Taste: The 4th Sense
375 Danforth Avenue
416-649-0024

The first time I went to talk to Gerry, he was too popular for me. Maybe it was my mistake for stopping in on a sunny Saturday; I should have known better. Even so, despite watching and waiting for an hour, he barely had a minute to spare. It’s apparent I am hardly the only one who get serious cravings for hot sauce. The place was positively teeming with people eager to scald their tastebuds. I had to come back on a cooler Sunday, and even then, customers wandered in and out. Some zeroed in on a bottle and made a beeline for the counter, clearly knowing precisely their poison. Others, perhaps newcomers, sampled a range of sauces and oils until they settled on two, oh and could they have just this one as well, and maybe one of those vinaigrettes, please.

Gerry, the owner of Taste: the 4th Sense, as well as several other hot sauce outlets in places like Orangeville and St. Jacob’s, knows exactly the impression I was getting from his customers. “Hot sauce is the heroin of the food industry,” he quips “and I am the only dealer in town.”

And what a generous provider-slash-enabler he is! His store offers the biggest variety of hot sauces in Toronto, and includes exotic items such as crab-meat salsa, Cheesecake in a jar, (“The most decadent food item available,” is Gerry’s summation.) and, of course, the flavoured oils.

The oils are really the starting point of the entire enterprise. Once confined to producing the oils for other vendors, Gerry and his wife found that the “bottom line” meant penny-pinching on things like fresh ingredients. Soon Gerry felt so pinched that he was no longer proud of what he was producing. He made the (retrospectively wise) choice to sell his oils straight to the consumer, so that he could always be sure of the quality. However, high-end oils don’t necessarily sell themselves. As good as they are (and I assure you, they are good) Gerry needed a hook, something to reel in masochistic foodies such as myself.

That is precisely where products like “After Death Sauce” and “Mark’s Canadian Psycho Sauce” come in. For readers like me, insulated in our middle-class Western lives of comfort and living past 60, sometimes it is invigorating to have your food try to physically assault you. Enjoy life more by endangering your health!

That last line is not entirely in jest, either. There is a collection of sauces over toward the “crazy” end of the store that bear the label “Liability Waiver Signing Sauces.” Gerry told me about how capsaicin, the chemical our brains register as “hot,” raises the blood pressure, increases the heart rate, and can be potentially life-threatening for asthmatics. You don’t mess around with this stuff. Gerry himself is a lightweight, sticking usually to the milder or medium sauces. It turns out those of us who prefer hotter sauces actually have less sensitivity to capsaicin, which is why we can stand the heat. I am sorry to say, my habanero tolerance means my palate is LESS refined, not moreso.

Even my burnt tastebuds have their limit, however. A customer came in and asked for a sample of a sauce simply called “10,” and since literally everything in the store is free to sample, I joined in. These samples come in tiny paper cups with miniature spoons, for careful, slow tasting.

It was a literal assault to my senses. I became dizzy and the room spun; I reeled. After a minute, I had to sit down with my mouth open and just let my eyes water for a while. While Gerry may not be able to understand why people like me find addictive pleasure in sensorial pain, I can offer at least partial insight. To be honest, there is not much like it in the world, and most similar things cost a lot more than 20 dollars a bottle. For something so small to have such a powerful, undeniable effect on the body is an invigorating experience. Most mood-altering substances have laws or morals constraining their usage; not so with hot sauce.

For fellow thrillseekers who are looking for a passionate, knowledgeable, and friendly independent entrepreneur to sell them some stuff that will really f#$% them up (in a good way), or folks who just want some tasty, homemade, and healthy oils and vinaigrettes, then Taste should definitely be their first legal stop.