National Hot Sauce Day is coming up. A Mishawaka chef offers a sauce with roots in Malawi.

Greg Swiercz, South Bend Tribune
·2 min read
Kuleza Kadyakale, a Malawi native and Mishawaka resident, stands inside Purple Porch Co-op in South Bend, where her Chef Kuleza Hot Sauce is sold.
Kuleza Kadyakale, a Malawi native and Mishawaka resident, stands inside Purple Porch Co-op in South Bend, where her Chef Kuleza Hot Sauce is sold.

Saturday is National Hot Sauce Day, with South Bend area foodies urged to join people across the country in enjoying all things spicy.

To paraphrase, and butcher, an old saying: "If you can't stand the heat, try another hot sauce."

Instacart, an online grocery site, used its sales data for 2021 to find that Frank's RedHot sauce is the most popular hot sauce in Indiana and Michigan.

Locally, Mishawaka resident and Malawi native Kuleza Kadyakale has her own offering for people to try: Chef Kuleza Hot Sauce.

Kadyakale studied culinary arts at Ivy Tech and has worked as a chef at the University of Notre Dame and other sites.

Bringing African flavors to Indiana

Trying local hot sauces, she found the flavors were unlike anything she experienced in her African nation. So she took seeds from the Kambuzi hot pepper, a small, round Malawian habanero, and planted it in gardens in Niles and Granger, since she had no permanent site to grow them.

"I traveled every day watering them," Kadyakale said of that 2019 effort.

After producing the peppers, she relied on her experiences in Malawi to produce her sauce. Low in vinegar and sodium, the sauce features flavor over heat, she said.

Kadyakale planted a larger garden in 2020 at her new home, eventually producing a bounty of 100 pounds of peppers for her sauce. With the large amount of processing needed, she enlisted co-packers in Florida to use her recipe and produce the sauce.

Chef Kuleza Hot Sauce on a shelf inside Purple Porch Co-op in South Bend.
Chef Kuleza Hot Sauce on a shelf inside Purple Porch Co-op in South Bend.

Bottles of the hot sauce have been sold at the South Bend Farmers Market and at Purple Porch Co-op. Kadyakale also sells the sauce online at https://chefkuleza.com/.

"A lot of people taste food and a lot of it is fried, and it has no flavor," Kadyakale said. "People are looking for flavor."

Her sauces are bottled in mild, medium and hot. Medium heat is her best seller.

What makes hot sauce hot?

According to scienceofcooking.com, capsaicin is the main culprit of hot sauce. It is not neutralized in water – a fact many ultimately find out when they try to kill the burn with water. Milk or dairy products that can cut the heat.

Where is capsaicin found?

Capsaicin is present in the tissue that holds seeds in peppers, and in lesser portions in the fleshy parts of some plants.

What's the hottest pepper?

The burning sensation occurs when it comes in contact with mucous membranes. The degree of heat found within a food is often measured on the Scoville scale.

Here are several peppers and their Scoville Heat Unit ratings:

• Thai chili — 50,000-100,000 units

• Jalapeno — 2,500-8,000 units

• Chipotle — 10,000-23,000 units

• Habanero — 100,000-350,000 units

Email South Bend Tribune reporter Greg Swiercz at gswiercz@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Chef Kuleza Hot Sauce, born in Mishawaka, for National Hot Sauce Day