Hot Stuff, Sweet Stuff


hulagirlWyckoff native Nicole Ramsperger has a recipe for success bottled and available for purchase online….or in Ramsey on May 16th at the Adorno Spring Fair.

Heart Breaking Dawns is the line of sauces, marinades and spices she produces with Johnny Mclaughlin. Like many start-up companies, Heart Breaking Dawns looked to have an interesting story behind it.

HeartBreakingDawns.com gives a brief history behind the origins of how they started to market their hot sauce, and readers can vist their About Us page.

The Journal touched base with Nicole with our own questions about her, Johnny and their hot sauce business.

Hi, thanks for giving me the opportunity to share the joy of the hot sauce business with you! A little background information about me: My name is Nicole Ramsperger, I am 23, I graduated from Ramapo High School in 2004. I took 3 years off from school after high school, then received my Associates Degree from Bergen Community College in the Spring of 09. Now I attend SUNY New Paltz in New Paltz, NY, where we now base our business out of. Both my parents still reside in Wyckoff and we are often back and forth there.

Now for the questions…

What part of this business is most rewarding? The actually cooking….The selling at fairs…..or the business aspect?
I love the fairs. They are the most rewarding to me because that is where the public is able to sample what we have created. Compliments from a stranger mean more than compliments from family or friends because they’re going to say they like our products no matter what, where as the public is a bit more honest! Johnny really enjoys the actual cooking and creating, on the kitchen end, I enjoy the “testing and sampling” element of the kitchen.

Is this your first trip to the Wildwood 60s Sensational Weekend?….If not, what was it like last year?
This weekend we have the Wildwood sensational 60’s weekend and it will be our second time attending that specific festival. The guy that puts on this weekend also puts together several more through the summer that we have attended in Wildwood, we always do really well in Wildwood people really respond well to our products.

Did you attend any cooking schools?
Neither of us have formal culinary education, but we love to create, learn and experiment. If you treat cooking with a creative recklessness you start to know what works and become more proficient, it’s like anything else and really just requires passion and patience. As I said earlier I am a junior at SUNY New Paltz and I am in the Psychology department, and I am currently doing an internship in Poughkeepsie working in a residential facility with developmentally disabled adult men that are being treated for substance abuse (and I absolutely LOVE it!). I am going to continue on to get my masters; which is necessary in the field on psychology. Johnny has received his bachelors from Indiana University in comparative literature and near eastern language and culture. He is also an artist, check out his work at www.artgiovanni.com .

What are some of the best fairs you’ve been to in NJ? And else where?
The best fairs in New Jersey are definitely the one’s we do in Wildwood and Ramsey’s spring and fall Adorno Fathers fair on Darlington Ave (coming up May 16th!!). The Rosendale Pickle Festival was also very enjoyable, which was in November this year, and we won first place chutney (which we call Fiery Trail Preserve).

What’s 3 of your favorite recipes using your sauces?
Favorite recipes:

Breakfast Burrito

  • Need: 10 Tator tots, 2 eggs, shredded cheddar cheese, tortilla flats (wraps), bacon, jalapeno pineapple
  • Cook tater tots in toaster while cooking up your eggs (scrambled is how I like em!). Cook the bacon in the microwave to your liking.
  • Once the eggs are cooked enough, add a handful of cheese and two tablespoons of jalapeno pineapple.
  • Add the tatters and the bacon (break bacon up)
  • Now stir all the ingredients together in the pan, so every bite has every ingredient!
  • Scoop into your favorite tortilla, roll up like a burrito and enjoy!
  • Marinated Chicken

  • Need: Chicken breast, mango habanero, olive oil, garlic
  • Get a pack of chicken breast and put them all in a zip lock bag. Add 3 tablespoons mango habanero, 4 tablespoons olive oil, and a few cloves of garlic. Place bag in fridge overnight to marinate and infuse the flavors into the meat.
  • Next day, grill, broil, bake- whatever you prefer! Enjoy!
  • Cheeseburgers

  • Need: Ground beef, classic gold habanero, burger buns
  • While forming your beef into burgers, add a small amount of classic gold habanero into the mix. This will spice up your burger with just one ingredient!
  • One more..

    Our fiery trail preserves are great on toast, a bagel with cream cheese, and (Johnny’s favorite) vanilla ice cream!

    three-sauces-1The labels are pretty striking and memorable, did you consider other artists before involving Jae Connor?

    Jae Connor is a good friend of ours. He owns Electric Lotus Tattoo in Boonton, NJ. At the time of us creating the labels, Johnny was working at Electric Lotus as a piercer (another talent Johnny has; he has been involved with the Tattoo industry for 15 years now, on and off). There wasn’t too much thought in deciding who would draw up the images for us, it was just talk around the shop of the images we wanted and Jae offered to lend his services. Knowing he is an awesome artist, we were excited to see how he would create beautiful art through putting our imagination onto paper. Another artist, Frank Lee from Florida has signed on to doing some of our drawings as well. He did the monkey that is on the Fiery Trail Preserve and the labels for the lip balm. Johnny has known Frank Lee for years and has several tattoos from him. He is also an exceptional artist.

    Does the “The Drunken Boat” poem have any special significance?

    (Johnny) The poem does not have any certain significance as far as Hot Sauce goes. Being a literature fanatic, Rimbaud has always been my favorite poet, his story, his work, everything. The line “even the dawns are heartbreaking” always just read so sweetly. I had some things I was working on years ago and was planning on using Heartbreaking Dawns so I had registered the domain and kind of forgotten about it. When the time came to name the sauce we were brainstorming for weeks and nothing really came together until I came across a confirmation email with the domain and it just struck a chord. That was it.

    What’s a perfect day ?

    We just had a pretty perfect day this past Friday which is a great example of the overlap of the pleasure and joy of what we do with the business. We started off at Woody’s All Natural in Corwall, NY. They were voted “best burger” in the Hudson Valley and we recently crafted a Private Label sauce for them which we dropped off. While there we talked about some other ideas while enjoying a nice burger and fries lunch. After that we did a few errands in NJ on the way down to Cross Country Nurseries in Stockton, NJ. They have perhaps the largest selection of pepper plants in the North East so we talked and walked around the hoop houses selecting a substantial variety of pepper plants for this years garden. We got about 50 to go along with the 120 we already started from seed. We met some great “chileheads” there and gave them some of our products to take home with there plants. After that we went to New Hope, PA to deliver some sauce to Suzie’s Hot Sauce. They are under new ownership and meeting the manger Gerard was a lot of fun along with getting our products in a new store and selecting some other products for our personal collection. We finally ended up in Wildwood, checked into great little hotel and went out for dinner at an Irish Pub that used to be a bank back in the 20’s. The walk-in freezer was actually in the old vault. Then off to bed to get rested up for the next days festival. That was a perfect day. Either that or just sitting around watching SVU with Pizza!