Bonnie: Last summer, in the midst of a July heat wave at an event where the air conditioning didn’t work, I was approached by Tom Pfleider, president and CEO of Pfleider Pfoods, the company that makes The Art of Chipotle products. He tried to tell me about his food products, but I was way too overheated to listen. I just wanted out of the muggy, over-packed room.

But, impressed by his passion for his family business, I gave him my card, requesting that he send samples. Then quickly — very quickly — I exited that steamy room.

I hoped his tenacity matched his eagerness. It did, as his samples arrived soon after. Score one point for Tom.

Once I tried his Sweet Heat Addiction, I had to learn the story behind it, as I thought I recalled him telling me he was a manufacturers’ rep to neurosurgeons. Or could that conversation have been just a heat-derived hallucination?

Tom does work with physicians, providing computerized image-guided neurosurgery capabilities to medical facilities. But in 1999, at a BBQ thrown by one of the brain surgeons he worked with, Tom sampled an interesting sauce that his host served with grilled chicken and beef fajitas. It was a sweet sauce with a subtle heat kick.

For Tom, it was love at first bite. It took about five years, but Tom turned that family recipe into his bottled sauce — Sweet Heat Addiction — one that has won the Pfleider family not only accolades, but awards as well.

As a chipotle lover, I looked forward to testing the sauce. By the way, chipotle is just a smoked jalapeño pepper. I wasn’t disappointed, although, I generally do like sauces with more of a take-your-breath-away punch. In this sweet-heat sauce, the brown sugar’s sweetness softens the smoky jalapeño’s heat, making this a sauce for all.

Suggested uses. Use as a dip for shrimp, as a finishing sauce for grilled ribs, pork tenderloin, chicken or fish, or as a spread for pizza dough before topping it with goat cheese, fresh herbs and roasted veggies.

Pfleider’s next stop? Food service. So don’t be surprised if you find an Art of Chipotle product served with your food at your next restaurant stop. In the meantime, you can still buy it online or in gourmet stores.

Bryan: In a sweet move this past Valentine’s Day, my girlfriend got me a small pizza oven. After complaining about the pizza in Atlanta for over a year, she was basically telling me to put up or shut up. Well put up I did. We started with the basics: cheese pizzas, pepperoni, white pies with garlic. When you have your own pizza oven, though, experimenting is a natural foodie extension. While we are still toying with a savory pie of fontina, grilled chicken, apple and sweet potato, we have finally perfected our Mexican pizza, one of our favorite meals and my girlfriend’s recipe.

A blended mixture of refried beans and salsa acts as our sauce, with layers of cheese, chopped tomatoes, scallions and sour cream forming a bedding to a beautifully seasoned chopped or pulled chicken breast. The focus of the dish truly becomes the chicken, marinated in Sweet Heat Addiction only an hour before. There is much to love about The Art of Chipotle’s all-purpose sauce (grilling, marinating, dipping, dressing, etc.), but for me the star really is the chipotle itself — the smokiness. As Bonnie noted, chipotle really just means smoked jalapeño, and I like smoke. There is something about smoking that changes certain flavors not only for the better, but for the extraordinary. We’ve talked about smoked paprika before and what a fundamental shift that was; this is no different.

This sauce really sets its goal (chipotle) and hits the mark with pinpoint accuracy. I’ve used Sweet Heat Addiction now for a variety of dishes, from seasoned beef (just pour some right into the fry pan with the ground meat) to rib racks (mix it up with a bit of OJ and just mop it on). While our ‘coup de chipotle’ is still the Mexican pizza, can’t you just smell the pulled chicken simmering in Sweet Heat? I’d like to challenge our readers for their best suggestions. Try it and let us know…

Eric: One of my favorite things about returning home to Connecticut is the access I have to the multiple refrigerators and cabinets residing throughout my mother’s house. She has a fridge in the garage used to store backup essentials, a freezer in the basement used for temporary holding of testing products, an overflowing cabinet in her office that probably still has products in it from the mid-eighties, a smaller beverage fridge in the kitchen and of course the pièce de resistance — the main kitchen refrigerator/freezer. The main fridge is more of an in-house food terminal, and is reminiscent of the wardrobe leading to Narnia — a person can honestly get lost sifting through the large number of products. That brings me to this chipotle sauce.

I was going to have a BBQ and had been searching for something different to try with the meat(s). My usual instinct is to make a nice marinade and forget about the sauce, but after finding a variety of sauces in the fridge, I was tempted to see how the average BBQ and dipping sauce has changed over the past few years. Out of the five sauces I used for the meal, the chipotle was the only one that was nearly finished by the end. This sauce was the highlight of the BBQ and provided a sweet and tangy, yet delicately spiced “kick” to the food (and something different from most other sauces I’ve tried). The taste was so good that I later tried it on some sandwiches of cold cuts and even a grilled pizza. As my brother put it, this is a great product to experiment with in order to add taste to certain meals you may have never thought needed it. The chipotle is in your court, and it truly can become an addiction.