I have vivid memories of this bottle.

It's a bottle of Mango Creek,

a sauce from Charleston, South Carolina

that hasn't been produced in about 25 years.

It's also my dad's hot sauce,

the same dad who, about 25 years ago

in Charleston, South Carolina,

welcomed me into the world.

Growing up, I would ask my dad about it

and he'd talk about it in poetic terms

like sultry and fruity.

I also never fully knew why he stopped making it.

Obviously, having a second kid was a factor,

but he sometimes would mention something

about a con man who'd stolen all of his money.

Most importantly, though, I could tell that he missed it.

My dad has always been there for me

and has always done his best to support me,

and I wanted to do something to repay that,

so when I was a teenager I got this idea in my head.

I found his old recipe

and I decided I wanted to surprise him

by making his old hot sauce for him.

But, as with most of the whims of a teenage Dakota,

it never came to fruition.

Until now.

(lively music)

Today my Cameraman and I are finally going

up to my parents' home in Vermont

with a couple of negative COVID tests in hand,

and I figured it was finally time

to make my dad his long-lost hot sauce.

So the difficult thing about this recipe

isn't actually the making of the sauce,

it's the ingredients.

The main ingredient is a Scotch bonnet pepper,

which is a Caribbean pepper

that's really, really hard to find.

It's a bit like a habanero but a little bit juicier,

and it gives the sauce that nice,

sweet flavor that we're looking for,

and I have been trying to find it all day.

There's not Scotch bonnets.

Green peppers.

This place has a lotta peppers, but it doesn't...

It looks like Cubanelle,

Cornito, poblanos...

Yeah, they only had habaneros,

which are similar to Scotch bonnets

but not quite as sweet.

I called 25 different grocery stores

and none of them had it, but I finally found

a West Indian grocery store in the Bronx that has it

that's kind of on the way to Vermont, it's north.

Got our peppers. Ready to make some hot sauce.

I knew my dad had put his heart and soul

into making this hot sauce,

so if I was gonna do it right

I would need a bit of that heart and soul.

I needed to find out exactly what happened.

Why did he start making it,

and more importantly, why did he stop?

- Hello! My name is Jones Deady.

I'm Dakota Deady's father.

Back in the '90s,

my wife decided on doing her medical residency

in Charleston, South Carolina,

and I gave up my gardening business here in Vermont

and we moved to Charleston.

Scratching my head, trying to figure out

what to do with my life at that point,

I decided to start growing peppers.

I set up a booth at the farmer's market.

I found great satisfaction in that,

but then decided there must be more, so I said okay,

I would like to create a line of sauces.

So the mango sauce, I wanted to make

fruity and full of life,

and I think I have succeeded in that,

and it was a big hit.

And at that point in time,

not many people were using fruits such as mangoes.

I had 'em in a lot of the higher-end stores

in Charleston and abouts,

and I got a letter in the mail from an individual

that had found my product in a store, tried it,

and he also owned a food distribution company.

He was very, very charismatic, and

we agreed to terms,

and he began distributing my pepper sauce.

Soon, I sent him invoices

to find that I wasn't receiving payment,

and this went on and on for a little bit,

and I said something's not right,

so I called the other food producers that he had chosen.

All of them were having the same issue.

I flew back to Charleston without telling him,

and I went into a store and his wife was there.

My product was on the shelf.

I took my product all off the shelf,

realizing that they were just making money

and not providing their end of the contract.

So I walked away from everything.

- I had to keep my dad off the scent of what I was doing,

so I told him that I was gonna be

filming something all day in the kitchen

and that he couldn't come in

or he would mess it up completely.

Then I got to work.

At first, all I had to go on

was a handwritten ingredient list that I'd found years ago.

So I am here in the kitchen,

and I am going to start making this sauce.

I have a 25-year-old piece of paper

with my dad's nearly-illegible handwriting on it.

It's not like a full, step-by-step recipe.

It's sort of just a collection of ingredients.

I've started by chopping some onions really finely.

Chopping some carrots.

So I'm putting some water on to boil back there.

I've never pureed anything.

I'm the least qualified person to do this,

but I am determined to.

Let's put some mangoes into this little Cuisinart guy here.

Mango is actually the first food I ever ate.

