Fried eggs
Mouser. The lime wakes up the yolk.
Section II
What in the world
is a chicken cat?
A chicken cat is a thing that shouldn't work and does anyway. Two animals with nothing in common, welded into one creature that somehow looks like it was always meant to exist.
That's the sauce, too. Fermentation is patient and quiet. Chiles are loud and impatient. Most hot sauce picks one — either it's a flavorless heat delivery device or it's a jam that happens to be spicy. We wanted the chimera.
So every batch starts in a barrel and sits there until the peppers stop tasting like peppers and start tasting like something older. Then we bring the heat back in at the end, sharp and deliberate, so you get both halves of the animal.
The mark, cut in the manner of a nineteenth-century engraving. Comb, ears, wattle, whiskers — all of it, all at once.
“Flavor first.
Heat second.
Never heat only.”
We're a small operation in Middle Tennessee. Batches are a thousand bottles, which is small enough that we taste every one and large enough that it isn't a hobby anymore.
Everything is on the label. Peppers, vinegar, salt, aromatics. No gums, no dyes, no extract, no numbers we can't explain.