Butterfly Bakery is a female-owned, locally sourced bakery in Barre where the staff doesn’t deal with traditional goods like cakes and scones, although they used to. Now, their eyes — and taste buds — are set on hot sauce.
“OK, what does that mean — these are for tacos?” award winning singer-songwriter and actor, Lenny Kravitz asked Sean Evans, host of the YouTube celebrity interview show, “Hot Ones,” in a recent episode as he tried Butterfly Bakery’s newest hot sauce, called Taco Vibes Only.
“Tacos from hell,” Evans replied.
“Hot Ones” is a show “with hot questions and even hotter wings,” Evans says in his introductions to each episode. The show involves interviewing celebrities while they eat progressively hotter wings.
The scoville level of Taco Vibes Only — a unit that measures the heat of the sauces for the show — is 638,000. For reference, the level-one hot sauce on the show has a scoville level of 1,600.
The show is currently in its 20th season, and Butterfly Bakery made its debut on the show back in the seventh season, showing off its maple wood smoked onion hot sauce.
The bakery has been involved with another popular YouTube show, “The Try Guys,” in 2019. Butterfly Bakery made Keith’s Chicken Sauce for one of the members of the group, who documented the process in one of their videos.
First We Feast, the YouTube channel that produces “Hot Ones,” boasts 12 million subscribers, while “The Try Guys” have accumulated 8 million. The shows are massively popular, and with one primarily structured around hot sauce and the other devoting a brand to it, it seems hot sauce is on the rise. Claire Georges, founder and owner of Butterfly Bakery, certainly agrees.
‘I never thought about making hot sauce’
Georges said Butterfly Bakery’s connection with “Hot Ones” is linked to Heatonist, the hot sauce empire that supplies the sauces for “Hot Ones.” Heatonist’s founder, Noah Chaimberg, grew up in Vermont.
“He got a storefront in Brooklyn, and as he was building that brand, he reached out to us, just saying that he wanted us to send them samples and he wanted to give it a try,” Georges said.
Heatonist reached out to Butterfly Bakery around 2015, as Georges began shifting her bakery’s focus toward hot sauce. “It was right as we were transitioning to selling wholesale,” she said, after Georges recognized the rise in hot sauce popularity in Vermont.
Initially, Georges said, making hot sauce was just a fun hobby for her and her husband. “When we first met, he mentioned that he was making hot sauce,” she said. “I remember thinking, oh! I never thought about making hot sauce.”
At the time, to test potential baking ideas, Georges said she would bring baked goods to the Montpelier Farmers Market, such as macaroons, muffins, or chocolate cakes. Then, she traded any leftovers she had with other farmers, such as those that grow peppers.
“Because I had been making hot sauce with my husband, I would take them and make hot sauce and sell it at the next week’s farmers market,” she said. “And that would always sell out.”
The growing demand for hot sauce in Vermont wasn’t the only reason Georges recognized its potential. There was the product’s long shelf life, which became a major business consideration after the birth of her first child, and it became harder to keep up with products that have short shelf lives.
“We shifted towards more shelf-stable products,” Georges said. “We used to do scones, but they had like a five-day shelf life, so they ended up transitioning out once I had kids and stuff like that, and couldn’t deliver as frequently.”
Now, Georges said her bakery focuses only on goods that will last a long time on the shelf. Along with hot sauce, Butterfly Bakery crafts granola, cookies, caramel, mustards and salsas, plus limited specials that emerge from messing around in the kitchen, like barrel-aged cold brew vanilla extract.
Georges said Butterfly Bakery’s ingredients are almost exclusively from Vermont farms, with just a couple over the border in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. She likes to experiment and collaborate with other Vermont businesses, such as The Alchemist brewery in Stowe; her Red Heady hot sauce is made with Heady Topper beer.
Baking arithmetic
Georges said she grew up in California within a “very foodie family.” She cooked and baked a lot growing up, partly because of her early realization that she could not eat refined sugar. At the time, that severely limited her options.
