Hasse to be in the kitchen for over 10 hours.

“It’s all about the peppers … doing a lot of prep work first and chopping.” There’s no quick way around the prep – Hasse gets hands on and makes sure only the best peppers are making the final cut. Next is blending the batch using a high powered blender until its super smooth.

Some batches have specific needs though, specifically when working particularly potent peppers.

“The second you put ghost peppers in a blender, it turns the whole place into pepper spray,” Good ventilation is key. “At first you will cough a bit but you get over it … wear gloves and don’t touch your eyes,” home sauce makers take heed to Hasse’s words of the wise.

After the blend Hasse adds other spices and ingredients. You only need to disclose spices as “Spices” on food labels – so Hasse can keep the spice list close to his chest. Next the batch is pasteurized and moved directly into packaging.

Probably the most dangerous part is hot-filling each bottle and flipping them up-side down as they cool. This creates a self-canning effect that vacuum seals each bottle. This allows for less preservative focused ingredients and helps make a shelf-stable product, which is as much as a challenge as creating delicious recipes.

Looking at other on-shelf sauces, the balance between flavor and heat recently is taking up a bigger space in the market. This is good news to Hasse as he doesn’t want to smother flavors with heat, but strike a balance that pairs well with a meal.

“Even just five or ten years ago all you had was great flavor with no heat, or all heat with no flavor.” A lot of people are entering the marketplace in this balanced space now, and it’s thriving with options.

“There’s a lot of ghost pepper-blueberry, and blueberry-reaper mashups out there now,” Hasse said. “It’s not my favorite, but is a good way to balance the heat.”

Hasse’s most popular sauce, Smoky Ghost, strikes that balance. Like its namesake, is a ghost pepper and smoke flavored sauce that goes well on fried chicken. The secret to the smoke – Mesquite powder, which is actually ground up mesquite wood that gives it a smoky southern BBQ flavor. It’s hot and smoky, but never too much of both and leaves room for food flavors to shine through the cloud of hot smoke.

But what about a PlayStation flavor?

“That’s a tough one … you would need a prominent themed food item in a game”. With Joel’s current project being The Last of Us 2, the apocalypse isn’t too inspiring on culinary fronts. He did come across some interesting whiskey-spicy mustard flavors while working here and wants to continue exploring those flavor profiles. Since he discovered it while working at PlayStation we’ll just say that counts for a PlayStation inspired flavor.

“Every part of the US, and the world, has its own peppers and sauces,” This does include the Pacific Northwest and Hasse wants to keep embracing those too. Common flavors like seafood, salmon, crab, mushrooms and Marion Berries are always on the tip of. But Hasse’s favorite Northwest flavors come from something else

“Great Bread,” Hasse’s Northwest pick. It’s heavier, heartier, and captures earthy qualities from the forests that nurture ingredients which make these foods. A rich crispy golden-brown bread that doesn’t forget the butter. That’s home to Hasse, and hopefully future pairings for more Habgoblin flavors.

If you’re interested, Habgoblin is available online at www.habgoblinhotsauce.com and they keep fans informed on the following Instagram/Facebook handles: HabgoblinSauce / habgoblinsauce