Eaten Alive: hot sauces go on sale at Sainsbury’s
Eaten Alive – the fermented foods producer, has secured a listing in Sainsbury’s for two of its bio-live, all-natural chilli sauces. The retailer has selected the Eaten Alive Smoked Sriracha and Scotch Bonnet Hot Sauce which will be on sale in 71 stores as part of its ‘Future Brands’ initiative.
Founded in 2016, Eaten Alive is the creation of two chefs who bonded over a shared passion for fermentation and flavour.
The range is all additive free, completely raw, vegan and teeming with good bacteria. Only the finest ingredients are used and made to the secret recipes created by Glyn Gordon and Pat Bingley at their kitchen in Battersea.
Pat Bingley, managing director, said: “We’re really excited to see our sauces on the shelves of Sainsburys, we hope their customers enjoy them and we’re looking forward to hearing about all the delicious ways they choose to eat them.”
Pat and Glyn are passionate about working with exciting ingredients to produce savoury and deliciously complex flavours. Their Smoked Sriracha alone was over a year in development and each batch takes six months to produce. The pair developed an in-house smoking process, which for the Smoked Sriracha means smoking two chilli varieties, onions, garlic and peppers over oak before they are fermented in barrels for six months. The blending and adjusting process that follows is similar to that of a whisky, as working with natural ingredients and processes will produce slight variations from one batch to the next.
Rachel Eyre, Sainsbury’s head of future brands, said: ‘At Sainsbury’s, we want to offer our customers the most innovative and interesting products around. Following on from the success of our first Taste of the Future bay, our second trial bay continues to showcase new, distinctive products that you wouldn’t necessarily think you’d be able to pick up on your food shop. We’re always on the lookout for ways to inspire our customers, and can’t wait to hear what they think of our selection.”
The two sauces on sale at Sainsbury’s are:
- Smoked Sriracha – Combination of chillies, sweet peppers, garlic and onions are smoked over oak before being fermented for several months to develop complex flavours. Smoky, rich and tangy with a deep chilli kick.
- Scotch Bonnet – Scotch bonnets and sweet peppers with a touch of garlic, slowly fermented to develop intense, fruity flavours then blended with raw unfiltered cider vinegar and a touch of pure cane sugar.
Lacto-fermentation is the preservation of produce with lactobacillus bacteria and salt, a process that has given the world many much-loved traditional foods such as sour cream, cheese, sauerkraut, kimchi and briney dill pickles. As well as preserving and producing great flavours, the process improves the bioavailability of many vitamins and nutrients, by producing foods the body finds easier to digest, one of the many health benefits thought to be linked to biolive lacto-fermented foods.