I Like It Hot Festival: Burn your mouth good

So, This weekend we started our Friday night off so hot… burn your mouth good, stomp around and slap yo mamma hot! You know as young adults do. We stayed home making some hot sauce. What were you thinking?

Amateur Hot Sauce Competition

For that reason, we had to stay up and make the hot sauce because Saturday was the “I Like It Hot” Festival in Largo. Mike and I decided at the Pepper Fest we went to months ago. We were going to enter a hot sauce into the amateur contest.

Immediately looking forward to this festival since the pepper fest. Then, we spent the next few months testing many, many hot sauce recipes. Even gave some out to Mike’s co-workers who loved it!

If you don’t know what this festival is, let me share what it is all about. I like it hot is a 2-day festival celebrating all things HOT and SPICY! For 5 bucks you enter and go around to about 30-40 different vendors.

You can try their hot sauces, dips, BBQ sauces, or anything they make. It could be hot or savory or it could be sweet. Either way, bring your tums and some milk.

Get up… We gotta go

So, of course, we had to get up early Saturday. The festival opened at 10a and they were accepting sauces. So, we got up late and did not get there till 11a. Nonetheless, because of this, we missed out on an hour of voting. Yet, we had our sauce there for voting for 3ish hours while others had 4ish.

Hang til they called the winners

Meanwhile, Mike and I waited till 3p when the winners would be announced. We headed around the festival and tried some sauces and dips. Basically all things tasty. We tried to stay away from really spicy things. It’s a must, after all, when we already had heartburn from trying our sauces all night long the night before.

If you want to know what sauce we made, let me know in the comments. I’ll share the video of the sauce making process and what we used.

Finding Funky Fusion

One thing I knew from the Pepper Fest is that I needed to connect with my girl at Funky Fusion. I must know if my new friend was going to be here because I needed to re-up on my savory hot sauce from her. I bought this sarap sauce from them. Using it on everything I ran out pretty quick.

Since they work out of a food truck in Sarasota, which is a 2-hour trip from me. We planned a trip down there bought the sauce and within 4 days of being home. I went to take it from the fridge and I dropped it on the floor. I was so mad!

Our Agenda for the day

So, the first order of business was to find Funky Fusion and pick up a new bottle of Sarap and guard it with my life!!! The second was to meet Johnny Scoville and the third was to find out if we won the contest!

Meeting our first Youtuber

Since the pepper fest (if you haven’t yet read our post about our Urban Homestead or watched the YouTube video) Mike bought Sweet Caroline (Carolina Reaper plant) from Tom with Seriously Hot Peppers. We mentioned to him that we love Johnny Scoville’s videos on YouTube, and Tom told us he was friends with him. We were one person away from knowing Johnny Scoville. How freaking cool!

We have been following Tom on Facebook and he mentioned that Johnny was coming to the “I like it hot” festival. So, Mike and I were definitely going! When we met Johnny, he was so nice and sweet. A real down-to-earth person, not like the red ranger from Fusion Con. Mike brought up his Tube of Terror.

The Tube of Terror is BAD!

Tube of Terror is a bottle of peanuts about 13 million on the Scoville, but each peanut is about 3 million. Johnny said he had some with him and if we bought one he would sign it. Mike replied “I just want to try one. I can’t do the whole tube.” Johnny pulled from his back pocket his tube and gave Mike a peanut to try.

I have seen Mike jump around the kitchen from his hot sauce, but never have tears in his eyes, and he couldn’t stay still. Johnny did tell him the pain would last about 10 minutes. The video will be going up on Thursday, you can see Mike jump around and cry.

**Go subscribe immediately, so you don’t miss out! **

I like it hot contests

While most of the vendors were inside, some were under a tent outside. They had tables for people to sit with the DJ and listen to music. Mike and I watched 2 contests.

Frozen t-shirt contest.

Where contests took a frozen shirt out of a Ziploc bag and they had to use their body to defrost the shirt. The first person who gets it completely defrosted and puts it on wins. This was hilarious seems like a fun family game.

Jalapeno pepper eating contest.

Contestants had to eat as many jalapenos as they can in I believe 3 minutes. I missed the end of it because of my tiny bladder, yet, I do know Johnny Scoville got 2nd place.

I wish we went on Sunday too. They were having a hot lollipop contest. Would have loved to watch it.

Meeting a lot of people

Mike and I have no problem talking to anyone and “making friends” anywhere we go. Mike wore his Patriots jersey which started a lot of conversation with random people. It is the most fun I have had talking about football, hot sauces, sexy patriot players, and more. It really made the time go by fast.

I love those festivals like this one. That brings people together who would normally not be together. I like it hot and the pepper fest brings together a lot of people who become family. Everyone was cheering everyone on. Mike and I are already planning to go next year.

Amateur hot sauce contest winners

Its 3p, Mike and I are waiting patiently waiting to see who won. We will rip the band-aid off. It wasn’t us. It was 3 people who have been coming for years. Mike said if he didn’t win he would stop making sauces. I knew he was being dramatic. When she read the results I was secretly hoping Mike would have won, more than myself because he really wanted this.

Next, I went to ask the announcer if she could tell me how many votes our sauces got. She happily showed me her list. The winners got 55, 48, and 43 votes. Mike got 27 and I got 25 votes. Mike beat me by 2 votes! WTF man lol. 52 people thought our sauces were good enough to win. That made us excited.

We didn’t win

Although we lost, this makes us so happy. We put ourselves out there for that reason. In the future when we start our hot sauce company, that is to say, we could have potentially 52 customers.

Since 52 people wanted our sauce to win. Which just fuels the fire of our obsession. We just need to invest in a big, big tub of tums and an endless supply of milk. Thus, we have had heartburn for the past 3 days. We are feeling the burn.

Come join us next year

I hope you guys enjoyed this little post about how our weekend went. If you are in the Tampa Bay area, I hope you come to join us next year for Pepper Fest and I like it hot Festival.

Please join our Facebook page. But, once we know the dates we are creating an event to have a big group of people to go with us!

Until Next Time, Have a Great Day!