I love how seemingly unconventional flavor combinations can come together, evolve over time, and eventually become trends, or even part of a culture's culinary identity.
Take hot honey. While many Americans were introduced to it only in the last decade, the marriage of honey and chiles has deep roots in places where both ingredients have long been everyday staples. Across Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, cooks have been balancing sweetness and heat for generations.
I fell deeper in love with that sweet-spicy interplay while serving in the Peace Corps in Zimbabwe, near the South African border. There I was introduced to Chakalaka, a vibrant vegetable relish with just enough sweetness to soften the chile heat. It's traditionally served alongside a braai (South African cookout) or spooned over isitshwala, a hearty Ndebele maize porridge. It's wonderfully addictive, and that experience helped shape one of my favorite flavor profiles—a balance I've continued to explore in recipes like our Lum Lum Thai Curry Nut Butter, inspired by Thai Penang curry, and our Sweet Heat Peanut Butter, inspired by Haitian mamba. Even the ancient pairing of cacao and chiles found throughout Mayan and other Indigenous American cuisines reminds us that sweet, earthy, and spicy flavors have belonged together for centuries.
Of course, credit should also be given where it's due. Mike Kurtz, founder of Mike's Hot Honey, helped introduce countless Americans to the Brazilian tradition of chile-infused honey. Hot honey is one of those rare condiments that somehow seems at home on almost everything, adding both complexity and contrast with remarkable simplicity.
Creating a hot honey-inspired nut butter has actually been on my recipe development list for nearly a decade.
Years ago, I experimented with simply blending house-made hot honey into fresh-roasted peanut butter. It was good—really good—but it never quite felt complete. The easiest way I can describe it is through music. It reminded me of listening to an incredible drum-and-bass duo: powerful, rhythmic, and compelling, but leaving me wanting one more melodic voice to complete the band. I needed a third ingredient that would allow both the peanuts and the hot honey to become something greater together.
So I put the idea back on the shelf and waited.
Sometimes recipes simply need more time.
We've been fortunate to partner with the incredible team at Central Market in Texas for more than ten years. They were among the very first retailers outside North Carolina to believe in our vision of handcrafted, culinary-driven nut butters, and over the years we've had the privilege of creating several exclusive recipes for their seasonal festivals. A Chili Lime Mango Peanut Butter for their Citrus Festival became a customer favorite, and every year I've admired the enthusiasm surrounding their iconic Hatch Chile Festival. Central Market has an exceptional way of sourcing remarkable foods, supporting knowledgeable team members, and cultivating genuine food curiosity within their communities.
Around the same time those ideas were quietly waiting in the back of my mind, another memory kept resurfacing.
In my late twenties, one of my housemates—a good friend from Taos, New Mexico—would receive boxes of freshly roasted Hatch chiles from his family every season. One evening he made pozole, and I was hooked. There is something almost magical about the Hatch Valley itself. The scorching desert days, cool evenings, and mineral-rich volcanic soils along the Rio Grande produce peppers with thick, meaty flesh and an unmistakable character: earthy, smoky, slightly sweet, and deeply aromatic. Once you've tasted them, you understand why people eagerly await Hatch season every year.
When we began developing a recipe for Central Market's Hatch Chile Festival, green chile naturally became the centerpiece. I experimented with several Hatch chile powders sourced directly from New Mexico, but I also reached out to our friends at Burlap & Barrel.
Whenever Burlap & Barrel sources an ingredient, I know it's going to represent not only extraordinary flavor but also an extraordinary story. As fellow Certified B Corp, we share a commitment to equitable sourcing, transparency, traceability, and building long-term relationships with the farmers behind exceptional ingredients. Those values matter just as much to us as the flavors themselves.
Their Hatch chile, sourced directly from New Mexico's Hatch Valley, was exactly what I hoped it would be—fruity, smoky, beautifully aromatic, with a gentle, slow-building warmth.
The first batch, made with fresh-roasted peanuts, Burlap & Barrel's Hatch chile, and a touch of Jacobsen sea salt, was delicious. But once again, it needed another instrument.
Peanuts have an assertive roasted character of their own. The Hatch chile was present, but I wanted it to sing rather than simply accompany the peanuts. The recipe needed brighter sweetness and a livelier, more expressive heat.
That's when the decade-old hot honey idea came rushing back.
A carefully balanced blend of honey and habanero suddenly transformed everything. The honey softened the earthy richness of the peanuts, the habanero lifted the overall heat, and, perhaps most importantly, it made the fruity, smoky character of the Hatch chile even more pronounced. Instead of competing, every ingredient began amplifying the others.
Maybe the musical metaphor has now gone a little too far, but what began as a drum-and-bass duo ultimately became a quartet, with every player contributing something essential.
For us, that's when recipe development becomes truly satisfying, not when individual ingredients taste great on their own, but when each one helps reveal something beautiful in the others.
We can't wait for you to taste the final result.
Cheers.
Mark
