Boyland Hot Sauce
You may have a hot sauce stash that fills up a trophy cabinet or a modest condiment selection that fits in one corner of your refrigerator door. But if you don’t have a bottle of Boyland Sauce Co.’s “Wake ’N’ Bake” Chipotle somewhere in there, be advised: Your taste buds are snoozing.
Rob Boyland (the name, brains, brawn, and literally everything else behind Boyland Sauce Co.) embodies the hardworking-yet-heady world of food and beverage. He started learning his way around a stovetop the instant he grew tall enough to peek over a counter, and his passion for hospitality has propelled Boyland to top positions in some of Sarasota’s favorite bars and restaurants. Along the journey from his mom’s kitchen to sauce-preneur was a Tijuana Flats in Orlando where, in bouts of lunch break bravado, Boyland and his coworkers tested each other’s limits at the infamous hot sauce bar. It only took so many shots for Boyland to start thinking, I could do this.
The culinary obsessive emerging within him replied, You could do this better.
Where the sauces that inspired the Boyland Sauce Co.’s beginnings were more about bringing the pain, Boyland committed to elevating the flavor of the pepper and enhancing the experience of a meal. Especially breakfast. In Boyland’s opinion, the most important meal of the day was missing a perfect hot sauce complement. After four to five years over the stove, Boyland perfected his recipe for Wake ’N’ Bake Chipotle, with eye-opening notes of coffee, chocolate, and orange zest. It instantly became Boyland Sauce Co.’s bestseller.
His success with earthy chipotle doesn’t mean Boyland shies away from heat; other Boyland Sauce Co. recipes have harnessed the diabolical wrath of the ghost chili, one of the hottest peppers known to mankind. But Boyland refuses to lace his sauces with capsaicin extracts, preferring to let the pepper do its job. More recently he’s introduced them to a probiotic sidekick, Lactobacillus, which pulls thrilling and complex flavors from little more than peppers and salt. A table sauce developed exclusively for Made restaurant is one product of Boyland’s explorations in fermentation, and he’s considering a fermented red habanero sauce called “Instant Beard” for his next bottled release.
Available in these parts only, Wake ’N’ Bake is popping up wherever Sarasota celebrates the full-flavored and locally made. Wild Ginger Apothecary, Walt’s Fish Market, the Artisan Cheese Company, Sarasota Liquor Locker, and Palm Avenue Express all stock the savory stuff; and White Picket Produce drops it at doorsteps from Ellenton to South Venice, from Siesta Key to Myakka City. Customers report a curious inability to make a bottle last longer than one week, suggesting that Wake ’N’ Bake offers more than “a little smoke in the morning.” It’s really an all-day, every-meal kind of sauce on which you’ll get happily hooked.
Boyland Hot Sauce Co.: facebook.com/ BoylandSauceCo/
