Delicious global warming

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This article was published 03/06/2022 (935 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The capsaicin-rich envelope please.

Among the winners at the 2022 Scovie Awards, an annual competition that recognizes the top fiery foodstuffs in the world, was Tasty Heat’s Hot Sauces & Spicy Foods, a Winnipeg-based, small-batch hot-sauce biz owned and operated by Amila Rajakaruna and his wife Arshala Dona.

Talk about getting it right the first time: last summer, the couple expanded their line of seven flavourful hot sauces, which include selections dubbed Sunny, prepared with ghost peppers, habanero peppers and a hint of fruit, Tangy (ghost peppers, green peppers and lemon) and Woot (ghost peppers, cayenne peppers and berries), by adding an all-natural, preservative-free curry spice blend. A few months later, their introductory effort, called simply Tasty Heat’s Meat Curry Powder, placed third in the “meat required, unique” category at the 25th Scovie Awards, so-named for Wilbur Scoville, the scientist who developed the Scoville Organoleptic Test over a century ago, to determine the heat scale of chili peppers.

“I sent them a box of our curry mix, which was then judged in a blind taste test by 90 professional chefs,” says Amila, seated next to his wife on the main level of The Forks Market, where they just finished dropping off a sales order to The Forks Trading Company, one of a dozen or so retail outlets in Winnipeg that carry Tasty Heat’s products.

“The awards are very famous among chili-heads, and I never expected to win a thing,” he continues, scrolling through his phone to find a photo of the medal and certificate they received for placing third. “Mostly, I just wanted to get their reaction to my product, to know if it was good or not. I guess I got my answer.”

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Amila and Arshala were both born and raised in Sri Lanka. He’s originally from Karagala, a village in the central part of the South Asian nation, while she grew up in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s most populous city.

Arshala moved to Winnipeg, where one of her sisters was already living, in 2004, to complete a master’s degree in food science at the University of Manitoba. She was introduced to Amila, an IT specialist, through an online dating service the following year. It wasn’t until August 2008, however, by which time he was temporarily living in New York City for work, that they met in person for the first time.

“He originally had it in his head that the two of us would return to Sri Lanka after we were married, only I had already applied for permanent residency in Canada, so I told him that wasn’t going to happen,” she says, playfully poking him in the ribs. “Our wedding was in October (2008) and he joined me here for good about a month later.”

There wasn’t much the parents of two missed about Sri Lanka in the ensuing years aside from how balmy the temperatures there are, come December and January. If there was one thing they did occasionally long for, however, it was meals that tasted a bit more like home. Try as they might, they could never find spices here that quite matched the pungency of what they’d grown up with, Arshala says.

Amila mentioned that to a co-worker one time who suggested adding hot sauce to whatever they were eating, to give it some zing. The interesting thing was, because Sri Lankan cuisine is generally spicy enough on its own, hot sauce wasn’t a product he or Arshala were familiar with. And because he couldn’t decide which of several dozen brands he spotted in the condiment aisle would suit them best, he decided to study up and make his own hot sauce from scratch.

Well, you can probably guess what happened next; not only was Arshala, a food scientist who has worked at a number of testing facilities including the Richardson Centre for Food Technology and Research, impressed with what her husband came up with, so too was her sister, when she and her husband came over for a barbecue the following weekend. The brother-in-law was so blown away by Amila’s hot sauce, in fact, that he immediately requested a jar of his own, to bring to work for his lunches.

“The next thing we knew, my brother-in-law’s co-workers were enjoying Amila’s hot sauce, too, and were asking where they could buy some,” Arshala says, pointing out what appealed to her most about Amila’s sauce was that she could pick up on the various ingredients; it wasn’t just “vinegar and hotness.”

“Within a few months, so many people were telling us we should start our own business that we decided maybe they were right, and that we should give it a shot,” she adds. (A true family affair, Tasty Heat’s, the name they ultimately settled on for their venture, was a collaborative effort between their then-three-year-old daughter Amarsha, who was forever asking for “something tasty” at dinner time, and their son, Akein, now 12.)

Describing himself as the furthest thing from a sales person, Amila shudders as he recalls his initial stab at getting a person who wasn’t a friend or family member to try his fare. Crampton’s Market was still situated on Waverley Street, not far from where they lived, in the summer of 2016, so he drove there with a mix of sauces he planned to leave with the owners to sample. Nervous as the dickens, he got in and out of his vehicle five times before finally working up the nerve to go inside and introduce himself.

He needn’t have fretted; 20 minutes after leaving, he got a text from Crampton’s manager, letting him know staff had already tried the sauces on soda crackers and loved them. Also, when could he fill an order so they could begin selling Tasty Heat’s to their customers?

Six years later, Tasty Heat’s is now Amila’s full-time job. Besides supplying grocery stores in four provinces along with local institutions such as De Luca’s and Miller’s Meats, he and Arshala also ship internationally through their website, www.tastyheat.com. In addition to the aforementioned, award-winning curry mix, they have a chili paste that pairs well with fish, poultry, meat… even ice cream, according to people who’ve reached out to let them know how they use it.

“It’s been almost six years already but we still can’t believe it, sometimes, how well-received our sauces have been,” Amila says, noting during the buildup to Christmas 2021, they prepared and packaged in the neighbourhood of 10,000 bottles of sauce, in the commercial kitchen they rent at Riverview Community Centre. Arshala laughs, saying there have been multiple occasions when they’ve been cooking a batch of this or that, when parents who were outside watching their kids’ sporting event have entered the facility, saying they picked up the scent of spices through the building’s exterior vents, and were wondering what smelled so yummy.

“The biggest thing I’ve noticed through all this is how before, when he was doing his (IT) job, he was stressed out a lot of the time,” she adds. “Now, every single time we receive an order, whether it’s a large one from a store or an individual requesting a single bottle, he’s happy, and smiling from ear to ear. That’s been such a joy to see.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca