Jersey Girl is branching out! We have partnered with Mable to offer Jersey Girl Hot Sauce to all of you brands and stores and restaurants and strange folks that buy bulk cases of hot sauces to fuel your steampunk assault vehicles in the future sauce wars (we’re going to drive an armored VW Microbus!).

If you are looking to get Jersey Girl on your shelves today, go check us out: https://meetmable.com/jersey-girl-hot-sauce

And if you aren’t currently interested, allow us to shamelessly pitch at you:

Jersey Girl is sustainably made in the USA, woman-led, made without preservatives or additives or thickeners, and committed to cutting our carbon footprint and being a good global citizen. After all, we can’t surf if there’s no shoreline anymore.

Beyond that, though, it’s delicious. It’s sweet potato-based, which is not a common thing in the hot sauce marketplace, but it gives the sauce more depth of flavor. That could be why that in the dozens of stores that currently carry Jersey Girl Hot Sauce—from food markets to restaurants to, buckle up for this one, hair salons—we are constantly selling out.

Jersey Girl’s pretty attractive, huh? Come join her crew, and let your customers add some attitude to their food.

It’s not great.

This particular sauce (which was not, and I repeat, was not Jersey Girl brand since our sauce is meant to taste great and not set you ablaze) was 750,000 Scoville units. For comparison, a single jalapeno hovers around 5,000. I’m not entirely clear on how the math works out, but I guess if you want to try shoving 150 jalapenos down your throat, you’ll have a basic idea of how hot this one teaspoonful of sauce was.

So, if you’re reading this, you’re definitely something of a Hot Head, right? Let’s go into detail. The first thing you notice is that familiar tingling on your tongue, that little note that says, “I’m here, and you’re in for a time.” At the same time, there was—for the 10 seconds before the horrendous pain began—the delightful taste of smoked chipotle peppers. Then there was just the taste of heat.

Like some gruesome transformation in a Cronenberg film, my tongue transformed from tingly to torturous, and the rest of my mouth followed. It was that kind of spicy where you have to open your mouth as wide as you can like an uncomfortably sweaty baleen whale filter feeding.

It didn’t help.

At this point, this was in college, so a bunch of people from different dorm rooms had piled in, filming and laughing at my agony. In retrospect, yeah, super funny—also, if you’re the pretentious type, an apt commentary on the current state of internet culture of whatever. I don’t know symbolism. I write about hot sauce. 

Anyway, I was sitting on the floor staring at a wall trying to focus on a paint spot instead of the feeling of what I could only assume were my teeth disintegrating.

I tried milk. Nothing.

I tried bread. It tasted like glowing embers.

I thought, this is it. This is how I go out, on the floor of a dorm room, drenched in sweat from eating a single spoonful of hot sauce. 

But then—and yes, it’s very anticlimactic—it ended. The heat subsided almost immediately, and all that remains of the incident is a ten second video on my college roommate’s laptop of me sitting on a couch eating a rolled-up slice of bread with both hands like a racoon eating trash from a dumpster.

 

Springsteen or Bon Jovi. The Definitive Jersey Debate, Settled by the Staff at Jersey Girl Hot Sauce

It’s a tale of two New Jerseys. And no, I’m not talking about the debate of North Jersey versus South Jersey.

Firstly, as a Bergen County boy, it’s North Jersey. 

End of story. 

Maybe. 

Well, I guess South Jersey has a good portion of the Shore, but those savages can keep their sand. In North Jersey we’re cosmopolitan. We’re pretend New Yorkers. That’s the closest you can get to being a New Yorker without having to pay rent with one of your kidneys.

Anyway, now that I’ve offended most of the TriState area, let’s go ahead and continue that trend by discussing who is the better rock’n’roll and NJ icon: Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen or Jon “Bon Jovi” Bon Jovi.

Let’s start from the start: one is “The Boss” the other is nicknamed with a mispronunciation of his own name. That doesn’t sound very “Boss” to me.

But alright, I’ll concede that Bon Jovi—especially in some of his earlier albums—has some absolute bangers. “Runaway” is a classic 80s hair metal ripper. It’s as close to thrash metal as someone in leather pants with feathered hair can get, and as a big thrash metal fan, I can honestly respect it. That high note at the end is absurd, and I can’t really imagine Bruce hitting a note like that without sounding like someone threw gravel into a woodchipper.

Jokes aside, I personally love Bruce Springsteen. I can listen to Jonny Boy, for sure, but growing up, my dad—a Freehold native—sang me to sleep with “Thunder Road.” I spent hours upon hours in the car with him listening to “Born to Run” and “Born in the USA” on repeat.

Bruce is one of the reasons I play music, one of my favorite things to share with my dad, and really, a core piece of my NJ identity.

With that said, what’s the rest of the Jersey Girl staff think? Well, it’s actually pretty lopsided. Of the folks that responded to my totally professional email of… 

“Bruce or Bon Jovi? 

Thanks, 

Ryan,”

…it ended up split 3 to 1 for Bruce.

 

Mike, Craig, and Katie all came in saying “Bruce and Thunder Road are so Jersey,” “Bruce feels like Jersey, Bon Jovi is just from Jersey,” and “Bruce sings about loving a Jersey Girl, so that puts him ahead.”

