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Hall inserted his toothpick into a hole in the bottle's mouth not much wider than the toothpick itself, and quickly withdrew it, revealing just a trace of a nuclear-orange liquid. He touched it to his tongue and waited. Nothing. Over-hyped, he reasoned. "This stuff is an 8-out-of-10 on my heat scale," he declared. Renate Zoschke took the bottle and poured three individual drops -- together, not quite the size of a dime -- on a tortilla chip, and handed the chip to Hall. He popped it in his mouth and waited again. "OK," he said matter-of-factly, "I can't feel my tongue." His eyes began to bulge and water, and beads of sweat quickly formed along his hairline. His face, already flushed from hours of sampling other hot sauces, reddened to a deep, sun-burned shade of crimson. He began to exhale forcefully, as if he could somehow blow the burn out of his mouth.

Hot Sauce won't Wipe out these Wines

"OK, OK, OK, OK, OK," he continued submissively. Then, like a younger brother being subjected to noogies, Hall offered the fiery-foods equivalent of "uncle" to the small crowd who had gathered to watch him. "It's a 10, it's a 10, it's a 10."

Taking off his jacket as sweat poured down his face, Hall looked like a defeated man. His attempt to describe the sensation took about three minutes, with each sentence -- nearly every word -- interrupted with an "oooohhhh" or an "aaahhhhhhh" or an "oh man."

"Just call me stupid," he said. "That's for sure."

I couldn't call him stupid. I had done the same thing the previous day. Four beers and a glass of milk later, the burn had still been with me. So I'd done what any self-respecting chilehead would do; I'd walked from booth to booth at the Fiery Foods Show in Reno, Nev., in search of something hotter. And I'd found it in Da Bomb Ground Zero, which, depending on whom you believe, registers a blistering 50 or 300 times as hot as Tabasco sauce. Unfortunately, as another chilehead concluded a bit too authoritatively, "It tastes like burnt cat."

Since 1988, the Fiery Foods Show has grown from a tiny trade show with 37 exhibitors and about 100 curious members of the public to a sophisticated operation boasting some 260 exhibitors and 12,000 heat seekers. Although fewer members of the public attended this year's show on March 4 and 5 (a scheduling conflict had moved it to Reno from Albuquerque, N.M.), the show's growth mirrors the explosion of the hot-foods industry in America. The formerly insignificant fiery foods niche is now a booming $2.5 billion industry, according to "The Pope of Peppers," Dave DeWitt, who has written or co-written more than 30 books and cookbooks on chile peppers and hot sauces.

DeWitt is the editor and publisher of an industry trade publication called Fiery Foods magazine, and the former editor of Chile Pepper magazine, a consumer mag with a growing circulation of more than 60,000. An Internet Web ring popularly called the "Ring of Fire" now boasts more than 400 sites devoted to growing, selling, cooking, eating and -- as one popular site puts it, worshipping -- the chile pepper. According to a recent report by the American Spice Trade Association (yes, there is one), general spice consumption in the United States rose almost 16 percent from 1995 to 1998. "Growth in the hot spice category is largely responsible for the increases in total spice use," the report concludes.

The Reno show boasted attendees from throughout America and all over the world. Tom Hall, the Viper victim, flew in with his wife from Bellingham, Wash. Others came from Trinidad and Tobago, Ecuador and New Zealand. One woman I spoke to had traveled 36 hours from Botswana. The Chinese government, hoping to tap the expanding American heat market, sponsored Wen-Qiam Zhou's trip to represent the Yellow Emperor Pepper Sauce Company.

Next page | From Screamin' Demon to Monica's Down on Your Knees Hot Sauce