Burning Sensations

Photo By John Anderson

The East Coast members of the Epicurious television crew in town to shoot the 13th annual Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival had been warned about the awesome power of late-August Texas heat. Mother Nature did not disappoint them. She delivered a fearsome rage of a day, but thousands of the chilehead faithful still flocked to Waterloo Park to sample salsa, swill cold beer, and enjoy live local music. Sometime in the next year, we'll have the pleasure of seeing this weekend's festival footage in a segment of the Travel Channel's Epicurious, hosted by New York chef Michael Lomonaco. I'm sure that the Epicurious folks will give the television audience a sense of Austintatious adventure, but viewers won't be able to feel or taste that heat. They'll need to join us at next year's event to do that. The results of this year's blind-tasting reveal plenty of new faces in the individual categories, while familiar favorites dominate the restaurant and commercial-bottler divisions, even though some of the commercial bottlers who've won in the past competed and won this year with new products. Whether you made it to the fest itself, we encourage you to get out and sample the winning concoctions in the various area restaurants and stores where they are available. Our heartiest congratulations to all the winners, and to those who provided more than 12,000 pounds of canned goods and $4,100 through the Out N' About Austin Raffle for the Capital Area Food Bank!