The Fire In Our Bellies
Text and photos by Nikhita Venugopal
Even though chillies have always been an essential part of Indian cuisine, it is only in the recent past that homegrown hot sauces have begun to gain popularity.
Mikhel Rajani was watching a cricket match on television a few years ago when the players broke out into a celebratory dance. Hands raised and cupped overhead, the unmistakable nagin dance had been popularised by the late actor Sridevi in 1986’s Nagina. The gesture was meant to mimic the hood of a cobra, bobbing back and forth on the cusp of striking. In India, it’s a routine that appears everywhere, from Bollywood item numbers to choreographed wedding dances to, evidently, the cricket pitch. “It’s such an emotion in India. And I don’t know why, I just said to myself, Naagin Sauce. That’s such a good name for a hot sauce,” Rajani recalled.
Rajani, 33, who is based in Mumbai, had been working in the food and beverage space for many years, starting his own restaurant in 2012. The word Naagin appealed to him so much that he quickly snapped up the domain name, though he had no immediate plans to go into the hot sauce business. It was only later that he and two friends — his soon-to-be co-founders Arjun Rastogi and Kshitij Neelakantan — began the first discussions to bring an Indian hot sauce company to life. “We love spicy food, we love condiment culture, we love mixing and matching in our meals,” Rajani said.
India’s passion for condiments is no secret, seen in seemingly endless variations of chutneys, pickles and podis or powders that reflect regionally specific tastes and techniques, while offering searing heat and flavour in teaspoon quantities. Our inescapable hunger for ketchup has allowed the condiment to find its way to everything — and we mean, everything — from pizza to dosa to fried chicken, and so much more. Indo-Chinese cooking has turned Szechuan and hot garlic sauce into essential accompaniments, while bottles of Ching’s Red and Green Chilli sauces — a term we’re far more likely to use than hot sauce — can be found in stores throughout the country. And though India’s connection to chilli is embedded deeply into our culinary and cultural psyche, until recently, you weren't likely to find an indigenous hot sauce being sold commercially, let alone ones with chilli names like sankeshwari or bhut jolokia on the label.
That, however, is changing. In recent years, Indians have sought to turn one of the world’s most storied and beloved condiments into their own. And they’re doing it by letting the fiery, flavourful essence of India’s chillies speak for themselves.
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Manjusha Barua’s East by North East highlights the flavour of the bhut jolokia, which is integral to the cuisines of the northeastern states.
Chilli — powdered, whole or crushed — is an undeniably common ingredient in India. The effect of chilli on food is never to flatten, but instead to further the experience of eating in subtle and stunning ways.
But a misguided western perception of Indian cuisine puts chilli and its heat at the forefront, a notion that often undermines its complex flavour for the thrill of its burn. In 2007, when the bhut jolokia — known by several names, including ghost pepper, naga jolokia and raja mircha — was named the hottest in the world, with over a million Scoville units, eating them turned into the ultimate challenge for a YouTube-obsessed generation and its propensity for dangerous and definitely viral stunts.
A squat, vibrant, orange-red pepper that’s grown in India’s northeast, the ghost pepper’s heat has since been surpassed by the Carolina Reaper, but the videos continue to rack up millions of views while sending their eaters straight to the nearest carton of milk. Virality made bhut jolokia famous across the planet, but its notoriety belied its deep significance to the cuisine, economy and livelihoods of generations of growers in the eight northeastern states.
It was that regional connection to the chilli which grabbed the attention of Manjusha Barua, a former communications and branding executive. After retiring from a long career in the corporate sector, Barua had been looking for a new path to pursue, one that would allow her to champion the northeast of the country, particularly Assam, where she is from. Travelling around the region, it was the bhut jolokia that intrigued her the most. Barua felt that there was no equivalent to brands like Tabasco and Sriracha in India, ones that could turn the spotlight on what we grow.