Whoop! (sputters)

Look at that! Half a cup exactly.

(processor whirs)

Aw yeah, those are some liquified carrots.

So the special ingredient to this hot sauce

is this blend of spices here that...

I'm not gonna tell you what's in it, but

I'll just tell you it smells wonderful.

It's time for the peppers.

Got my rubber gloves on to make sure

I don't get too much hotness all over me,

more than I already have.

(wheezes) Ha!

I did not expect these to be this spicy.

These are so hot.

Mm.

Whoo! That's some spicy air.

Hot pepper puree.

Ooh!

Hoo-hoo!

Finally, it's time to transfer this sauce here to a pan.

Ah!

Really letting these flavors get to know each other in here.

(Dakota slurps)

Oh, something is very wrong with this.

I'm gonna have to start over.

When that recipe failed,

I realized that I had to dig deeper,

so I went back into his paperwork and kept searching.

While I was there, I found a lot of very interesting stuff.

I found the business card of the man who'd conned him.

I found the catalog he'd told me about.

I found all sorts of things that corroborated this story.

And the fact that he was holding onto these things

decades later showed me that this really did hurt him.

Most importantly though, I found a real recipe.

A recipe for a large batch,

which includes six five-gallon buckets of peppers.

It might be a little much, but what I can do

is I can take this and I can convert it down

to something a bit more manageable.

So I've got everything converted now.

Things are definitely a bit different.

Yesterday I was using as much vinegar and lime juice

as pretty much every other ingredient,

which definitely made it a bit more acidic than I wanted.

So today, when I've converted everything down,

it does cut a significant amount of that acidity out.

The other thing about this recipe is that it says

to use canned peaches.

Crossing my fingers for a successful second batch.

This time it had to work.

I was running out of peppers,

and that was the one ingredient

that I couldn't get any more of.

Take two. (chuckles)

Mango.

Next up are the peaches.

Carrot time.

Onions.

Put that in there.

Third a cup of lime juice.

Ah!

Spice mix.

(processor whirs)

The blade.

(Cameraman chortles)

Now all that's left is to grind up some peppers.

(coughs) Whoo! That's strong!

Here we go.

Oh, please, please, please be good.

(drum roll)

That is so much better.

Yes!

So it tasted good to me,

but I had no idea whether or not it was authentic.

For that, I would have to give it to my dad,

but I wanted to make the experience

as authentic as possible,

so along with one of his old bottles

I actually found a roll of his old labels,

and I knew that would be the icing on the cake

of surprising him with this.

This is the final product.

Mango Creek's hot sauce.

I'm about to give it to my dad.

- [Cameraman] Do you think he knows?

- Probably. I mean...

He's suspicious, for sure,

of what's been going on.

Let's go.

- [Jones] Hey! - [Dakota] Hey.

- [Jones] What's happenin'?

- [Dakota] I have something for you.

- Uh...

How could you...

Where the hell could you get this?

- I found the recipe, I got the peppers

from a Peruvian grocery store in New York,

and I made it.

- And you found my old labels.

- I found your old labels. (laughs)

- Wow, Dakota.

- Dad.

- That is absolutely unbelievable.

It looks exactly like it did!

- Do you wanna try it? - Yeah, I'd love to.

- [Dakota] It might be a little chunky.

- Looks exactly like it was.

Exactly like it used to be. Ooh!

- That's a lot. - That might be a lot.

(Dakota laughs)

Whoo!

Oh my god. It's delicious.

- [Dakota] Does it taste like it should?

- Exactly.

- I feel like I messed up a little bit,

but it was as good as I could get it.

- (whistles) It's supposed to be hot!

(Dakota laughs)

I just love the flavor.

- [Dakota] Yeah, it's very nice.

- Wow.

You're amazing.

I cannot believe you did this.

- [Dakota] How long has it been since you had that?

- '97, '98.

- [Dakota] Wow. Okay.

- Well, this is amazing. I mean...

Ah!

Makes my heart sore because, you know,

this is what I did, and this-

- My dad has done a lot since we left Charleston.

He's worked in stores,

been a sous chef, made maple syrup,

and he's even publishing a book in November.

Link in the description.

But this hot sauce has always been a part of his identity,

just one that I'd never really uncovered.