CARP – It was a homemade Christmas present that has turned in to a business creating spicy, flavourful hot sauces people are enjoying all over Ottawa.

Saucy B Sauces is the brainchild of Carp’s Bahareh Tabrizi and her husband Frank Bolduc. Tabrizi makes a variety of hot sauces, 18 to be precise. made by hand using only the freshest ingredients and no preservatives ranging from mild to wild.

“It was a fluke really,” Tabrizi told West Carleton Online from her Carp area kitchen. “I was making some sauces as Christmas presents in 2017. I was going to make vanilla, but the beans were too expensive. I had all these jars, so I went with a hot sauce. I got a really good response. People were asking me can you make one that’s hotter? Milder? Tastes like this? I had to start using a commercial kitchen to keep up.”

Now Saucy B Sauces can be found in restaurants and shops around the city – locally at the Juke Joint Soul Food Kitchen, in the east end at the Orleans Brewing Co. and in specialty food stores like Mrs. McGarrigle’s in Merickville, Chile Chillies in Bayshore and Kanata, and locally at the Herb Garden in Corkery. The company is also a vendor at the Carp Farmers’ Market for their second year.

“It’s fun,” Tabrizi said of the market. “You run in to all sorts of people. We have our regulars. You’re meeting other local vendors, sometimes creating collaborations.”

Not only does Tabrizi sell her hot sauces at the Juke Joint, the restaurant owners Corri Greenberg and Sandra Weyand let Tabrizi make her sauces there.

“She’s totally for supporting local,” Tabrizi said. “We were just having dinner there and started talking. I mentioned we make sauces and she said she had to have them (editor’s note: it was actually Corri Greenberg who tipped us off to this hot lead and gave us our first bottle of Saucy B Sauce).”

While Tabrizi does the cooking, she says the B in the business name can equally stand for Bolduc.

“My name’s on the jars but he does as much work as I do – the heavy lifting,” she said.

Tabrizi says her success is based on the edict that taste is more important than heat.

“I try to incorporate a lot of different flavours in to that,” she said. “Although the first ingredient is always pepper. We go from mild to blow your socks off, but even those have a lot of flavour.”

Tabrizi made her early sauces in an InstantPot and “still does.”

She says she was certainly not a hot sauce expert when she first got started.

“I never considered myself an aficionado, but now I know so much more,” she said. “The sauces aren’t just condiments – they can be part of recipes, even cookies, drinks, glass rimmers for Caesars.”

And she just happened to have some of those cookies on hand – West Carleton Online can confirm they were delicious.

“We use all sorts of peppers, from bell to Carolina Reaper – the hottest pepper commercially available,” Tabrizi said.

There is Carolina Reaper in the chocolate chip cookies she made, and despite what you might think, the heat is more of an accompanying aftertaste than something that takes over the cookie.

While Tabrizi knew she had some great hot sauce recipes, what she had to perfect was the consistency of those recipes when making the sauces in large quantities. Now she is hoping her business will grow.

“We want to get in to more places, little restaurants and shops,” she said. “We want to continue to grow.”

To learn more about Saucy B Sauces, click here.