“India being a chilli country, everything is about chutneys, achaars and pickles. We never had anything like hot sauce,” Barua said. In 2016, Barua and her business partner Rinka Banerjee started East by Northeast — and a “hot sauce revolution,” as billed on their website — with sauces that put bhut jolokia on and inside the bottle. Beginning with only two types — an original and an extra hot — they’ve now expanded to five more flavours, including barbecue and a chilli mayo, each focusing on the ghost pepper. The chillies are freshly pureed and processed at a facility near the border of Assam and Nagaland, before being transported to partner factories to create the finished product. In 2018, they began receiving funding from the North Eastern Development Finance Corporation and have been working to bring their bhut jolokia sauces to a larger audience within India as well as in the United States, Singapore and other countries.
In the time since, several other hot sauce brands have also turned to the bhut jolokia as their signature chilli. For Barua, it's a sign that appreciation for the northeastern chilli’s flavour profile is growing far beyond a fascination with its heat.
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The divide between hot sauce and a focus on pure heat aligns with the divergent but intertwined histories of hot sauce and chillies. The use of chillies in the human diet, evidence suggests, dates back to around 7500 BC in Mexico and 6500 BC in Peru. “However, that date is extremely early for crop domestication and some suggest that these specimens are chiles that were harvested in the wild rather than cultivated by man… Experts are certain, however, that chile peppers were domesticated by at least 3300 BC,” according to Chile Peppers: A Global History by Dave DeWitt.
That ancient connection to chilli, naturally, has far-reaching culinary repercussions as well. It’s suggested that early hot sauce was little more than ground pods with water and perhaps some herbs. And before bottles of hot sauces took over supermarket shelves, there were table sauces -- some homemade fermented concoctions, others simple finely chopped salads with a supremely spicy kick. Think of bowls on restaurant tables and non-descript bottles in homes around the world. It could be the tangy, sweet notes in Thailand’s prik nam pla, drawing its heat from tiny but explosive bird’s eye chillies; gochujang, a pungent Korean fermented paste infused with smoky-spicy flavors of crushed gochugaru chillies; or the tangerine orange of Peru’s aji amarillo paste that mimics the beloved pepper it’s made from. (You could even argue that Indian pickles fit this description).
Mexico’s use of chillies is among the most interesting and varied in the world, from fresh pico de gallo, made with chopped tomatoes, onions and of course, chillies, to mole sauces, which can be made with half-a-dozen kinds of peppers that add varying degrees of heat and colour to the sauce, not to mention characteristics like meaty or smoky or sweet, said chef and culinary historian Maricel Presilla, author of Peppers of the Americas. “In Mexico, in which these peppers are used to add heat directly, there is always table sauce,” she said. “The bottle sauce is the commercial and business incarnation of a table sauce.”
That commercialisation took off in 1870, when one of the most globally recognisable hot sauces was born. Though the American Edmund McIlhenny wasn’t the first to make and sell hot sauce from tabasco chillies, he was the first to turn them into a brand, patenting the Tabasco name and watching the demand for the sauce surge. The McIlhenny family saw their share of challengers and competitors, but they took their battle to court and ultimately emerged victorious around 1929. “From that time on, only the McIlhenny sauce could be called “Tabasco,” and competitors were reduced to merely including Tabasco chiles in their list of ingredients,” DeWitt wrote.
For many chilli connoisseurs, there is an open disdain for Tabasco, perhaps for its ubiquity, its low heat quotient or the vinegary taste that tends to overpower anything it's put on. But for Presilla, who has extensive knowledge and experience with chillies, there is something special about the sauce. “The taste of Tabasco is exactly the taste of the chillies, because I've grown them, and I’ve made my own sauces here. That taste of vinegar is the taste of the Capsicum Frutescens when it's fermented,” she says.
Whatever your opinion of Tabasco, its success is undeniable. But it’s also possible that some of the most well-known hot sauce brands — including Sriracha and Frank’s RedHot — made the condiment seem like something that wasn’t terribly Indian; something that was foreign. “That’s the word my grandmother would use. It’s a foreign concept. Because if you wanted something spicy, hey, there’s a pickle,” said Sreepathy Paliath, a Bengaluru-based home cook and food enthusiast. “If you’re having bread, here’s ketchup, if you’re having potato fries, here’s ketchup.”
