Get stung

The story of Tulsa’s hottest new sauce

When Dillon Hargrave gifted me an unlabeled glass bottle from his first batch of hot sauce—a fearsome red concoction he called Baby D’s Bee Sting—the first thing I did after tasting a droplet was write on the bottle, in Sharpie, three large Xs and the best skull and crossbones I could muster. 

I stood in the kitchen pensively, bottle in hand, seriously wondering if I should store it in the gun safe. This was no condiment to be trifled with, and I was afraid some unprepared person might accidentally get hurt, as though Hargrave had casually stopped by my house to drop off a case of hand grenades. 

I’d recently written a book, “Hot Sauce Nation,” about America’s love affair with spicy food, which Hargrave said helped inspire him to make the stuff, so he gave me a bottle. 

“Right now a tiny dab of the purée makes me run for the milk,” he said then of his unholy creation. 

Yeah, no shit, man. 

That first batch was a terrifying blend of Carolina reapers, scorpion peppers, ghost peppers, Fatalii chiles, and Scotch bonnets, a lineup of some of the hottest chiles in existence, like fielding a mafia crew with Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Whitey Bulger, Don Corleone, and Jack the Ripper. 

But damn if it wasn’t good. For those of us who relish the burn, finding new, unique, and truly hot hot sauces is a thrill unto itself, and when Hargrave turned his hot sauce into a small business earlier this year, Baby D’s Bee Sting became a bold new addition to the hot sauce canon. 

Owing to the use of five varieties of capsicum chinense—the hottest species of chile on earth—the sauce is not only very hot, it plays on the mouth in the peculiar way cultivars of this species do, building slowly in layers and lingering. But the sauce also strikes instantly, hence the name.

“When I tried my first batch I felt the immediate sensation of a bee stinging the tip of my tongue,” Hargrave said. “That combined with the fact I am a small man with a first name that starts with D made the name just come to me almost instantly. Nobody ever called me Baby D before but it has now been added to my list of aliases.”

Baby D’s Bee Sting Original blend has cooled off slightly since that very first batch, but it still packs ferocious heat. The company now sells a lineup of three additional sauces including Yellow Jacket, a medium heat, more vinegar-heavy sauce; Okie Sunset, a mix of 80 percent Yellow Jacket and 20 percent Original; and JalaHellNo, a barely spicy but absolutely delicious sauce made from two varieties of capsicum annuum, jalapeños and serranos. 

Baby D’s Bee Sting isn’t just incidentally made in Tulsa, it’s fiercely local. A native Tulsan, Hargrave is a graduate of Tulsa School of Arts and Sciences and Oklahoma State University, a DJ under the name Dilation—you’ve probably grooved to his tunes before, perhaps at Guthrie Green or Cry Baby Hill—and he runs literacy programs at the small non-profit Neighbors Along the Line. All of the sauce is made in Tulsa by Hargrave, his wife Ashley, and sister-in-law Amanda Mead. Baby D’s Bee Sting is a member of Kitchen 66, an incubator for local food startups, and the hot sauce is as much a community-building initiative as a condiment. 

“By the time I started the Kitchen 66 program in February 2017, I had decided that the primary goal of the company was going to be job creation to build wealth in the community,” Hargrave said. He hopes to one day source all ingredients from within a 10-mile radius of Tulsa, including neighborhood gardens that employ area kids, putting Tulsans to work from the farm to the factory to the store. 

For Hargrave, Baby D’s Bee Sting is a sauce—a cause, really—worth suffering for. The chiles that go into their hotter sauces are hot enough that in raw form they can be truly dangerous, capable of causing severe pain merely by touching the skin. Or, as happened to Hargrave once, splashing into the eyes, a hazard he seems prepared to endure to keep making his sauces, growing his company, and investing in his community.

“I have most recently started putting Okie Sunset on my yogurt in the morning with some strawberries. I really believe there is magic in combining sweet and heat,” he said. “Baby D’s Bee Sting is made for people to experience and experiment with. I just wish I could try everything that people make with it.” 

You can find Baby D’s Bee Sting at Barn 66, Bodean Seafood Market, Chimera Café, Kitchen 66, Mr. Nice Guys, and at babydsbeesting.com.

For more from Denver, read his article on white Oklahoma families who claim Native American ancestry.