take me to church's
Famous San Antonio-born chicken chain leads search for superhot sauce in docuseries
Church's Texas Chicken looks unassuming, but the upcoming dipping sauce may change that.
The warmth San Antonians feel for Church's Texas Chicken, the locally born chain that now roosts in 24 countries, far exceeds the heat of its existing dipping sauces. But that may change when the eatery releases its latest creation, which was documented on the 10-part Hulu series Superhot: The Spicy World of Pepper People.
The unstoppable trend of watching food we can't taste continues, but the humanizing within this title hints at an approach that goes beyond the Scoville scale. As promised, the series focuses on the folks who put themselves through hot pepper-induced pain for glory, or at least just to feel...something.
Episodes eight and nine will be of particular import to San Antonians, as they feature a contest to develop a super-hot sauce for the Texas chain. They feature two chefs from Church's culinary team: Chefs Kevin Houston and Eric Stein.
“The growing popularity of bold and daring flavors in recent years has added to the rising phenomenon of all things spicy – which has been Church’s signature for more than 70 years,” said Houston in a press release. “We were thrilled to lend our chops to Superhot and be part of an exciting journey that shows off the lives of these truly one-of-a-kind people and, ultimately tap their fiery ambitions to help create a new signature hot sauce for our restaurants nationwide.”
Charismatic professional "chile head" Johnny Scoville serves as a central host for the series, and appears in "The Business of Heat" (the series' eighth episode) to set up a premise about corporate America's interest in raising the standards of spice. The two-episode arc becomes a sort of case study focused on the search by Church's.
CEO Joseph Guith's son, according to Scoville, is a burgeoning heat-seeker himself, and inspired the chain to ramp things up to the tune of "an R&D summit" for the perfect hot dipping sauce.
The eighth episode details some of the elements that flavor unique pepper development, like pepper storage, marketing, and safeguarding the intellectual property that a proprietary pepper can hold. Of course, there are also the obligatory shots of unsuspecting tasters choking on spicy samples.
The two oversee a hot sauce cooking competition to put the peppers they found to the test. By the end of the episode, Church's has found its next sauce. Watching the events unfold is fun, but the real payoff will come when folks can try it. That'll happen nationwide on April 15, 2024, according to the release.
“As we were filming, we learned that Church’s Texas Chicken began the hunt for their next signature spicy sauce, and immediately, we knew we needed to film it all,” said Brian Skope, Superhot's executive producer and director. “Chef Kevin and the rest of the Church’s team were invaluable in helping showcase a special group of chili heads with the same intensity for bringing the heat!"
Superhot: The Spicy World of Pepper People is out now on Hulu.
