The Handsome Devils – Canberra boys with a hot and saucy side

The Handsome Devils are four former Canberra boys who are bringing the heat and spice to Sydney – via their hot sauce company.

You might not have heard about them until about a month ago, when one of their sauces, the De Arbol, gained a spot in the Good Food list of top 10 new-wave hot sauces.

Mark Vicol, Stuart Miller, Ian Nicholas and Ryan Brown are a group of childhood Canberra friends who grew up in Belconnen and now live in Bondi, and share a mutual love of hot sauce, especially after travelling in Mexico. The fifth co-owner, Shannon Douglas, is a Texas girl who lives in Austin.

"We fell in love with hot sauce at the same time," Brown explains. "We were eating a lot of hot sauce and we realised how expensive it was and how much artificial stuff was in them – flavours, thickeners, there were some of our favourite sauces that were full of artificial ingredients."

They decided to make their own, using natural ingredients. "Originally, it was just making sauce for ourselves, and we weren't planning on branding it," Brown says. But on a weekend trip back to Canberra, the group found themselves at a Triple J Hottest 100 party where the sauce proved so popular that their friends suggested they should sell it.

"That planted the seed and we came back to Sydney and started talking. It took about 12 months to get that off the ground," Brown says.

They started at the Bondi Farmers Market and had an extremely simple marketing plan - they just walked into cafes and explained their product. "We didn't know any better, we didn't really ask for any help," Brown says with a laugh. But it paid off. "Still to this day, that's exactly how I'm doing it."

They've now got 100 retailers nationwide and since they were featured in Good Food, there has been a big jump in sales. In Canberra, they're stocked in 16 IGA supermarkets, along with a couple of smaller shops such as Barrio cafe in Braddon and Meet Gather Collect in Aranda.

There are four flavours of hot sauce – a smoky chipotle, the De Arbol, which is a traditional hot sauce, a mild green tomato salsa-style sauce, and a mango and coriander dressing.

Brown says Australians need to let go of the idea that a good hot sauce is one that just burns all the way down. It's more about spice, richness and bold flavour.

And don't be afraid to use the hot sauce on different things.

"Our chipotle mixes really well with ricotta or aioli. You can put a tomato-based product into a pasta sauce. We use the mango coriander in a salad dressing," Brown says. "The other day we had mozzarella and chipotle sauce and sourdough, and we were just dipping the bread into the sauce. We're still just realising that there's so much more we can use them with."