Hair of the Dog Hot Sauce

Hair of the Dog Hot Sauce, sourced from the combined pepper crops grown last summer by J. Drake Cook and Victoria Pecoraro, has arrived.

The pair are fellow farmers; Cook manages John and Debbie Hopkin’s Pure Joy Farm in Truro, and Pecoraro owns The Wellfleet Chick Koop. The two bonded while sharing their love for their dogs Diesel and Junior, the eventual inspiration for their product’s name and label. The farmers worked well together, completing tasks as board members for the Wellfleet Farmers’ Market, attending the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) conference in Worcester, comparing chicken stories, and snickering over the best and the brightest of their funky, sometimes naughty-shaped root crops.

The desire to create a homegrown hot sauce was born of the common conundrum experienced by pepper growers on Cape Cod. Peppers require a long growing period and a hot summer, and the fruits appear in one or two batches near or close to the end of the growing season, when the farmers’ market crowds have greatly diminished. Other than freezing or dehydrating the peppers, options are limited.

“The inception of the first sauce was mine,” says Pecoraro. “While attending the 2016 New England Food Show in Boston with fellow food producer Kim Shastopovich of Lola’s Shrubs, I was completely inspired by Alex’s Ugly Sauce, a micro-batch product created in a commercial kitchen with local honey and beets. It was a great year for peppers, but my 40-pound yield was shy of the 50-pound minimum required to do a private label bottling. I was able to co-brand my product with Alex that first year, having both our names on the label.”

Pecoraro and Cook then joined forces to create Farmer Friends, the brand which they hope will continue to roll out products featuring Cape Cod-cultivated ingredients. The 2017 growing season yielded plenty of peppers, so Farmer Friends planned a private label hot sauce as their first joint venture, naming it Hair of the Dog. “We created that smoky base and paprika flavor using ten different peppers, including Aleppo, Black Hungarian Chicken Heart, Leut’s Paprika and Yellow Banana,” says Cook.

Pleased to receive Alex’s (of the Ugly Sauce) rating of 5.5/10 for heat, the duo was looking more to create a complex layered flavor rather than one solely focused on its fire. “It’s more fruity than hot,” says Cook.

There are many types of peppers, whose looks and flavors can be vastly different. Some varieties have been around forever, and many are regional, growing in very specific locations. Colors range from green to yellow to orange, the traditional bright red, to purple and speckled or striped. “We wanted a non-formulaic recipe using these more unusual peppers,” says Pecoraro. “Something that you could use to finish a sauce; to add flavor in a refined way.”

The partners filled their buckets in the summer and fall of 2018, delivering the harvest to Alex’s off-Cape processing facility in two batches. Calling this version Hair of the Dog Due (two in Italian), “it has even more varieties this time, with fifteen different peppers including Mora-do, Krimzen Lee, Fish and Criolla Sella,” says Cook. “This harvest upped our heat rating just a bit, to a 6.”

Suggestions for the best foods to shake Hair of the Dog on? “Eggs…no, soup,” says Pecoraro. “Pizza,” says Cook, then adds, “well, really just about everything on the table.” “What we really aspire to be,” smiles Pecoraro, who met great acclaim last October while handing out sample bottles to the master shuckers, “is the official sauce of the Wellfleet Oysterfest.”

Now that would be hot stuff.

Hair of the Dog Hot Sauces, both original (2017) and Due (2018) are available at Chequessett Chocolate, Truro; Curiouser and Curioser, Wellfleet; and Plant Work Shop and The Local Scoop, both in Orleans. Samples are available at the year round Orleans Farmers’ Market, and the seasonal Chatham, Orleans, Truro and Wellfleet Farmers’ Markets.