 

HOWEVER, Wendy, THE Jersey Girl, the one who makes the sauce, the Supreme Queen of Peppers, picked Bon Jovi, stating that Bruce is “actually Bon Jovi’s idol. Bon Jovi set the stage for hair and glam metal and personally stole my heart decades ago with ‘It’s My Life’ and ‘Who Says You Can’t Go Home.’”

 

So, there you have it folks. The Jersey Girl herself had her heart stolen by Bon Jovi. Against all odds, we have a winner. Sorry to “The Boss,” but Bon Jovi is “The Sauce.”

 

Have your own opinion? Let us know in the comments! Want to get your own bottle of Jersey Girl Hot Sauce? Duh, of course you do. Grab some here.

Alright, look, I know I already wrote about crickets. No, I’m not some weirdo that loves bugs, but I want to talk to you about bees.

 After all, we make Bee Sweet hot sauce, and that wouldn’t exist without our friends, the humble little buzzy boi.

 Actually, a lot wouldn’t exist without the bee.

 Let me be very clear, though. I’m not talking about hornets. I’m not talking about wasps. Those are all savage monsters that ruin what may have otherwise been a perfectly good Summer day. In fact, considering how horribly hornets can ruin the Summer, they may be the exact opposite of Jersey Girl Hot Sauce.

 Anyway, product placement aside, let’s get back to the bee. Remember the bee? We started talking about the bee. Firstly, they have fur. That’s adorable.

 You can actually pet a bumblebee without it stinging you. I should note, though, as a representative of this company, that you can still get stung if you do try to pet a bumblebee. I’m not guaranteeing a bumblebee-human friendship.

 But yes, the bee is a cool little insect, and 70% of the crops that make up 90% of the world’s diet are pollinated by bees.

 That’s the stinger. With bees dying off due to climate change, due to pesticides, due to human encroachment on their habitats, it takes us a step closer to worsening world hunger. In fact, according to the BBC (and who doesn’t trust the Brits?), without bees our grocery stores would only have about half as much produce as they currently have.

 While that may be tough to imagine – or you may be someone that doesn’t eat much produce anyway and don’t think it’s a big deal – consider that produce goes into hot sauce and tomato sauce and jams and jellies and other non-produce-section items.

In short, there would be a food shortage of epic proportions – not to mention a complete lack of honey.

Now, I get this article has had kind of a flippant tone to it considering the potential gravity of the situation if bee populations continue to dwindle, but while this is extremely important to consider, this is still being written by an ex-punk rocker that does the marketing for a hot sauce brand.

But that’s the point, man (or woman). I’m not a scientist. I cited a source that based their journalism off of scientific research, but I’m just some guy trying to sell you hot sauce and maybe save the world. I care about bees, and just as importantly, I care that we all have enough to eat.

While I can’t offer much to end hunger today, I can at least offer you some Bee Sweet hot sauce and promise we’ll do our best to protect the buzzy bros and broettes as they pollinate and party in their hives.

Look, at Jersey Girl, we tend to favor a vintage aesthetic. Our office desks may be repurposed 50s longboards. We may have extra wide parking spaces for all of the classic Chevelle's and Thunderbirds our team of hotheads drive to work. We like a good, old-fashioned burger for lunch, smothered in a mix of ketchup and Jersey Girl Original.

Except, what’s this? Sometimes, there’s a chance that burger isn’t quite ground beef. Sometimes, like all those nostalgic Summer nights cruising down the shore, those nights sound tracked by a symphony of chirps, our burgers are full of crickets.

Okay, not really. I, at least—and I think I can speak for many of my colleagues—haven’t eaten a cricket burger.

But we should. For our health. For the environment. For the sake of trying something truly vintage, we should.

In fact, humans eating crickets predates those 50s longboard desks (which we really don’t recommend…very difficult to balance anything on a freshly waxed and polished surface) by 10,000 years. Early hunter-gatherers often ate insects to survive. Millions of years before them, Australopithecus likely ate insects to survive.

So, what? We’re evolved. We couldn’t possibly eat insects, right? Firstly, plenty of modern countries across all continents currently have crickets and other insects as a significant part of their national cuisine. Now, of course, there is a good chance that much of the audience reading this resides in the United States.

Well, guess what, you eat bugs. Sort of. What has an exoskeleton, a multitude of legs, and scavenges for food? It’s not crickets (well, it is, but I’m making a point); it’s shrimp. It’s lobster. Crustaceans are, without being in the same genus, effectively insects of the sea. So, why the hesitation to eat crickets?

Maybe that argument fails for you. Sharing traits doesn’t suddenly negate the creepy-crawlies that come from seeing a cricket hop wildly and unexpectedly out of a dark corner. Many of us have been conditioned to view bugs as anything but food.

But crickets are actually one of the most nutritious proteins available (with more protein per weight than most meat), one of the best for the environment (it doesn’t take all that much land or water to farm crickets), and a novel way to help get a handle on a growing global hunger crisis. Over two billion people already supplement their diet with crickets and other insects. We might as well scale.

But if you’re ever staring down a plate of cricket or scorpion kababs and thinking “I can’t do this,” we recommend packing a bottle of Jersey Girl hot sauce to spice up your diet while you…spice up your diet.