BRINGING THE FIRE

PHOTOS BY CAROLINA KORMAN

Hot sauce and pottery might not seem like two things that naturally pair together, but for Joanne Horton and Rich Mudge it’s as perfect a fit as peanut butter and jelly, bread and butter or chips and dip.

The COVID pandemic-forced lockdowns afforded the married couple the opportunity to bring their two creative passions together as they combined their love of ceramics with a passion for gardening—especially peppers.

“This all started when we expanded our own peppers that we grow in our garden,” says Horton. “During the pandemic, we were experimenting with hot sauces.” She explains that their business, Creative Fire Studios, which is a full ceramics studio based in Granada Hills that specializes in after-school enrichment classes, was mostly on hiatus as COVID threw everything into turmoil.

“One thing led to another,” Mudge says. “We’ve been jarring foods for years. Right around this time we were making quarts and quarts of chili pepper sauces and processing all the things we grew. These are things we consume and we share. When we went on lockdown, we expanded all the raised beds in our yard. I started buying a bunch of pepper plants, like Black Cobra, Scotch Bonnet and Trinidad Scorpion pepper—which was red. I figured, ‘I’m a redhead and Scorpio.’ So it was a natural.”

As the couple hunkered down, they made a deep dive into the world of fermentation and canning. The first fermented hot sauces were Red Thai, Serrano and Habanero mixtures, which Mudge mixed with agave vinegar. “I started playing around with different things. I had no idea how this would turn out,” he says.

Eventually Mudge, who is also a ceramics teacher at Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica, had to take his weekly PCR antigen test. As was his custom, he gifted the school nurses with bottles of homemade chili and hot sauce.

“I had just printed up labels and bought some bottles from a local bottle supplier. Two weeks later, the school nurses emailed me and requested more. But they insisted on paying for it. They insisted. They made me sign up to Venmo,” Mudge says. Mudge took some photos of the bottles he had just sold to the nurses and posted it online. Within 24 hours the remainder of the 24 bottles he had on hand were sold.

The idea of ceramics married with hot sauces was born. “We have this ceramics studio and we’re sitting on a lot of inventory,” Mudge says. “At the end of May, we started selling those ceramic items alongside the hot sauces at farmers markets.”

The couple set about developing a unique line of ceramics to complement their food items. “We make mortars and pestles and herb strippers. Things we like to use in our cooking.” Horton says. The ceramic food items also include butter crocks, mise en place (small prep) dishes, fermentation crocks, chili bowls, trivets, little salsa bowls and more.

Before they started producing the sauces commercially, Mudge says, he enrolled in classes so he could be certified by the FDA in food safety. Those were a real eye-opener.

“We felt we dodged a bullet producing hot sauces in our kitchen based on our long experience of home jarring food via hot water bath and pressure canning. I learned jarring and canning foods from my mother,” says Mudge, who found the information about the toxicity of botulism chilling. “Wow, we got really lucky we already did it the right way. You see a lot of amateurs blending things and putting them in bottles.

These people have no idea. There are people who think [that bypassing safety certifications] is a protest against regulations. But those regulations are in place to keep us safe.”

Currently Mudge and Horton sell their ceramics and sauces from 5 to 9pm on Wednesdays at the Northridge Farmers’ Market and Family Festival and from 9am to 1pm on Sundays at the Westchester farmers’ market in Los Angeles.

The Creative Fire Kiln and Kitchen products are set to be featured in the upcoming Season 2 of “At Home with Jonathan Scinto,” a food show to be distributed by Discovered TV 7 available to stream on Roku, Samsung and Android services, reaching over 200 million worldwide.

• For information about Creative Fire Kiln and Kitchen, visit CreativeFireKilnAndKitchen.com.