I’ve been thinking a lot about chile peppers lately, two in particular.

One, has its own local festival, the other, well, we’ll get to that little devil in a minute.

First, the annual Hatch fest at Central Market is almost upon us. With the theme "15 Years and Still Roasting Strong", the 2010 event will be two full weeks of pepper madness. The kickoff party is Thursday and will feature a hat contest for shoppers and chile heads who care to decorate their headgear with the banana-sized chiles. Normal folks can just eat them instead of wearing them.

But what’s the big deal about Hatch?

“They only come from one area in Hatch, New Mexico,” explains David Kiser, Central Market’s cooking school manager. “They just have the perfect flavor, you can put them into just about any recipe.”

And he does. You can buy everything from Hatch sausages to pasta cream sauces and even brownies at Central Market right now. I adore the quail stuffed with Hatch peppers, but that’s just me.

“It’s not just for salsa anymore,” Kiser says.

And you can join in cooking classes, a Hatch dinner and chile brunch during the fest.

How much does Central Market love its Hatch chiles?

“The trucks started coming last week,” Kiser says. “We’ll get about 250,000 pounds in. We’re the biggest ‘importer’ of Hatch chiles in the world.”

That’s a lot of chiles.

Say hi to Kiser and crew, who will be roasting batches of chiles outside Central Market because, as he says, there’s nothing like standing over a chile roaster in this heat.

“People buy pounds of the roasted chiles,” he explains, “you can freeze them and use them all year long.”

He suggests cooking up a batch of chile rellenos while they’re fresh, then using them later in his favorite recipe for green chile pork stew or just chopping them up and tossing them into scrambled eggs.

“They aren’t very hot,” Kisser says. “I don’t really like getting my head burned off and not getting my taste buds back for three days. So these are perfect.”

Which brings us to the second pepper in this tale.

I recently bought a jar of salsa from Whole Foods Market. It had a cute skull logo on the label. Kinda like a cartoon skull. I served it up to my salsa-loving friend with chicken fajitas. I put the fresh guacamole and sour cream on my tacos, he ladled on the salsa. He dunked chips in it. He drank it from the ramekin. This is a man who eats jalapeños on anything I make. He likes the heat. But he never said a word, just lapped it up.

The next day I took the last of the chicken and the final tortilla and made a taco for lunch. With the guac gone, I spooned some of the salsa on the taco and took a bite.

The first taste burned my lips.

OK, maybe it was just a hot jalapeño. They are notoriously famous for being unstable for heat, which is why Mexican chefs prefer Serranos in their guac.

Another bite.

Whoa, this was some hot salsa. Tasty yes, but damn. What new level of Dante’s Inferno was this?

Within an hour it wasn’t only my mouth that was burning. For a foodie I have a rather delicate digestive system and after two hours I feared I had once again poisoned myself.

I flew to the fridge and yanked the jar out, searching for an expiration date.

What I found instead was this: WARNING! This salsa is made with the hottest pepper in the world, the bhut jolokia pepper, also known as the ghost pepper.

What the…? Most foodies know about this little devil, a pepper from the Assam area in India that has a Scoville scale rating of one million, slightly less than police-grade pepper spray. Four times more potent than the evil habanera. It is hot. With a capital H.

I turned the jar over. Ghost Pepper Salsa, made right here in Stafford, Texas by Silver Leaf International.

Who were these people? Minions from hell? I had to find out so I called them.

“Did you not read the label? Maybe the flames coming off the skull would be an indicator,” laughed Neal McWeeney, who with his wife Adriane owns Silver Leaf. Apparently I was not the first fool to assume that this was some normal, ordinary salsa.

But why, why would a nice Texas company create the hottest salsa on the planet?

“I’d read about the ghost pepper for a year or so,” McWheeney says. “And we would go to the rodeo every year with our jalapeño salsa and our habanera salsa and people would say ‘is this the hottest you have?’ So we made the bhut jolokia salsa.”

It may have been a lark, a challenge, but now it’s the number one selling product for Silver Leaf, sold at Whole Foods Markets, Spec’s Liquor Warehouse and online at www.4garlic.com.

“We just shipped some to a guy in Afghanistan, you’d think it was hot enough there,” McWheeney says. “And I have friend who cuts his barbecue sauce with it and another who spices up bloody Marys with it. It’s fun, we’ve had a good reaction to it.”

McWheeney, a Texas native, doesn’t eat this stuff every day, although he says his wife loves it. But he has started growing some ghost peppers on his patio. “They seem to like this weather,” he says.

So, all you chile heads out there, go to Central Market’s 15 Years and Still Roasting Strong Hatch chile festival and, I dare you, double dog dare you, to pick up a jar of Silver Leaf’s Ghost Pepper Salsa. If you eat it and live to tell about it let me know.