My very own bottle of Dave's Ultimate Insanity Sauce

In Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the now-classic account by John Berendt of his time in Savannah, Georgia, there is a character named Luther Driggers. Luther - real person but his name in the book is a pseudonym - was a scientist who invented the flea collar. In the book Berendt accompanies him as Luther tries to market glow-in-the-dark goldfish (the scheme bombs bigtime). But his real claim to notoriety is that he possesses a bottle of poison so deadly, that it would kill every man, woman and child living in Savannah. He never intends to actually use the stuff. But Luther enjoys the sense of power that comes with owning so potent a thing, knowing that his fellow citizens are terrified out of their wits that Luther will pour it into the water system some night when he's depressed or drunk or something.

Well, it's not anything that powerful (I hope) but now I have a sense of what Luther felt as he held that bottle of poison in his hands. A few days ago, on our way to visit Lisa's family in Georgia, I tried Firehouse Subs for the first time and noticed that they have a slew of hot sauces available, and most for sale even. Two of them were something that I've heard about for quite awhile but had never actually seen: Dave's Insanity, supposedly one of the hottest sauces on the market. I bought a bottle of Dave's Ultimate Insanity, which is said to measure 250,000 Scoville units (the measure of how "hot" a spicy food item is), whereas regular Tabasco sauce is only 5,000 Scoville units. There are other brands that have surpassed Dave's sauce "hotness" (Blair's 16 Million Reserve is said to be sixteen million Scoville units) but those are said to mostly be just short of being pure capsaicin extract and not really a "sauce". The nice girl at Firehouse Subs said that 357 Mad Dog is supposed to be much hotter than the Dave's products. But since Dave's is the "ultra hot" sauce that I've heard of longer than any of them, I got the Dave's Ultimate Insanity.

And right now, like Luther Driggers and his bottle of poison, I'm just looking at my bottle of Dave's Ultimate Insanity: holding it in my hands, wondering if I should dare break the plastic seal and open the bottle and at least sniff the stuff. I haven't done that. I don't know if I will do that: it's just fun knowing that I finally have such a thing in my grubby lil' paws, in case I do ever need - or want - to use it.

So... should I try it? After seeing YouTube videos of people trying it raw, I am, needless to say, a little reluctant. That the bottle explicitly states "Keep away from eyes, pets and children. Not for people with heart or respiratory problems." isn't helping matters much. And yet, it's so tempting to give it a try...

I might do that, sometime soon. And post the video footage of the experiment here. If not for sake of daring, then because I'm wondering how this might be a neat thing to add to my concoction of marinade the next time I deep-fry a turkey.

In the meantime, it's a wonderful feeling to have a bottle of something that is described as being a potential health-hazard to others :-)

Categories: dave's ultimate insanity, food, hot sauce, peppers