Jim McWilliam’s life changed when he caught malaria while working in Nigeria.
Confined to bed for days, the aircraft engineer was handed a mystery powder by a friend who promised it would make him feel better.
The powder was called pepe, another name for the Nigerian cooking spice called suya.
And it worked a treat.
“It’s a sublime mix of dried ginger, garlic and cayenne pepper,” says Jim, who after three days of no food felt immediately better when he used the spice on a Nigerian kebab.
“And that was it. I was just in love with suya from that point.”
That love – as well as his obsession with fiery chillies from all over the globe – led Jim 12 months ago to launch a range of hot sauces under the name Jimbo’s Sauce.
Handmade from Jim’s croft outside of Tarves, Jimbo’s Sauce includes sweat-inducing bottles such as No Quarter, Ginger Apace and Plutonium.
Jim’s hope is his customers feel the same chilli-based endorphin rush he gets from a lifetime of sampling some of the world’s hottest peppers.
“I have to wear a mask when making some of these sauces,” the 54-year-old says. “The intensity of the capsicum that comes off it make your eyes stream.”
The Tarves croft that doubles as a hot sauce lab
Jim’s chilli lab where he pickles and concocts all of his sauces is in the croft he is building with his wife on the site of a ruined cottage.
This is where he devises the devilishly hot sauces that end up on the Jimbo’s Sauce website.
However, he is smart enough to sell milder sauces, too, to hook in new customers.
“An initial buyer will probably, if they’re feeling particularly pepped up, go for the crazy hot stuff, but you’ll find that most people won’t come back again,” Jim says with a laugh.
Some sauces also makes use of Aberdeenshire’s whisky-making heritage. Jim uses whisky-barrel staves to hot or cold smoke the peppers and impart a distinctive smoky taste.
“I’ve seen it elsewhere, but it is not all that normal,” Jim says of the process. “I’ve just brought the two things together – the smoking and the chillies – with some quite unique results.”
North-east of Scotland ‘not a great environment for chilli growing’
Jim latest mission is to make a black sauce that he hopes will tingle the taste buds of his customers, if not blow them clean off.
So far, the Tarves weather has not been helping
“I’ve had mixed results because unfortunately the north-east of Scotland is not a great environment for chilli growing,” he says.
Last year, Jim doubled his sales and halved his losses, and is looking forward to more progress this year.
But unfortunately for local malaria sufferers, none of the hot sauces on sale at Jimbo’s will contain Jim’s much-loved suya spice.
It turns out that getting the ingredients carries too much risk, as Jim found out when trying to bring a large cannister of the spice blend back through Aberdeen airport.
“I got stopped and asked all sorts of questions,” says Jim, who was returning home after a stint working in the Niger Delta.
“I’d been travelling for about 36 hours by this point, so didn’t look too great.”
