Working at the World Famous Pike Place Market for a number of years has always been fun but sometimes it's the hours away from the market that burns into memory. April 2009 One day on "the line" ( aka flower row / North Arcade Pike Market) a gentleman from Texas was talking to me about smoked sea salt and how it was catching on down south, I was after something a bit more flamey, I wanted to make hot salt.

I had already made a super hot tincture by cold pressing the three hottest peppers on earth so I tried adding the tincture to 12 pounds of pure sea salt mixed it in and... waited.... and waited ...and waited  it took 2 weeks to cure on the salt and that was just way to long there had to be a way to shorten the bounding time... but how?

I love it when inspiration comes through music, so while listening to Bob Marley's "Catch a Fire" the eureka moment  what if I could set and entire batch of salt on fire, again how can I do it safely I first tried the heat gun method, problem with that is it blew the fumes from the peppers all over the house so I in effect maced everyone in the house.

Trail No.2 this time I poured 12 pounds of sea salt on a cookie sheet loaded up the tincture mixed it into the salt and popped it into the oven. -- (Now's a good time to explain what the tincture really is, so our tincture is about 10 pounds of mixed, smoked & dried Ghost, Scorpion & Reaper peppers sitting in a bucket for 6 months preserved in 190 proof grain alcohol in the old days we would load those peppers into a hand press and turn a crank till all the oils rendered from said peppers now we load them into a professional juicer dry peppers have no juice just oils.)

Not thinking about this process 190 proof alcohol, & a 350-degree oven, result when opening the oven? you may have guessed it a huge fire ball hits me square in the face burning off my eyebrows and lashes, panic sets in and all I can think about is my buddies talking S#!T about how I burned down my house. I manage to get my Kevlar oven mitts on remove the salt put out the flame using a second cookie tray and tasting the salt once cool, -- I did it.

  Salt infused with the 3 hottest peppers in existence ( MU HA HA WAH HA HA HA  -- ITS ALIVE ITS ALIVE!) (Sorry Frankenstein moment ) here's a pic of me after I learned how to control the flame (it takes me 30 minuets to make a batch.) in the Pike Place Market Atrium Kitchen where we started our business.

So why did all of this matter well ya see I love bloody Mary's and I love taverns and what if I could sell hot salt to bars around Pike Market so that's what we did. One day a lady emailed me that she was melting our salt in butter and putting it on popcorn -- mind blowing! Soon after a friend of mine called me the " Hot Sauce Alchemist" for using flame to bond base elements, I guess the title stuck. -- End.