The heat's on: La Place offers array of handmade hot sauces (VIDEO)

FORT WALTON BEACH — It started in Duane and Nina Selph’s kitchen.

Now the couple are spreading the word about their homemade sauces, most recently by placing first in two categories Jan. 21 at the Key Lime Pie Festival in Cocoa Beach’s hot sauce competition.

“We’d been making our own sauces for several years,” Nina said. “So we thought, ‘Why not.’ We love to cook. We don’t follow any recipe. Everything we do is our own.”

The Fort Walton Beach couple took home first place in heat with their “Tropical Heat” sauce, first in taste with their “Raspberry” hot sauce and third in heat with their “Habanera” sauce.

The Selphs opened La Place last April on Eglin Parkway across from Popeye’s chicken, where they sell 11 sauces and fresh ingredients from around the globe. From peeling the ingredients to sticking labels on the bottles, the Selphs say they do it all.

“We’re venturing out so we can give the tastes we love to other people,” Duane said. “It’s good sauce and it can be used not just as a hot sauce, but a seasoning.”

In the back of the store is the Selphs’ kitchen. Large refrigerators hold the fresh ingredients. Several blenders are set up on a table and in the back sits the “hopper,” a large machine used for bottling. That is where the couple spends hours prepping, preparing and packing their hot sauces.

The sauces can be found in a few local restaurants in Destin and at Fusion Bistro in Fort Walton Beach. The sauce also is stocked in two restaurants in Chicago and the couple are in talks to sell their product in South Florida.

The sauces cost from $4.25 to $5.25 and range from mild to hot, which has the ghost pepper, ranked as one of the hottest peppers in the world.

“We want to give everyone a ‘spicy little taste of Florida,’ ” said Nina, reciting her brand motto. “We use as much local ingredients as we can. We test everything from home and we put everything into our sauces.

“We take the time to make it different.”