Herndon couple bottles spicy, globe-trotting memories.
By Jennie Tai
“When Apinya and I started dating, we’d cook for each other,” Adam Ross remembers. “She cooked Thai dishes from her childhood, while I cooked dishes I had while traveling to Peru, India and Greece.”
Inspired from his now-wife’s interpretation of hot sauce, Ross bottles an achingly fiery blend.
The graphic designer-turned chili-experimenter named the company after his wife. The sauce’s bold flavors can be traced back to a rural town five hours from Bangkok, where Apinya “grew up harvesting and prepping fresh ingredients for her mother’s restaurant in Khon Kaen,” says Ross.
“We want to create unique flavors,” Ross says, “like a Thai-Peruvian combo, or blend of African spices.”
The inaugural sauce’s texture of minced ginger and garlic amidst specks of cilantro and basil will make this a standout compared to the boringly smooth commercial options. It’s an all-natural answer to sour, vinegar-based hot sauces and scores a 75,000 on the Scoville chart, about five times hotter than jalapeños.
Though the first few batches were made from imported vegetables, Ross strives to “source every ingredient as locally as possible for the next batch.” / Apinya Thai Food Co.; apinya.co
(March 2013)
