A combination of great music and Scotch bonnet peppers is serving up a food sensation around Croydon this summer, as GIANELLA A BASILE discovered
Rum do: DJ mates Jimmy Plates (left) and Ian ‘Chippie’ Anan are getting a buzz from their sauce start-up
Friends Ian Anan and Jimmy Plates were making the long journey home to Croydon during a rail strike three years ago when they had the idea to make a hot sauce.
They wanted to make something that “you can throw on anything and make it taste good”.
Anan, known to his friends as Chippie, is a big fan of Scotch bonnet peppers, and one night after he had taken home a hip flask of rum they hadn’t finished, he tried it with some hot peppers he had in the fridge.
They sold out all their stock within an hour at their first food festival, and Captain Chippie’s hot sauces haven’t looked back since.
Anan and Plates met in Croydon 20 years ago. Chippie used to buy records at Beanos, the famous Croydon second-hand record shop off Surrey Street, where Plates ran the shop. It also happened to be where all the area’s DJs would go, a musical hub where anyone who was trying to break into the music scene would go.
Every night that they were DJing together, Anan and Plates would get a bottle of spiced rum from the management. It became their routine. One night after a gig, it was gone 4am and they were trying to find somewhere to get food. “I think I’m going to make some chilli sauce,” Chippie said that fateful night.
“I think it was within hours, but it was probably over a couple of days, backwards and forwards on WhatsApp, just doing some sketches and sending pictures back,” Plates remembers of the early thoughts on the design for the brand.
Distinctive branding: the pirate logo stands out
“I think we should have a chilli, maybe he’ll look like this… oh, he needs a hat…”
The Croydon Food Festival was to be their “product launch”.
“Well, I wanted to sell the hot sauce,” Anan says, “mainly because my mum said I couldn’t.”
A couple days before the festival, Anan messaged Plates with a picture of the logo. Plates sorted out a label with ingredients. Suddenly there were T-shirts, labels printed, a stall booked and about a hundred of their hot sauce bottles ready.
All sold out within an hour.
“I think from the music and club promotions side of things, we kind of know how to do stuff. We figured out how to do things quickly,” Anan said.
“Just having people that liked it was a big deal… The best way for us to get direct feedback and product testing was to do more batches and take it to the markets.”
They’d hit up food markets and stalls, and offer to DJ for free. Often, this led to them going and working with the music, then they’d pull out a large suitcase filled with the hot sauce. The banner would come out with their trademark cartoon pirate and they’d start offering tasters and selling the sauce.
“It was kind of in the spirit of the south London hustle,” Plates says. “We’re doing a lot of stuff with the markets and you get to meet a lot of the real people there.”
The focus on feedback was because they knew they’d get the most honest reactions from the public. It was important that they were part of the community, sourcing all their ingredients from local market, particularly Surrey Street.
“We’re enjoying being part of the process and everything we do with the DIY ethic. We get direct feedback which is similar to when you’re a DJ, people come and ask for songs or they leave the dance floor.”
Alcohol enhances the flavour of tomatoes and chillies, so they use rum to make the peppers taste fruitier and give the tomatoes a sweeter flavour.
The original flavour, Plates’ favourite, has a nod to his Italian heritage with the use of tomatoes and herbs, which give it an earthy flavour. Plates recommends using it for cooking, particularly with passata – tomato purée. He calls it a “cheat code” to enhance a lot of tomato-based dishes.
The extra hot sauce, Chippie’s favourite, has twice as many Scotch bonnets and twice as much rum as the original. It doesn’t contain any tomato, but the pair say that it can have a bit of a sweeter taste that offsets the heat. The extra Scotch bonnet, instead of making the heat unbearable, gives it more of a prolonged heat. This one is recommended for dipping.
Packing a punch: the mini sauce bottles will be available at food festivals and ‘challenges’ this summer
The last sauce available is in collaboration with an artisan rum brand called Dr Funks. Instead of spiced rum, it uses a tiki rum which contains pineapple and pimento. They say that it gives it a sweeter, more summery flavour, which sits somewhere in between the original and the extra hot. They say this is best with barbecue meats, salads, gammon – anything you can put pineapple in.
Captain Chippies’ sauces are resolutely homemade.
“Everyone else has their recipe and gets it manufactured and bottled in factories,” Plates says of their homemade sauces.
“We want to do it ourselves because we’re those sorts of people. Sticking all the labels on and doing all this is part of the approach, something we want to do ourselves.”
Last year they brought on another member to the team, Steve Beharie, Chippie’s lifelong friend and chief salesman.
You might be able to catch him on August 31, when Chippie and Plates will be hosting their Wing Challenge at The Oval Tavern in Addiscombe. The pair pull out a special sauce for these challengers, Naga Ghost. They say it can be between six and 10 times hotter than the extra hot.
You can find their sauces stocked in the biggest chilli sauce shop in the country, The Chilli-Shop in Leeds. They also have gift sets in Timebomb and you can sample some of the sauce alongside breakfast in Terry’s Café, near London Bridge.
Now, they are talking about exports to Europe, and they are looking at setting up a fair trade chilli farm in Sri Lanka.
With food fairs and DJing, they have a busy summer ahead, as they keep growing Captain Chippies. As for myself, I happen to have the spice tolerance of a newborn, but from the tiniest dab I had on a chip, I can verify it’s really good.
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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