My name is Adam and I love Hot Sauce
Or more specifically, I’m addicted to hot sauce. Dangerously addicted, even. It’s actually beginning to have some serious ramifications for my health and wellbeing at this point. Just last week, for example, I caused a scene in Nando’s when I was mistakenly served a lemon and herb butterfly burger instead of a half chicken extra-hot. In a split second of untameable fury I pounced onto the beleaguered waiter, desperately craving a hit of neat, sweet hot sauce to quell my whirlwind rage. A nearby gaggle of gym lads prised me from the terrified employee, but I got away — making for the exit with several bottles of peri-peri sauce in one arm and a boneless sharing platter in the other. This was, in hindsight, a low point for me.
Alas, it wasn’t always like this. My obsession began in the summer of 2018 when my sister gifted me a bottle of Sriracha for my birthday. With this, the touch paper was well and truly lit, setting in motion a hot and steamy love affair between myself and this sweet yet sumptuously spicy mistress. At first I used the sauce in moderation, applying a dab to the occasional pizza slice or noodle dish; but before long I was totally enraptured, besotted by her mysterious, tropical tang, yet all the while beguiled by her lingering savoury notes. Come autumn I was totally hooked, dousing hot sauce on nearly everything I ate. Pancakes and hot sauce, roast dinner and hot sauce, tiramisu and hot sauce. Sometimes, when gripped by a particularly fervent frenzy, I would just quaff entire bottles of pure, unadulterated hot sauce — such was my craving for its fiery deliciousness.
Supporting this penchant for hot sauce has, as you may imagine, presented some pretty substantial hurdles. While living in Germany last year, for example, I was confronted with a disquieting lack of hot sauce, leaving me with no choice but to grow and ferment my own chillies in order to continue feeding the habit. This operation began as a hobby but quickly spiralled into an all-consuming obsession, to the complete detriment of my social life. It was not uncommon for me to parry invitations from friends to instead tend to my crop — even inverting my sleeping schedule in order to continue blending my custom sauces long into the night. My neighbours inevitably became concerned by my pattern of antisocial behaviour, fighting through dense overgrown thicket to access my front door, but so engulfed was I in a bleary, chilli-fuelled trance that I failed to heed their cries. Eventually riot police broke down my door to find me perched fully nude on the windowsill like a bird of prey, feverishly devouring a stack of raw chilli peppers. They lunged at me, but I sprang from the window onto a nearby veranda and made my escape, subsequently returning to the UK a fugitive.
Needless to say, my addiction to hot sauce has left me a juddering husk of a man, and is undoubtedly responsible for the collapse of all of my human relationships. Where my friends have kicked me from the group chat, my long suffering girlfriend has left me for a far superior man. Desperate and alone, I guzzle bottle after bottle of hot sauce as a means of replacing her warm, loving embrace. Swaddled in a cocoon of mucus and shame, lips swollen and taste buds numbed, I collapse into a puddle of warm, salty tears. I cradle a bottle of hot sauce in my arms and calmly suckle from her teat. Warmed by her gentle burn, I gradually fade into a deep sleep, envisioning a bathtub full of hot sauce to reconcile my trauma.
My safe place. My happy place.
