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Datil Dew
By: J. Scott Wilson, Food Editor
One thing I test a LOT is hot sauces. This is partly
because I love them dearly, and partly because they are one of the most
widely sold items on the Internet. There are more hot sauce-selling sites
than I can count, each with its own "ultimate" sauce.
I had already heard of the Datil Dew
sauces before I heard from the makers, and when the samples arrived I was
ready with my plate full of saltine crackers to taste them.
Then a bizarre thing happened. The sauces were so
good that I began to ransack my fridge and pantry in search of other
things to use them on. Each sauce has its own character, and there's not a
bad one in the bunch. I think my favorite combination was the Burgundy
Mustard sauce (#8 heat) with a colossal smoked oyster on a Club cracker.
My taste buds died and went to heaven.
I took some lifeless leftover shredded pork barbecue
and hit it with a generous dollop of the Meat Mate sauce. The result has
me now scanning the paper for the next time pork loins come on sale.
Even the Inferno sauce, which occupies the place on
the Datil menu that most hot-sauce makers reserve for their rankest, most
mouth-abusing selections, is a sublime chorus of flavors. Sure, it's hot.
That's beside the point. It's also flat-out delicious. All of them are.
Their prices are very reasonable, also. I've seen
plenty of hot sauce makers who think their stuff is more precious than
plutonium, and charge accordingly. The Datil Dew sauces are better than
most of them, and cost a quarter as much.
Want some?
Datil will do as hot sauce additive, local couple finds
By Greg Walsh, Managing Editor
gwalsh@jcpgroup.com
GREEN COVE SPRINGS – If the first part of selling a
product is believing in it yourself, then Byron Bates is destined to be a
wealthy man.
Watching Bates talk recently to customers considering his datil
pepper-based hot sauces at the Fleming Island Wal-Mart Super center was to
watch a man who knows his stuff.
If there’s a bit of doubt his line of hot sauce products, called Datil
Dew, aren’t the best around he doesn’t show it.
And there’s not a bit of braggadocio when Bates tells a visitor later that
one taste of Datil Dew is all it takes to hook a customer and make a sale.
“Once I have someone taste it, that’s like setting a worm in a fish’s
mouth and setting the hook,” Bates said. “That’s the truth. Once they
taste it the worm is set.”
Not that the 12 different flavors of Datil Dew taste like worms. It’s
quite the contrary.
Plenty of folks are buying the products. In fact, Wal-Mart liked it so
much it decided to market the product in all its Jacksonville-area stores.
That’s where you find the Bates several days a week, talking to customers
and offering samples of datil dips and polish sausage marinated in it.
Bates said he tries to offer a product different from other companies that
offer datil peppers in their sauce.
“There’s no sense duplicating what someone else has done,” he said. “We’ve
tried to create our own unique flavors.”
The Bates, who live on County Road 209, moved to Green Cove Springs in
1991. The couple decided to sell their steel business in Pampano Beach,
Fla., after Byron developed post Polio syndrome. He had been symptom free
for more than 50 years when the syndrome hit.
They choose Northeast Florida to retire in because one of their three
adult children lived in Jacksonville and it was a chance to see
grandchildren, Byron said.
Not long after arriving, however, Wanda had a conversation with the owner
of St. Augustine’s Outback Crab Shack, who complained he was unable to
find a datil hot sauce that didn’t need to be refrigerated after opening.
After a year of experimenting, the couple returned with their first sauce,
Outback Red. Since then, they’ve added Six Mile Gold; Inferno, Meat Mate
and Burgundy Mustard.
And now the company is really taking off, Byron said. A former assistant
manager at the Fleming Island Wal-Mart, Marcus Braeckel, is investing in
the company and will become CEO. Bates said he’s also added a financial
expert and a business manager to help.
“I will remain the head of production and testing,” said Bates, who
proudly boasts he has genetically engineered a “super datil” four times
the size of a normal pepper but containing all the same flavors.
The couple is also getting some substantial media coverage, with a
Jacksonville TV station featuring them recently and Southern Living
Magazine doing a spread on how they got started.
But it was the Wal-Mart contract, which took eight months of testing,
paperwork and negotiations that Bates speaks most highly of.
“It’s really been the best thing that’s happened to us. It was a lot of
hard work but it really paid off,” he said.
And then there’s the ringing endorsement of Buster Dunn, leader of the
award-winning Boggy Pond BBQ Brigade in Moultrie, Ga.
Dunn said he first met the Bates about 10 years ago when they were selling
their line of datil pickles at “Ham Jam,” then held at Spencer’s Farm near
Middleburg.
Dunn said it was a match made in heaven.
“I make my own tomato-based barbeque sauce but I was looking to get a
little different flavor,” said Dunn, a cement contractor who travels to
dozens of barbeque contests every year. “He gave me some of the Raz L’
Datil, the one with raspberries, and it really made a heck of a lot
difference.”
He first sampled it for judges at a competition in Claremont, Fla., about
five years ago and got immediate positive response.
The datil pepper – an offshoot of the habenero -- can grow anywhere, but
it’s most often associated with the St. Augustine area because that’s
where it has been grown commercially for many years for its ability to add
heat to any dish.
Using what’s known as the scoville scale, which determines the pungency
level of peppers, the datil consistently scores among the highest at about
360,000 scovilles. A yellow onion scores about a 10 by comparison.
But that is exactly what Dunn said he wanted.
“It’s just a different flavor. There’s just a lot of heat in it,” Dunn
said. “With a lot of hot sauces the heat will hit you at the lips or on
the tongue and you feel it immediately. But with a datil you don’t feel
the heat until you get it in back of your throat.
“It’s really different, out of the ordinary,” he said.
Dunn said he first got hooked on pickles the Bates make from datils and
the two struck up a friendship.
“He’s just a hell of a nice fella. I just love his pickles,” Dunn said.
“We would sit around and eat his pickles and drink beer and have a good
time.”
The mixture of Dunn’s sauce and Datil Dew has been a winning combination,
too.
Since first using the sauce about six years ago, he’s participated in the
ribs competition at the Memphis In May International Festival, considered
the Super Bowl of barbeque competitions. He also won the Marianna, Fla.,
Art Council’s Fine Swine competition last year using the sauce.
With four more competitions coming up this year, including a major one in
Vienna, Ga., he’s not about to change a good thing.
“There’s no doubt I will,” he said when asked if Datil Dew will go along.
“I use it every time I go to cookin’, that’s for sure.”
For more information about the Bates’ products, call (904) 284-8144 or
visit www.pepperproducts.com
Where
can you buy Datil Dew?
You can buy Datil Dew Pepper
Products at select gourmet stores and restaurants and online. Call Wanda at 904-284-8144
and, of course, please
email us
with any questions you have. |
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