Contest & Festival Facts
13th Annual 'Austin Chronicle' Hot Sauce Festival
Fri., Aug. 22, 2003
Admission is FREE, with your donation of two nonperishable food items for the Capital Area Food Bank.
There's also free, shaded parking in the Capitol Visitors parking garage at 12th & Trinity.
Schedule of Events
Sunday, August 24 at Waterloo Park
10:30-11:30am: Check-in for individual and restaurant contestants at the south end of Waterloo Park
11am: Festival begins
11am-noon: Patricia Vonne performs
12:30-2:30pm: Grupo Fantasma performs
3-5pm: The Derailers perform
4pm: People's Choice voting for best commercial sauces ends
5pm: Awards announced
The Hot Sauce Contest
The contest has three levels of competition: individuals (homemade), restaurants, and commercial bottlers. This gives us a good chance to recognize homemade salsas in a class by themselves. It also gives us a chance to consider salsas made fresh daily in restaurants apart from those made for grocery-store shelves. The three categories of hot sauce for each level are designed to leave enough room for a wide variety of styles. In the past, special variety sauces have included fruit salsas, dried-pepper salsas, and even a purple sauce.
Homemade Salsas/Restaurant Salsas
You can still enter by bringing a quart of your best salsa to the check-in area in Waterloo Park between 10:30 and 11:30am on Sunday. See the entry form on p.6 of this supplement.
Salsas are available for tasting by the public at the designated tasting tent in the middle of the Waterloo Park grounds (triangular dipping chips on the map).
For this part of the contest, our judges pick the winners in each of the following categories:
Homemade red
Homemade green
Homemade special variety
Restaurant red
Restaurant green
Restaurant special variety
Winners will be announced at 5pm.
Commercial Salsas/People's Choice Award
Commercial salsas are not included in the rest of the tasting, but are available at separate booths around the park (green numbers on the map).
The public is invited to vote in the commercial categories:
Commercial red sauce
Commercial green sauce
Commercial hot-pepper sauce
Commercial special variety
People's Choice voting for the Best Commercial Bottler Sauces will be held under the balloting tent by the Cool Zone (the blue flag on the map).
Vote for your favorites by 4pm.
Winners will be announced at 5pm.
Food Vendors
Sample the fare from some of Austin's favorite restaurants, including: Aster's Ethiopian Catering
Berryhill Baja Grill
Curra's Grill
Evita's Botanitas
Sun Garden Shaved Ice
Zen Japanese Food Fast
Chips for the 13th annual Hot Sauce Festival are kindly donated by HEB.
Cold water, soda, lemonade, and beer will be available to cool off overheated palates.
Capital Area Food Bank's Out N' About Austin Raffle
ALL proceeds help to feed our hungry friends and neighbors throughout Central Texas!
T-Shirts & Caps
Hot Sauce Festival T-shirts will be for sale under the Chronicle tent for only $15 each. We also have festival baseball caps this year ($12) and koozies ($2).
