REDD SKULL Hotsauce: a culinary connection between Orangeville and Helsinki

ORANGEVILLE, Ont. — A plan to open a chicken wing restaurant in Helsinki, Finland has created a hot sauce company producing small batches in Europe and Canada.

Dylan Broda, a Canadian expat living in the Finnish capital, began testing hot sauce recipes in anticipation of opening the wing joint. To assist with recipe development, Broda partnered with chef Adam Ryan, who is based in Orangeville, Ont.

“Before he makes the leap to owning a restaurant, he started making hot sauce to test the market,” Ryan said. 

Broda began selling a REDD SKULL Hotsauce at farmers’ markets in Finland. Earlier this year, he returned to Canada and they began recipe development out of Ryan’s commercial kitchen. The sauce officially launched in March in Orangeville.

“We’re going to share resources and recipes. The reality is the peppers he gets aren’t going to taste the same as the peppers I get,” Ryan said. “The recipes may be the same, but the finished product we sell in Ontario isn’t the same as the Finnish product he sells in Scandinavia.”

The concept of the sauce, sold in skull-shaped bottles, is to focus on flavour as opposed to only heat levels.

“The idea is to have a nice heat level as well as flavour from the secondary ingredients,” Ryan said. “It’s not like mild, medium and hot. It’s mild with a sweetness, or hot with a smokiness.”

The sauce is currently available in five flavours, combining hot peppers with rhubarb and cranberry, maple syrup and apple, pineapple and thyme, mango and thyme, and the traditional vinegar and sugar.

For both versions of the sauce, Ryan and Broda are sourcing local produce when possible, highlighting flavour profiles based on the ingredients’ origin.

“The idea behind it is to take Ontario produce, specifically peppers, and pair it with different Ontario ingredients,” Ryan said. “I want to make it a regional product.”

Before its launch, REDD SKULL was distributed throughout North America, thanks to a partnership with Lordi, a Scandinavian heavy metal band. For the band’s North American tour, REDD SKULL created a Lordi branded box set, with two custom sauce flavours, Jack the Reaper and Cranscary Vodka Vodkatomic Bomb.

“We sold out. It went over really well,” Ryan said.