Dried or fresh, powdered or whole, chillies are deeply enmeshed in regional Indian cuisines.
The chilli itself is foreign to India, but was swiftly assimilated. Portuguese explorers carried the chilli plant — known by its South American indigenous name ‘aji’ — to India’s Malabar coast sometime around the sixteenth century. Though the exact date is not clear, what’s undeniable is that chillies quickly became “essential to the south Indian diet,” a worthy alternative to the similar long pepper. “Chillies were soon cheaper than long pepper and eventually supplanted it,” Lizzie Collingsworth writes in Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors.
The widespread use of chillies in India means you are inherently adding heat to whatever you’re cooking. Kitchen cabinets across the country are stocked with boxes of chilli powder, dried and fresh pods, so essential to Indian cuisine that their use plays a defining role in even an extremely basic understanding of regional cooking traditions, whether it's the verdant green of fresh chillies in Andhra’s spicy fare; Bhavnagri chillies stuffed to the seams for Gujarat’s bharela marcha; or lamb mirchi korma, imbued with the unmistakable red of Kashmiri chillies. Dalit families would use chilli to flavour blood fry, a signature dish of a community denied the right to eat within the oppressive constraints of a ruthless caste structure.
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Naagin’s hot sauces use Indian chillies to create flavours that are well rounded and flavourful rather than just hot.
The pursuit of a ‘tasty’ sauce — instead of just a hot one — was key to Naagin’s development of its first two sauces. The team wanted to use homegrown Indian chillies while building on the country’s love of ketchup and mouth-searing condiments. But to tap into the Indian palate with a product it wasn’t used to, they couldn’t just capture heat. It had to be something innate and familiar — sweet, fresh, juicy, garlicky and spicy. “Our brief was that it should taste like nostalgia,” Rajani said.
In developing their first sauce, a quintessential Mumbai snack — the vada pav — became their inspiration. How do you use a chilli to mirror the essence of a deep-fried potato patty wedged into a warm, soft bun and slathered in green chutney and an assemblage of spices? In speaking to people across the state, they landed on the deep red and wrinkly sankeshwari chilli. Sourced from near Kolhapur in Maharashtra, it’s often used in regional cooking, particularly by the Koli fishing community. It also gave Naagin an oomph that reminded them of Mumbai.
An underrated part of creating a hot sauce is understanding how the chilli reacts on your tongue. For their second sauce, which uses the bhut jolokia, Naagin wanted a sweetish flavor to compliment it. “Every chilli’s heat hits you very differently. Some hit you right at the front of your tongue, some burn up your entire mouth,” he said. “Bhut jolokia is a creeper of a chilli. It doesn’t immediately hit you on the front of the tongue. It creeps up at the back of the mouth, so we thought we should ease people into it.”
A year after they officially launched in January 2020, Naagin is looking to introduce a third sauce and chilli to their lineup. This time, it is a bird’s eye chilli called kanthari from Kerala that they’ve turned into a green sauce that is somewhere between the spice levels of the bhut and the sankeshwari chillies. They’ve also heard that fans have started to use Naagin instead of ketchup, a massive compliment as far as Rajani is concerned.
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Although Indian hot sauce makers are making an effort to source directly from farmers, they are often stymied by a lack of organisational structure.
It’s no surprise that India, the world’s largest producer, consumer and exporter of dried chillies, has scores of varieties, though only a handful are commonly known and used. They vary in length, colour and pungency across the growing states, each distinct in look and name: the shrivelled look of Karnataka’s byadgi mirchi, the waxy gloss on Andhra’s Guntur sannam, the distinctive deep red of the Kashmiri mirch. Over a million-and-a-half tonnes of dried red chillies were produced in 2019. Despite that success over a short amount of time, it’s come with an immense burden on chilli growers. In recent years, extreme floods have tarnished acres of crops, and deep price depressions have led to piles of chillies being burned to ash by protesting farmers, while pesticide poisoning continues to be a major challenge. Last year, the Covid-19 pandemic and border tensions with China harmed business with India’s largest chilli importer.
