Hoff & Pepper

November 27, 2020

Ready for a hot sauce that’ll kick your meal up a notch without smothering the flavor of your food? Hoff & Pepper sauces are just what the doctor ordered. Handcrafted with farm-fresh ingredients and carefully created for a balanced heat profile, these Chattanooga-based sauces have caught the attention of food critics (Guy Fieri) and celebrities (Chrissy Tiegen) around the country.

Hoff & Pepper specializes in everyday hot sauces, leaving the tear-jerking “double dare” stunt condiments to the commercial players. H&P sauces are the perfect companion to just about anything on your plate, created to elevate eggs, pizza, sandwiches, salads, burgers, fish, and more. The taste is spicy (of course), but also unexpectedly tangy, fresh, and full of flavor. H&P sauces are perfectly balanced to bring just the right heat without smothering the taste of your dish.

Freshness is king at Hoff & Pepper. The company uses more produce in their blends—more fresh chipotle, red jalapeno, and habanero chilis—combined with only vinegar, salt, garlic, and spices. Every pepper in the bottle is grown on a family farm in Dayton, Tennessee, just an hour away from the company’s small-batch production kitchen. The company’s owners work with the farmer to hand-select the exact pepper breeds for their sauces, chosen for fruitiness, sweetness, and heat.

The Hoff & Pepper story is the classic hobby-to-business tale, but in fast-forward. In just a few short years, Aaron “Hoff” and Michelle “Pepper” Hoffman have grown a home-cooked passion into an award-winning company. What started as a personal quest for the perfect everyday hot sauce produced the original Hoff Sauce(™) recipe: a flavorful mix of farm-fresh jalapenos and habaneros that make any dish sing. The couple cooked up a few batches to give as gifts, and as it goes with so many of our favorite makers, the friends and family came back for more. The Hoffmans started selling their Hoff Sauce blend at Chattanooga farmer’s markets and quickly learned just how popular their product could be.

Within six months of their first sale, Hoff Sauce took the gold at the New York City Hot Sauce Expo, sweeping the Louisiana-style category at the largest craft hot sauce competition in the U.S. Hoff Sauce has dominated the category for four years straight, and now holds the record for consecutive wins.

While the lauded Original Hoff Sauce is the most celebrated product in the Hoff & Pepper repertoire, new flavor experiments and fun collaborations are inching into the spotlight. One of our favorites is Hoff’s Wake Up Call, a sriracha-style sauce with a barbecue zing and kick of cold brew coffee from Nashville favorite, Frothy Monkey. It’s sweet, salty, savory, and spicy, and fully brunch-ready; we think it’s the perfect blend for Bloody Marys and omelettes.

Made in TN is proud to offer a curated collection of Hoff & Pepper sauces, but they do come with a warning: once you taste hot sauce this good, you’ll never accept the grocery store version again. Find your favorite here.

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