By Lorrie Baumann

Before COVID-19 and social distancing called a hiatus on casual congregations for sports activities, the U.S. Congress played an annual baseball game for charity since 1909 and Barack Obama, the former U.S. president, got together with friends on the basketball court. Chef Brandon Clark got together with his friends in Richmond, Virginia, to play tennis. “We used to play at night. We’d play three out of five sets, which takes about three hours,” he said. “It was kind of like a club.”

After their games, Clark and his friends would relax with a few beers, and there might be snacks. Sometimes they’d talk about the food that Clark was cooking; sometimes they’d talk about the food that someone had eaten recently at a local restaurant. “All we do is think about food,” Clark said. “It was kind of like a men’s night. It wasn’t just about tennis.”

One night, one of the men dug a bottle of hot sauce he’d just made out of his tennis bag and passed around samples. “One of the other guys bought a barbecue sauce out to the court,” Clark said. “That’s how it started.”

Encouraged by his friends, Clark decided to try his own hand at a hot sauce inspired by the flavors of Kerala, the Indian state on the Malabar Coast that had been the home of his best friend. “I went home, studied that cuisine and put those ingredients in a bottle,” Clark said. Pepper is a major agricultural product of Kerala, as are other spices as well as tea, coffee and cashews. When he brought the hot sauce at one of those evening tennis matches, his friend told him that the sauce tasted like home.
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Don Hopkins, the vice president of sales for a Canadian manufacturer, heard him say that, and the comment started the business wheels in his mind spinning. “Don was like, ‘Let’s look at this and see if we can start a company around it,’ and that’s how it happened,” Clark said. “He’s the business end of the thing. The business plan was super-involved, and that’s just not my forte.”
That was three years ago, and since Clark and Hopkins went into business with a company they called Clark + Hopkins, they’ve turned that hot sauce into a range of eight culinary sauces that bottle the flavors of several cultures from around the world and a pair of Bloody Mary Mixes, and Clark has abandoned the foodservice industry to devote all of his working hours to creating and cooking up sauces. Clark + Hopkins won a sofi Award for the best new product in the hot sauces category in 2019 for its Assam Pepper Sauce, a Scovie Award in 2019 for Chesapeake Bloody Mary and another sofi Award this year, this time a gold award in the hot sauces and barbecue sauces category, for Laos, a hot sauce based on Laotian flavors that includes bird’s eye peppers and habaneros, together with ginger and lemongrass to add brightness and dried shrimp to add a deep note of seafood umami.

The hot sauces are intended to do more than just add a note of heat to a taco or a dish of scrambled eggs – they’re intended to used as cooking sauces that add balanced flavor notes to a variety of dishes. Clark has created a repertoire of recipes for some of those that are posted on the company’s website for home cooks who’d like a little hand-holding as they experiment with the spicy sauces. “They’re all super-duper turn-key. It takes two or three ingredients out of the pantry to create a dish in just a few minutes,” Clark said. “Good or bad – with COVID, people are cooking at home. A lot of folks can’t afford to order take-out every day. They want something interesting to cook. These recipes take no talent.”

“Our chefs in the industry are some of our biggest fans,” he added. “We can cater to the real foodies out there and those who just want to try something different.”

The eight sauces in the Clark + Hopkins product range include Virginia, a sauce inspired by traditional Virginia barbecue, with flavors of peaches, peanuts and rye whiskey along with jalapenos and habaneros; Chesapeake, a pepper sauce that combines apple cider vinegar, mustard, bay leaves, ginger and other spices along with jalapenos; and Quintana Roo, a citrusy pepper sauce inspired by Clark’s travels to the Yucatan Peninsula; as well as the original Kerala sauce. Hopkins’ personal favorite among the sauces and Bloody Mary mixes that he’s created is Laos, the sauce that won the gold sofi Award. “It might be the only hot sauce that I know of that’s got dried shrimp in it,” he said. “We are more about flavor than super-duper heat. The Chesapeake is very mild, with jalapenos, and kids can eat that. It’s also a super-versatile sauce – a squeeze of lemon, a little water, the Chesapeake and some oil. It’s a hell of a vinaigrette with just a hint of spice, a little kick. It takes a minute or less, and it goes on a salad.”