Ethically Farmed Chilli Products
Over the past century, our family has grown everything from wine grapes to fruit trees, toiling under the hot summer heat of the Montagu sun. The scorching temperatures provide the perfect growing conditions for our chillies, intensifying their picante flavours and capsaicin levels.
Living at the foot of the Langeberg mountains has given us a great appreciation for nature, and we practice sustainable farming methods and source recyclable packaging -to help keep our environmental impact low.
Each chilli cultivar is carefully selected and grown here on our farm, and every year we introduce new varieties onto the lands to experiment with. Creating different blends is always an exciting process, and we never know how the new product will taste until a year or more after it's been produced.
During the growing season, our fields are bathed in an endless sea of luminescent reds, flamboyant yellows, radiant oranges and intense greens. We try to pick when the chillies are at their firmest and most vibrant- this allows us to create the deep coloured hues of our sauces naturally. You can always tell when our sauces were made, because those produced at the height of the growing season are always richer in colour.
At the end of the growing season, we pickle and sun-dry much of our left over produce. This helps preserve our chillies and ensures that we almost always have chillies readily available throughout the cold winter months.
In the warmer months, we have to hand churn our sauces more often than usual, sometimes repeating the process up to three times a day. During this time the sauces are checked for any imperfections, and the Packstore is filled with the pungent aroma of garlic and chillies during this time and the rhythmic sounds of wooden paddles scraping along the sides of oak barrels.
Why We Chose the Name Jumping Jackal
The name Jumping Jackal just kind of stuck when our founders rescued a jackal from a snare that had been placed on the farm's fence line. After a brief recovery period, the jackal was released back into the wild, and can often be heard barking and howling as the sun sets into the early hours of twilight.
Our Cultivars
We currently grow Jalapenos, Thai chillies, Cayenne peppers, Habaneros and Tomatillos. We're also trying a few new test cultivars including Sizzler, Red Baron, Ghost Peppers and Carolina Reapers- for those who like the burn.
Our Kitchen
Once our sauces are ready for consumption, we pasteurize them. This stops the natural fermentation process and removes any potentially harmful bacteria from our products, whilst preserving the healthy microbes AND ensuring that the delicate molecular bonds present in our sauces are not denatured by cooking our products.
Flavour over Spiciness
Most of our products are on the mild to medium side of the Scoville scale. This is because we value the flavour and taste of our products over mouthwatering heat. It's why we ferment our sauces rather than cook them, use wooden utensils rather than metal ones (as steel can leave a metallic taste behind) and why we refuse to use Xanthum gum to thicken our sauces- which normally leaves a chemical aftertaste behind in foods.
