Meet Your Saucemaker: Scott Zalkind of Lucky Dog

How did you get into making hot sauce? Was there a moment where it went from hobby to "I'm doing this"?

I was a hobby sauce-maker for around 7-8 years. I love hot sauce, but back in 2003-2004 there seemed to only be mild flavorful sauces, or extreme novelty sauces made with extract, but nothing in between.

After about 6 years, people started to say, “hey, you should sell this s**t!”. Then friends of friends started saying “you should sell this s**t!” After a while, I started to consider it. Now, 14 years later, I’m still selling this s**t.

Where does the name of your company come from?

When I was getting ready to launch, I needed a name. There are 50,000 hot sauce companies out there, all the good names were taken. I was on my porch, and called my dog in, yelling, “Hey Lucky dog!” and I thought, “oh, that’s catchy!”

What did you do before this?

I worked in horticulture, then IT, then project management in healthcare.

What is a piece of advice you’d give an aspiring saucemaker?

Take risks, be different. Fail up. Treat your recipes as both an art and a science. Taste for success, work to eliminate the flavors that don’t work. A “bad sauce” is just a good sauce waiting to be developed. No one hits a home run on their 1st recipe. Measure every ingredient with a good scale, so your recipes can be fine tuned. Finally, “good” is never good enough. Keep working a recipe until it’s great. Be stubborn. Don’t let a recipe win. If it isn’t special, keep working at it until it is. Mediocrity is easy. Once you get past the science, sauce-making is an art. Be an artist.

What is the hardest sauce you have ever tried to get right, and how many batches did it take?

Deluxe. I loved the black garlic, but started with the idea of green Thai chile, with banana and papaya. I struggled with it for weeks. After about 20 recipes, I finally had one I thought was solid. Went through the test-batch process, and after 2 test batches at the co-packer thought I’d nailed it. Then I tried it on various foods, and the sauce just… disappeared. It wasn’t bold enough to hold up against bold foods, nor did it really add anything to bland foods. It was just sort of… there.

So for the 1st time ever, I scrapped the recipe, and went back to zero, completely reinventing the sauce. I simplified the initial batches to dial in what would work to complement the black garlic. After a few attempts I landed on blackberry. It lent a nice acid, while complementing the black garlic’s umami goodness, but it was too blackberry forward. I added dragon fruit with the idea that the bland/sweet profile would temper the blackberry, and it worked better than expected. The black garlic popped even more. Long story slightly longer, Deluxe was somewhere between 35-40 prototype and test batches.

What is your favorite pairing for one of your sauces, something you would actually make at home this week?

This week I am actually going to rotisserie a couple of pork loins on my Weber. I’ll do a white wine/ACV brine for 24 hours, pat it dry, then dust it with a little salt, garlic powder & black pepper. For the baste I’ll use Brown Label (Ridiculously Tasty Mustard Chipotle) mixed with brown sugar, and a Tbsp of bourbon. I’ll baste it every 15-20 mins until it’s done. The bourbon gives it a subtle oaky flavor, while the brown sugar will help it glaze up, as there’s no sugar added in any of my hot sauces. Brown Label does the heavy lifting, with twice-smoked chipotles, mustard, cumin, coriander, and lime. The scotch bonnets will lend a subtle heat to the bark.

Give us one unexpected use for your sauce, the one that makes people raise an eyebrow until they try it.

Years ago, a farmers market customer came by my booth super excited, saying “you have to try this!” They pulled out a basket of strawberries, and said I needed to bite the top off, and pour in a little Year of the Dog, my Thai Chile Pineapple sauce. Simple, delicious. Sweet/spicy/savory. I probably shouldn’t have been skeptical. Also a pineapple margarita with Year of the Dog with a tajin rim is delicious & refreshing.

What do you get up to when you are not making sauce?

This is my full-time job, so I am mostly working, but I am a football junky, and have played in numerous FF leagues over the years. I also enjoy grilling with friends, or spending time with my dogs.

Desert island sauce, and it cannot be one of yours.

I always hate this question, because there are so many brilliant sauce-makers out there, and any time I name one I feel bad for leaving others out. Also my tastes change with my mood, and with different food pairings. So with that disclaimer, I’m going to say Marie Sharp’s Grapefruit Habanero.

Is there a food you refuse to put hot sauce on?

I know they are very popular, but I am not much for dessert sauces. Ice cream is sacred. Pie shall not be besmirched with hot sauce.

What music is playing in the kitchen while you cook?

Usually metal, but “shuffle” gives me an eclectic mix.

Favorite pepper?

Probably the T. Scorpion “Maruga” red.

Is there anything you want people to know that we didn’t ask about?

Hot Sauce labels are the face of your brand. They are the 1st impression anyone gets of a company. Support real art by hiring real artists for labelling. AI labels look cheap & terrible, which leads me to assume the sauce inside the bottle will be cheap and terrible. I’m not an artist but I have good ideas. Good ideas with bad execution will never look as good as if an actual human artist creates the label. My Dia del Perro label was a painting created by my dear friend Robin Case. It was not inexpensive. I paid for the label, and I paid the artist for the copyright so I had 100% control to use it commercially. I had to bring the painting to a fine arts photographer, and then have my long-time graphic artist Kara Thauer do the color correction and add branding. It was expensive, and a monumental pain in the butt to do. Fast forward a couple of years, and that label won 1st place for Label Art & Grand Prize for the Marketing Division at the National Fiery Food & BBQ Show. The prize was a custom ~$800 Disc-It BBQ. The label ended up paying for itself. I have t-shirts with screen prints of that label & they sell very well. The moral of the story is that it is worth it to hire talented artists to create beautiful labels to represent your brand. You only get 1 chance at a first impression, as my mother always said.