Things are Heating up at Rhed's
Local Hot Sauce Purveyor Taps into Culinary Background and Local Farms
The smell of warm Indian spices fills the air at Rhed’s commercial kitchen in the Farm Fresh RI building in Providence on a recent Tuesday afternoon. Owner and operator Deja Hart is busy bottling a new addition to her growing line of hot sauce and condiments.
“There’s cumin, coriander, fennel seed; we toast all the spices, we roast onions and garlic—lots of good stuff in there,” she says, standing over a 40-gallon stainless steel kettle filled with a shimmering cinnamon-colored liquid. The heat, she adds, comes from Byadagi dabbi chiles, a hot yet earthy pepper, along with local fermented orange habaneros. Her new hot sauce, which will be called Dabbi Sauce, will certainly make you feel alive, but the heat isn’t overwhelming.
“I’ve never really loved the super hot sauces that are just there to burn you up,” says Deja. “Having a chef background, I’ve always wanted to make sauces that complement the food and enhance the flavor, not mask it.”
After giving the kettle a good stir, Deja fills a plastic pitcher with sauce then transfers it to a metal hopper she uses for bottling. Meanwhile, her colleague Lynda McAuslan lines up long rows of five-ounce glass bottles on a metal prep table. Lynda has been with the company since it was founded nearly eight years ago, so the two have done this dance many times.
“We’ll probably bottle about 60 cases today, 12 bottles a case,” says Deja, as she tops off a bottle before quickly shifting to the next.
Deja started the company with her husband, chef and food industry professional Karsten Hart, who’s still very much involved in recipe development, label design and occasional deliveries. Rhed’s now has seven different hot sauces (soon to be eight), three salsas, three barbecue sauces and a black garlic and chile-infused maple syrup—“That’s an exciting one for us,” says Deja—all of which are sold at retail stores, farmers markets and on their website. But it was a pretty bare-bones operation in the beginning.
“It was basically just the three of us the first couple years,” says Lynda, adding that there was a hefty workload. “Pepper season was pretty grueling. I nearly got tendonitis.”
In general, the hot sauce market is on the upswing with a projected sales growth from $3.30 billion in 2024 to $5.98 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights. The popularity of the spicy condiment is obvious when you look around the grocery store.
“When we started making hot sauce, there was one local hot sauce that you could find in the grocery store,” says Deja. “Now I think there are at least 10 hot sauce producers in New England.”
Deja tries to set her sauce apart by using local fermented chiles, fresh roasted aromatics and none of the preservatives, gums or fillers that you’ll find in more mass-produced hot sauces. Along with locally grown chiles she sources from area farms like Brandon Family Farm and Cedar Valley Farm, some of her sauces also contain dried chiles, which can add notes from other regions around the world (like India) and also depth.
“Dried chiles can add a lot,” says Deja. “It’s kind of like using a raisin as opposed to a grape.”
Deja grew up in Southern California and wanted to be a chef at a young age. “I was always drawn to the kitchen, trying out different foods, new products,” she says. After attending the Art Institute of California and earning an associate degree in culinary arts and a bachelor’s in culinary management, while still in California, Deja bounced around a few different kitchens before landing in a small Thai and Indonesian restaurant called Chakra. “That’s when I really started making different sauces and playing around with hotter chiles.” She moved to Rhode Island in 2010.
Although she’s modest about her attention to detail in the kitchen that comes from years of working as a chef, Lynda speaks up.
“Deja is amazing,” she says. “Even this morning, they had already developed this sauce, but she kept saying, ‘No, it’s not quite there,’ and then she would add a little of this and a little of that. She’s always trying to make it better.”
At this point, things have gone well beyond hot sauce. Rhed’s just launched a brand new sweet and spicy barbecue sauce made with arbol chiles and cranberries. Like all of their products, a small banner on the label reads: Made in Rhode Island.
“Everything is made right here, from scratch,” says Deja, standing among towering cases of hot sauce and vats of fermenting chiles. “I rarely get a day off.”
Eric C. Voorhis is a Providence-based journalist who likes to find himself in the middle of stories about food, arts and culture. A native of Long Island, he’s now on a mission to find the best food in New England and hang out with the people who make it.
Rhed’s Hot Sauce
10 Sims Ave., #108, Providence (in the Farm Fresh RI building)
Check ahead for seasonal hours at their retail store or shop online at RhedsHotSauce.com.
