Recent Blog Posts

Pairing Beer with Spicy Food

First things first, beer should not be your drink of choice if you have just swallowed a Ghost Chile and need something to soothe the burn. Despite the rumor that beer can help ease the pain of a capsaicin burn, and the fact that some hoppy beers create the sensation of some minor relief, beer actually helps redistribute the spicy oils in chiles and can in fact make the burn worse in some cases! Beer also acts as an irritant, activating some of the same pain receptors capsaicin activates, meaning you may in fact be making it worse just by taking a single swig of beer. Drink milk or eat a yogurt if you are looking for relief from the unique pain that comes from eating a hot chile. Now that that’s out of the way, we can begin to talk about how beer can be paired with spicy food to enhance the experience.

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A Salsa for Every Occasion

Salsa, a word that in English translates to “sauce,” has found its way into American cuisine over the course of the last 100 years or so. Associated often with Mexican food, salsas show up in cuisines all over the world in various styles, from fruit salsas to vegetable salsas to everything in between. When you think of salsa it is likely that you think of a tomato-based mix of chopped up vegetables and fruits that is used as a topping or dip for many Mexican dishes. Salsa has an ambiguous form however, so it can be made up of pretty much anything you want- even those strawberries that are starting to get mushy and you need to find something to do with them. Make a salsa! It’s one of the most popular condiments in the United States, it’s easy to make, and it can add both freshness and nutrients to nearly any meal.

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How to Build Flavors

When cooks talk about building flavors, they don’t talk about putting layers on top of one another, like a comforter over a sheet. They mean building flavors into one another, taking a foundation and adding more to it, linking parts together to make one cohesive dish. Building flavors is a lot like making art. Sure, you could paint with a single color and you’d still have a painting. A cobalt blue line on a piece of paper is technically art but throw different shades of blue and you can see a stormy sky approaching on the canvas. This is the kind of art that really makes you feel something. Take a bunch of different flavors that work well together and it’s just like using a bunch of different shades of blue to paint a stormy sky. Build up those flavors to create a dish and you too will have a beautiful piece of art, but this one will be on your table!

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The Salt Life

Today salt is an inexpensive food additive but just 200 years ago in the 1800s, it was an extremely expensive ingredient. Costing more than four times the amount of beef, salt was a necessary nutrient for living creatures, but also an incredible preservative used in many food storage processes all across the country. Now salt is everywhere, causing nearly as much commotion as sugar does here in the United States. We as a company see a growing number of concerned customers wondering about their salt intake every day. Through the course of over a decade of being in business, we have continued to develop more salt-free blends to help ease our customers’ transitions into a lower sodium lifestyle.

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