“There is a growing demand for the chillies, certainly. But the benefits coming back to the farmer [are] very, very little,” said Dr. GV Ramanjaneyulu, executive director at the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, a nonprofit that works to support small and marginal farmers in the country.
Hot sauce purveyors such as Not Just Hot, Naagin, ENE and Sprig make an effort to source their chillies directly from farmers or work with traders who act as middlemen. But even the best intentions are stymied by a lack of organisational structure, which creates an inequitable environment for the farming community. “Nothing is organised in this sector,” said Barua, who works with local traders to source bhut jolokia from Assamese farmers.
During the pandemic last year, chilli farmers faced immense financial loss. The lockdown spurred a logistical nightmare, badly affecting transportation of produce to markets and farmers’ ability to sell. Chilli farmers also rely on specialised migrant labour to harvest their crop, but the COVID-19 lockdown caused an unprecedented crisis for these workers. Without work, and with railway services halted, tens of thousands of people were forced to walk across state lines to return home. But even outside of a year like 2020, there remains a lack of cooperation between the parties that ultimately bring chillies into your kitchen.
“The traders who get the benefits have to pass it on to the farmer. Farmers who get benefits should pass on to the labour. And if these two don't happen, it’s not going to work,” Dr. Ramanjaneyulu said. Having partnerships that lead to an equitable shape is going to be crucial to the growth of the farming complex going forward. “The integration of value chain actors together is something which is very important when we talk about sustainable production. All of them are interdependent.”
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A selection of Not Just Hot sauces
Last year, as India was deep into a nationwide lockdown that kept most of the country stuck indoors, Saritha Hegde, a former corporate fashion executive, began to create her own line of sauces and condiments called Not Just Hot from her home in Bengaluru. The genesis, she said, was realising that what she wanted was just not available in the market. “So, I needed a product for people like me.”
‘People like me’ are those who really, really like heat. But that’s not as common in India as you may think. Paliath, who runs an Instagram account dedicated to his food experiments, often found himself disappointed by sauces that promised to be “extra hot” but were ultimately just meh. Unless you’ve grown up eating spicy regional food, “[as a country,] we love spices, but we don’t particularly love the chilli spice,” he said.
That taste (or lack thereof) for spiciness also ties into the idea of hot sauce being something “foreign,” as Paliath had said earlier. Even at the Kerala-based company Sprig, Corporate Chef Pawan Pal Singh Maini explained that there was an effort from the get-go to position their products — which include a passion fruit-malagueta pepper sauce and a mango-jalapeno sauce — as not just super-spicy dipping condiments but as something familiar, like a marinade.
When Hegde started selling her hot sauces and other condiments, she was frequently told that her products packed too much heat to appeal to a broader market. “The advice was that you should tone it down,” she said, “The answer to that was, I haven’t toned myself down.” On each bottle of Not Just Hot is a hotness rating on a scale of 1 to 5; not the traditional Scoville rating but based instead on her own heat meter (the highest they have so far is a 4.0).
Hegde now works with an all-women team and a one-eyed puppy called Munchi, which means chilli in Tulu. In less than a year in the condiment business, she’s found that encouraging people to try to taste and cook with chillies in a way that might be outside their comfort zones is a part of her work. It involves videos and posts on social media to show people that the bright, fresh flavour of their coriander sauce can be used for banana-wrapped fish fry, or that a mouth-numbing Andhra green chilli masala can spice up a chicken fried rice.
And sometimes it involves learning to eat in new, unexpected ways. Shanthi started working with Hegde last year, but early on, the sauces were too hot for her, and eating them was a fairly big shift from the way she normally ate chilli. But once Shanti began exploring the sauces on her own, it didn’t take long to develop her own taste. “We now need red hot sauce on everything,” she said.
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