Introducing the New Fire Dawgs

Well some of you might remember the Fire Dawgs from a few years ago, but most of you might not. The Fire Dawgs were a creation by Darrell & Candy Fitch of Big Dawg Salsa. They wanted to create a style of review just for small salsa companies looking to get their name out there. It was the Big Dawg way of giving back from the success and help they received on the way up. The Fire Dawgs were 3 firemen who got a jar of salsa each and they simply told you their unbiased opinion. Simple, but effective.

Darrell is a fireman, so hence the idea, and to his credit it was a very good one. Unfortunately, the Big Dawg empire grew and with that came more responsibility and less time for other things. So their new salsa blog idea collected dust and soon became blog-fodder to the world wide web. Fast forward a few years, and I decide to reach out to the Fitch’s to see if they would be interested in bringing back these reviews, but in a video format on ILIS. They loved the idea, and gave me the green light to proceed. They are modest people and told me to make it my own and I didn’t have to include them in the mention of the review passed the first one. I decided to put up their banner, as you will notice on the left sidebar. As long as we do these reviews, they will get their proper spotlight here.

For those of you that have never had Big Dawg products, you are missing out, but not just their salsa is good. They have two of my favorite hot sauces- jalapeno and fatalli. The jalapeno hot sauce is blended with a fair amount of cilantro which I adore, and the fatalli is a great mix of pepper flavors plus beer. While I prefer salsa with more chunks than Big Dawg makes, their flavors are among the best I have ever had for a smooth, restaurant-style salsa. Their dry mixes are quite good too, and they also carry some other award winning products. With great products comes great success. They have now opened their own store now called Big Dawg Salsa Shack, and they have recently appeared on Food Crafters airing on the Cooking Channel. So you can understand why they could not keep up a salsa blog.

This is where we take over. For the past few months I tried to find 3 local Firemen to take on these salsa reviews. I struggled to connect to my town of Leesburg after the initial okay back in October. I kept leaving messages, business cards, my cell number, but I never got anything back. I hurt my leg in November and I was hobbled for the longest time, then stuff with the family took over, and these reviews were put on hold. Finally, after a few tries, I got my former work town of Ashburn, VA to allow me to get the wheels in motion. I got 3 Volunteer Firemen from Ashburn Fire & Rescue, who all love it spicy, to do the reviews for me. The only thing we needed was the thumbs up from the local bureaucracy. Now that we have that, I am very happy to finally introduce you to our new Fire Dawgs- Hector, Miguel, and Danny. A big thank you goes out to the Ashburn Fire Department for letting us film these reviews in their fire house.

So without further adieu, please welcome these brave men to the ILIS team.