The Black-Eyed Pea Festival
By The Oakland Post
Perhaps Elliott and Shawlaya Johnson know people who carry hot sauce in their handbags.
Perhaps they experienced a spill.
But now you can get your hot sauce from Goldi’s Gourmet Spices and a spill won’t ruin your bag.
In business for just over two years, the Hayward couple has been creating their own spice blends for more than 15 years for family and friends.
The spice blends, including the dry hot sauce, or Fire Dust Blend, are created in small batches, keeping them fresh, and bottled in two sizes.
They got started because of a passion for cooking and food that “set us out to look for new flavors,” they said in a statement. “We were not able to find the flavors that we were looking for, so we decided to work on creating our own spice blend.
“After countless attempts to create the perfect blend, we developed our Everything Blend (signature blend). We decided to name it ‘Everything’ because we were finding that whatever we would put it on, it was delicious.”
They get some herbs and spices whole and grind them up for the blends. The Everything blend is most popular in regular and salt-free with Lemon Pepper blend and Sweet and Smokey BBQ blend as runners up.
Common ingredients are sea salt, smoked paprika, chipotle chili powder, ghost pepper, lemon oil, cinnamon, black pepper, garlic, thyme, rosemary, onion, basil and oregano.
The Johnsons are regular vendors at the Hayward Farmer’s Market, but they are trying out local festivals, making a recent appearance at Oakland’s Art+Soul Festival and the upcoming Black-Eyed Pea Festival next month. But that’s not all they want to do.
“Now that we are doing local festivals and Hayward Farmers Market, we hope to launch an online store soon and we would love to collaborate with local chefs and other home cooks to create flavorful meals for family, friends and customers,” they said.
The Black-Eyed Pea Festival is a celebration of African American food, music and art. The Post and Omnira Institute are sponsors of the festival on Sat. Sept. 14, 2019, from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on the front lawn of Oakland Technical High School at 4351 Broadway. For more information, please call or text (510) 332-5851.
This article originally appeared in Oakland Post.
