The Rural We: Laura Webster

With over 2,000 entries each year, competition is fierce for a Good Food Award, sponsored by the Good Food Foundation. Needless to say, Laura Webster and Jared Schwartz, owners of the Poor Devil Pepper Company, were thrilled when one of their products, Gold Tooth Honey Mustard Hot Sauce, won a Good Food Award in the Pantry category. The Hudson company stands out among hot sauce makers because it uses a fermentation process, which means they're made with no additives or vinegar. Webster is the marketing guru behind the exuberant, design-heavy product and branding, while Schwartz is the head of fermentation.

Jared and I moved to Hudson in 2013 from Massachusetts. His background is in photo and design, and I have a background in journalism and hospitality. But both of us have worked in the food industry. The community feeling is what attracted us to Hudson in the first place. We had friends who were farmers, and we wanted to be part of that and the creative community here.

There are many other great fermented foods out there that focus on sauerkraut and kimchi and maybe hot sauce, but just a handful doing a fermented hot sauce. We chose to put a spin on foods that haven’t been represented that well. Ours are made without vinegar, using probiotics to give a depth of flavor. We think it tastes better and is a fun new way to eat hot sauce. We’re trying to raise awareness about it and encouraging people to find it in the refrigerated section at markets.

We have a range of heat in our sauces, from mid to medium to hot. Our hottest is a jalapeno-based sauce, which is special because green sauces are thought of as mild. But through fermentation it become really hot. We’re finetuning a special batch called Creeping Death that includes a variety of peppers: ghost pepper, Carolina reaper, pepper x and Szechuan peppercorns.

We source our peppers from New York growers, particularly Hepworth Farms, and other New York organic growers. We do all our production at one time of the year, from mid-summer to early fall. The fermentation process takes at least eight weeks, so there’s a fine balance of knowing how much to make and what our sales projections are.

We were so excited that our Gold Tooth was a Good Food Award winner. We love that organization and are always following along with the awards. We submitted a few different sauces in bottles without labels, because they do a blind tasting. Gold Tooth had been a limited variety, but now it will be available year round.

Usually the Good Food Awards has a celebration in San Francisco. But they made the virtual celebration really fun. They sent out goody bags and a cookbook to everyone, and had an online awards ceremony, with congratulations from people like Alice Waters and Dan Barber.

We’re trying to find other ways to expand the company and ways to use all the ingredients that go into — and come out of — our products. Through the process of making hot sauce we’re left with a pulp, which we’ve hydrated to become chili power and flakes we call our Zero Waste line. We continue to come up with new merchandise, too.

Poor Devil has developed into a community where we work with friends, artists and other foodmakers. It’s become so much more than hot sauce.