Some hot sauce is built to be a challenge. Flavor & Fire's is built to live on the table. The ubiquitous cayenne pepper might be the least fashionable pepper in craft hot sauce; but, when it is done properly, can be the most useful — and the family behind our Ohio collection has done it properly a few times over. Sauce Boss Gang, also making sauce just north of Columbus, takes the other road: small-batch, pepper-forward bottles that climb from a mild jalapeño verde up to a garlic scorpion that means it. Two Columbus, Ohio makers, two different approaches to what a bottle of hot sauce is for.
Flavor & Fire
Westerville, Ohio
Flavor & Fire is the work of Mike and Debra Laviolette, a Westerville couple who started making sauce in 2015 and now run production out of a 13,000-square-foot facility on Old County Line Road. Debra is the recipe side of the partnership — a chef by trade who builds sauces around balance rather than punishment — while Mike runs the business and keeps returning to the only question he thinks matters: does it taste good? Their son Tyler works production, which is where the "family made" on the label actually comes from. They mill their own pepper puree from locally grown peppers, they have placed top three at the Chili Pepper Awards and at ZestFest's Fiery Food Challenge in Fort Worth, and in 2019 they took on CaJohns Fiery Foods — recipe book and North Market shop included — which pushed the catalog past a hundred products. The cayenne sauces below are the quiet end of a very deep shelf.
All of Flavor & Fire's hot sauces are family made, and the lineup is unapologetically built for everyday cooking rather than for heat-seekers.
C Bus Hot Sauce ($8.50) A traditional cayenne-based all-purpose sauce that fits on any table. Mild to medium, it goes with anything and everything — salads, veggies, red meat, white meat, seafood and fish. If you want one bottle that the whole family will actually use, this is it.
Columbus Cayenne ($8.00) is the traditional cayenne-style sibling, adding a touch of zesty spice to whatever it lands on.
Taco Dog Sauce ($8.00) is the one we point people toward when they come looking for the old Hotbox Philly Taco sauce, which is now discontinued. It hits a similar mild taco heat, straight from Columbus.
Sauce Boss Gang
Westerville, Ohio
Sauce Boss Gang begins with Nicole DiTommaso walking away from an executive operations career in 2019 to build something of her own, drawing on Italian and Mexican heritage and treating hot sauce as a vehicle for something bigger than dinner. Production later moved from Miami to Columbus, and the brand has since worked its way through glass shortages, restaurant collaborations and, in year six, a vendor deal with Aramark — plus a spot in Chase's Coaching for Impact program.
Every sauce in the Fearless Flavor Collection is small batch, all natural, no fillers, and named for a chapter of that journey. The labels are designed with local artists. The result is pepper-forward rather than heat-for-heat's-sake — though the top of the range will absolutely get your attention.
Toro Verde ($14.00) is the tangy jalapeño verde and the easiest entry point of the three. Mild, bright and green — good on eggs, tacos, anything that wants acid more than fire.
Liquid Gold ($14.00) is mango and scotch bonnet, named for prosperity. Sweet up front, tropical, then a proper scotch bonnet finish. This is the bottle for jerk chicken, grilled pork and anyone who likes fruit with their heat.
La Jefa ($14.50) is the award winner and the superhot of the lineup — garlic and scorpion pepper, built for heat seekers who still want to taste what they are eating. Start with a drop.
