Round Mountain Sauces intends to stay local; find them in Asheville, Black Mountain, more
What started as a surplus of peppers from Mark Duncan’s garden has now turned into a successful sauce business.
Duncan and his wife, Holly Duncan, own and operate Round Mountain Sauces.
Round Mountain Sauces can currently be found in Black Mountain at Four Sisters Bakery and the Straightaway Café, in Old Fort at the Davis Country Store and in Asheville at Heaven’s Gate at the Western North Carolina Farmers Market. The sauce will also soon be available in Beradu, a new restaurant and market in Black Mountain. Round Mountain Sauces also has an online store for customers who do not live in the area.
Duncan said he is an avid gardener and often freezes his produce at the end of the season, but for a few years in a row, found himself with more peppers than he could freeze. He said he does not remember who gave him the idea, but he started trying to make hot sauce with the peppers.
Duncan said his first batches of hot sauce were good, but nothing he wanted to try again. He said he started thinking of ways to enhance his sauces.
“I was making good sauce, but it wasn’t special,” Duncan said. “I was looking for something, some ingredients, some method, something. I tried fermentation, I tried adding unique spices to it, I just couldn’t hit on anything.”
Meanwhile, Duncan was also smoking things like salmon and potatoes at home. He said he decided to smoke the chili peppers, onions and garlic during one of his rounds of smoking. Duncan said the idea for smoking the ingredients for the hot sauce came as a “natural extension” of what he was already doing.
Once Duncan had sauces he was happy with, he started the process of learning to bottle them in food-safe conditions. He said learning to do this involved taking a self-paced class through North Carolina State University in the summer of 2020.
Now, Duncan has a three-person crew who can bottle 2,000 units per batch in a shared-use kitchen in Candler.
Currently, Round Mountain Sauces carries four hot sauces. The Smoky sauce has no heat and is made with poblano peppers. The Wildfire comes in a green and red variety, both serrano-poblano blends with medium heat. The hottest sauce the company makes is Escarpment, made with serrano peppers.
“The main thing to remember about us, Round Mountain Sauces, is that we’re not really into taking your head off with the heat,” Duncan said.
In order to make the sauces, Duncan and his team first use a real smoke process that takes 10 hours for 100 gallons of sauce. He said he then follows a normal process of making hot sauce and uses a bottling machine to bottle the 2,000 units per 100 gallons.
Duncan said he and the company also travel to different festivals and tailgate markets selling their sauces. Other than these traveling events, Duncan said he wants to keep the sauce as local to Black Mountain and Western North Carolina as possible, including his wholesale clients.
“I’d rather them go by and support these local businesses,” Duncan said. “That way I can keep giving them my wholesale business and we’ll continue to make our retail money at festivals or tailgate markets.”
He said he has no real plans to grow Round Mountain Sauces much bigger than being a full-time job. He currently works in information technology while his wife is a teacher.
Duncan said he enjoys getting to see his customers' reactions to the sauces when they first try them, as well as getting to see what repeat customers do with the hot sauces.
“All these little things just sort of add up to a whole lot of just having a good time with it,” Duncan said. “I’m having a really good time with putting this together and just sharing the sauce.”
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Karrigan Monk is the Swannanoa Valley communities reporter for Black Mountain News, part of the USA TODAY Network. Reach her at kmonk@blackmountainnews.com.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Round Mountain Sauces intends to stay local to Black Mountain area