“If I wanted to eat stuff, I just needed to make it, and so I learned how to modify recipes to fit my own dietary needs,” she said. “I would work with maple syrup, or barley malt or honey, and I knew nothing about the science behind it at that point. I just kind of started swapping things in to see what would happen.”
While she was passionate about baking, Georges did not imagine she would turn it into a profession. In fact, she went to school for computer science and loved it. On top of that, her dad was a computer programmer and her mom was an astronomer and professor at UC Berkeley.
Despite her love of programming, Georges said it was hard to see herself making it a career. But, she said, her mathematical brain helps inform her creation of flavors within her hot sauces and other goods.
“It’s a similar part of my brain that puts together the pieces of flavors and figures out what might taste good, where and how flavor might affect another flavor,” she said.
Georges thinks of crafting hot sauces like an equation, where adding different flavors results in an entirely new, and sometimes surprising, taste. At one point, Georges used her hands as she described how she thinks about flavors, and they wavered up and down with the resemblance of a sine graph. She said the key to flavor is balance.
“Flavors have kind of this arch and you want it to round out and be smooth,” she said, creating arches in the air with her fingers. She described cucumbers as having a “negative flavor,” as she drew an upside down arch, which creates a gap in taste that “can sometimes taste a little empty or weird.” But, she said, “if you add garlic with a cucumber, then you’re gonna get this rounded flavor because the cucumber’s down here and the garlic’s up here and you’ll get this nice, rounded flavor, which is one reason that dill pickles taste so good.”
A hot sauce renaissance
Georges believes there has been a shift in the hot sauce trend. She said its popularity has “ebbed and flowed,” but hot sauce is in a boom right now, which she partially attributes to the pandemic.
“With the pandemic, you weren’t going on those trips, you weren’t getting together with people or going out to dinner, and you’re at home buying things on the internet that you want to make your food taste better,” she said. “That kind of all came together to really help hot sauce.”
Georges said Butterfly Bakery experienced “colossal growth” during the pandemic, and “basically tripled in size.” Before the pandemic, the bakery had just six employees, she said. Now, it has 25.
The business had to be moved into new buildings to handle the growth. Its last facility was 3,000 square feet. Now, the walk-in freezer alone is 2,000 square feet.
While Georges was reluctant to reveal financial information, she did say the bakery’s production exploded in 2019 and 2020, when the pandemic began. In 2019, the bakery filled 170,000 bottles of hot sauce, Georges wrote in an email. In 2020, the bakery more than doubled its output to about 350,000 bottles, half of which were bottled in the fourth quarter alone, she wrote.
“We bottled about the same amount of sauce in the 4th quarter of 2020 as we did in all of 2019,” Georges wrote.
While hot sauce is trending now, Georges said this boom seems different from when she observed the hot sauce trend in the 1990s. She thinks now there is more of an emphasis on taste, and less on heat.
“I feel like the ’90s wave of hot sauce was more about the burn, the machismo, the like ‘how hot can I go,’ ‘Dave’s insanity sauce,’ that sort of thing,” she said. “Whereas I feel like the modern wave of hot sauce popularity is more about the craft of it, the specialty food of it, the higher-quality interest in the ingredients and where they come from.”
While Georges understands the hot sauce wave may crash, she expressed optimism about the way it’s growing, especially in Vermont.
“Back in the ’90s, hot sauce kind of had a moment too, and I think that this seems to have a lot more sticking power and I certainly hope it does,” Georges said.
Kravitz, in the end of his YouTube interview, echoed a similar sentiment within his own profession.
“To close things off,” Evans says at the end of his “Hot Ones” episode with Kravitz. “I’m curious, are you more optimistic or less optimistic about the next great rock renaissance?”
“More optimistic,” Kravitz said. “I think, in the years to come, it will explode again.”
