Hi, I’m Lisa Duizer. I’m the Chair of the Food Science Department at the University
of Guelph. And I’m here today with students that have been involved with our hot sauce project,
so I’d like to introduce Gillian, Khevita, Sabryn, and Krupa. And they’re here today
to talk to me about the products that they’ve been creating. So Gillian, what do we have here?
So today we have 5 different sauces that we made and all of these sauces
were made completely on campus by undergraduate food science students.
[Lisa] Lets try our first hot sauce.
[Gillian] We have our Hot Tropic made from a previous year. So this one is
a very mild and sweet hot sauce, so it’s good for almost anybody.
And it is. It’s quite a pleasant flavour. And so,
the four of you are not alone in creating these products. I’m sure you’ve had a lot of help.
We have about 50 volunteers that come out and help up pretty regularly. Most of them
are undergraduate food science students and it is kind of a unique experience where you
get to go into the Guelph Food Innovation Centre Pilot Plant and have a lot of really
good hands-on experience and so it is really fun for all of the undergrads to kind of get
involved. So the next sauce we are trying is our regular Cannonfire and this is the
sauce that we make every single year. And so this one is a very medium hot sauce.
You’re right, you can have quite a bit and it’s not going to burn too badly. Yeah.
And one of the challenges with this product is that because we do use mostly different
peppers every year and we do have a different harvest depending on weather,
it changes the flavours of the peppers. One of our challenges is matching the flavour
of the Cannonfire this year with the ones of previous years to make sure there is continuity.
So there’s a little bit of taste testing that goes on.
[Khevita] There is, yeah. The best part of formulation.
[Lisa] Yeah, for sure. Krupa,
I know that the Hot Honey is yours. Can you tell me about the Hot Honey?
[Krupa] The Hot Honey is a new product this year. I am a co-op student at the Guelph Food
Innovation Centre. For this project, I was the project lead which was extremely fun and
I got to learn a lot. The honey came from the University of Guelph Honeybee Research Centre.
And so, what else could you use this honey on? What types of products?
After we finished producing the honey, the first thing we did was
try it on the vanilla ice cream that was made at the GFIC as well. It was
sweet in the beginning and then in the end you got like a spice-kick.
So there’s quite a bit of heat there. So let’s try this heat.
It’s got a great flavour. I could imagine it on ice cream.
I feel like the cold of the ice cream with like the warmth of the spice would
like really balance out and go well together.
Yes, it does.
So I know that Krupa did this as part of her co-op experience, but Gillian why did you do this?
Um, so when I initially transferred into the food science program when I was in second year,
I started volunteering with the hot sauce project. And being able to be part of the entire product
development and production process I found really special. And especially as someone who
is not in the co-op program, I found this really helpful for experiential learning, being able to
just have so much hands-on experience that I can then transfer into jobs when I graduate.
[Lisa] We have the new mango. Sabryn, you made the label for this product, didn’t you?
Mainly what inspired me I think was the vibrant orange colour
of the hot sauce and I wanted to do something to complement that.
We took inspiration from this Mexican street dish called,
“Mango en Palo.” It’s sweet and savoury, and a bit spicy.
I like that on the label you have listed all the
peppers out so that you can read what peppers are in the product.
[Gillian] We put so much effort into growing all of the peppers ourselves
here on campus and so it’s good to get the recognition of how many we’ve grown,
just because it is quite a challenge to grow spicy peppers in Canada.
(Laughing)
Alright, I’m gonna give this a go. Oh, there’s definitely some
heat there. But lovely flavour. A really nice blend of flavours in that product.
It does have a pretty good kick to it, but because of the sweetness and also the fats in the mango,
the spice doesn’t last as long in your mouth. And so it goes away pretty quickly.
Alright, well that brings us to our last product. So, it’s not gonna go away as quickly, is it?
[Gillian] So this is our Cannonfire NSFW. It is the spiciest sauce that we have made so
far. It uses pretty similar peppers to the other products, but it’s just a lot more concentrated.
This one unfortunately is not for sale any more because we made it last year. But it
just kind of shows the scope of products that we can make and kind of creativity
that comes out of, um, the undergrad students in the food science department.
Okay, good luck.
Spicy!
There’s definitely some heat there. It’s fantastic to see
the range of products you have. Is there anything else you want people to know.
If you want to learn more about our production process,
you can follow us on Instagram @uofg_cannonfire
(Music)