There may be a plethora of hot sauces in stores now and even more online but throughout my youth growing up in North Carolina there was only one hot sauce you could find on a regular basis: Texas Pete. My mom's family had a notoriously bullet proof palette and could drown anything, particularly BBQ in the hot stuff and not bat an eyelash. So, for me, Texas Pete strikes a particularly nostalgic cord living in New York. For a few years my mom mailed me bottles of Texas Pete from NC (or I stocked up when Lynn and I visited our family down south). Up until about six years ago you couldn't find the stuff on any kind of regular basis in here on Long Island. More recently, I have noticed that Texas Pete hot sauce and other Texas Pete products are more readily available.
With CHA! Texas Pete has entered the competitive fray of the sriracha craze. CHA! blends the sweet and the heat of first rate sriracha and Lynn and I found it a great complement to almost anything: take out Chinese, fried calamari, basmatti rice and so on. We also found it to be an unexpectedly effective ingredient in salad dressings and on vegetables particularly cauliflower and broccoli which can of course be bland on their own. We have used other sriracha's in salad dressings but the CHA! seemed to work better than some of the more established brands with its balanced hot and sweet qualities.
In my casual observation of the Texas Pete section of the two or three grocery stores we frequent I have not seen the CHA! as of yet. With Texas Pete well established in the northeast it is hoped that CHA! will be readily available. Otherwise my poor mom will likely have to haul boxes of CHA! to the post offfice.
