Why Flying Scotsman?

Flying Scotsman Hot Sauces is, at heart, the answer to the question “What do you do when you plant eight habanero plants and end up with 600 chiles?” There’s only so much fresh salsa you can make, so hot sauce was the logical next step. A few trial batches later, and what’s now our flagship Original Recipe, a Belizean-style habanero sauce with a few of our own tweaks, was born in the fall of 2007.

Since then, we’ve branched out - at first, adding mango and papaya to our original recipe to make our Tropical Heatstroke habanero sauce. A bit later, a happy accident with a supplier meant that what were supposed to be white habanero seeds ended up being jalapenos. We turned those into chipotles and made Smokestack sauce out of them. Our love for Indian food and its complex flavors was a logical match for the subcontinental origins of the Naga Jolokia chiles that are the backbone of Nigel’s #11 (the name, by the way, is a Spinal Tap reference).

But why Flying Scotsman? Two reasons. First of all, our owner and chief hot sauce maker, Jonathan, is Scottish - born in Glasgow - and has spent much of the last twenty years traveling as part of his work in the software industry. Secondly, it’s a callback to the Flying Scotsman express train service between Scotland and London, which for decades was a legend for service, efficiency, comfort and speed. We want to be the hot-sauce equivalent of that train - your best option, and the one you want to use over any other.