Peppermaster Original Chili Chocolate Hot Sauce

You know our Peppermaster has been making the Chili Chocolate sauce since 2005, right before we committed to the Pepperfire Initiative, our Slow Fair Trade project! And it is consistently one of our five best sellers. Last year our chocolate supplier, Equitas, the Canadian marketing arm for Oxfam's fair trade certified food ingredients, went out of business. When this company went out of business, it left a lot of people with their hats in their hands, worrying where they would replace these ingredients. Since we use quite a bit of the chocolate, we were rather concerned that we'd actually have to start making it from scratch. We could make chocolate, but it's really a good ingredient to have created by a local artisan, when you can get it; it saves a great deal of trouble. Although the Haitian cooperative, Noula Coop won't be ready to wholesale us chocolate for a little while yet, as they are building their retail network first, we still needed chocolate. One would think that buying fair trade chocolate would be simple, BUT, we're a little fussy. The chocolate had to be made with fair trade ingredients and NO NUTS. That's not easy. After much searching, we finally got a reference to local Montreal company, Cafe Rico and voila, we have chocolate! OMG, it's GOOD! Peppermaster Greg put the first batch into jars last night while I was out. Wait until you TASTE it! The chocolate is sooo much nicer than our old supplier's chocolate, which was nice really good, if you had the chance to taste that. This one is head and shoulders better. AND that's not all! The good news is that while we were searching for the chocolate supplier we were also trying to figure out how else we could improve the produt. It took four batches before Greg got it rigt, but now the Peppermaster Chili Chocolate sauce is 100% corn free! We found a supplier of a beautiful organic tapioca syrup and a tapioca starch that allow us to toss the corn out of the product altogether! We hope you'll try it, especially with fresh berries that are starting to ripen; Saskatoon berries, strawberries and blackberries are exceptionally good choices. Click here to order a jar for your next dinner party. Guaranteed to brighten up the conversation over dessert!