Cooking Up Clues: A Hidden Recipe in ‘Bones’

I get my inspiration for the dishes I cook from a variety of sources, and one of the more unique sources is the television drama ‘Bones’. I love the show for its blending of science, drama, and suspense. Of course the show is formulaic, and the good guys always win. Well, almost always. ‘Bones’ has found some creative ways to kill off a good guy when the actor doesn’t want to return, or demands more money than the producers are willing to give. One of their more gruesome approaches is to blow the character up and then let the forensic team try to reassemble the pieces in their lab. To be fair, the timeline behind the science isn’t real. Even a highly skilled forensic anthropologist like Temperance Brennan can’t solve a murder with a single glance at a set of bones. But I love it anyway.

What appeals most to me about ‘Bones’ is that the science is real, most of the time, even if the timeline behind it isn’t. The show is based on a book series written by an accomplished forensic anthropologist turned novelist, Kathy Reichs. In her novels, Reichs goes into painstaking detail on the process she used in her real life as a forensic anthropologist to determine things such as gender, age, ethnic origins and cause of death, all based on the victim’s bones.

There aren’t many episodes of ‘Bones’ with a culinary theme, but I recently came across one that caught my interest. The episode featured Opie and Thurston’s Hot Sauce. The story behind the hot sauce is a subplot involving a character named Finn, a naïve but charming (and deceptively smart) graduate student/lab intern from North Carolina, and the lab’s entomologist, a man named Hodgins. During the episode, they give each other the nicknames Opie and Thurston respectively, hence the name for their hot sauce.

The story has Hodgins using the last of a jar of hot sauce Finn stored in the lab’s communal fridge. When Finn discovers Hodgins has used all of his hot sauce, he explains that it was the last of the supply he got from his grandma back home in North Carolina. Granny died before she had a chance to write down the recipe and…well, you know where this is going.

As the rest of the lab is busy solving a murder, Hodgins attempts to assuage his guilt over eating the last of Finn’s hot sauce by recreating granny’s recipe. He applies his considerable science skills, and the lab’s considerable inventory of expensive scientific equipment, to the task. That his expertise is in bugs isn’t supposed to bother us. Television science to the rescue!

Hodgins coaxed a couple of drops of Finn’s hot sauce out of the empty jar and fed it into the lab’s mass spectrometer. The mass spectrometer spit out a complete list of the sauce’s ingredients, including red and yellow peppers. Not the molecular structure that went into the ingredients mind you, which I would expect from a real mass spec, but the ingredients themselves. As Hodgins proceeds to recite the ingredient list from the mass spec’s display, I hit record on the DVR so I could play it back and jot them down.

This is where the science breaks down a little. The mass spectrometer was able to determine the color of the peppers grandma used in her sauce, but couldn’t identify the specific type of peppers? Or the quantity of each ingredient? I suppose that would be too easy. After watching this episode several times, I felt like there was enough information and context for me to build a close approximation of Opie and Thurston’s Hot Sauce, so I did.

I took Hodgins’ list of ingredients and compared it against known hot sauce recipes using my AI search tool Perplexity. After going over the results, I realized most of the ingredients in Hodgins’ recipe are what you would find in a classic Carolina BBQ sauce recipe. Since both Finn and his grandma were from North Carolina, that fits the context of the story. The writers then added red and yellow peppers to the ingredient list because…duh, it’s a hot sauce. And to make sure you know the sauce is hot, the writers had Hodgins deliver this line as he cajoled Finn into trying it: “I am gonna burn the crap outta your mouth, and you are gonna love it!”

If there was any description of what the sauce tastes like beyond being hot enough to burn the crap outta your mouth, it might be possible to infer quantities for the ingredients, but there was none. Rather than going through hours of trial-and-error testing and tasting, I paired up the ingredients Hodgins recited with quantities I extracted from a classic Carolina BBQ sauce recipe. The only thing remaining was to sort out the peppers.

Assuming the writers even bothered to posit real peppers for that part of grandma’s recipe, which I highly doubt, the most logical would be Carolina Reapers and yellow bell peppers. The Carolina Reapers originated from South Carolina. Finn was from North Carolina, but close enough for television. Reapers are from one of the Carolinas, they are red, and they are hot…they score at the high end of the Scoville Scale, which fits with Thurston’s declaration about the hotness of the sauce. Yellow bell peppers also fit the available context clues…they are yellow, sweet, mild, and a staple of southern cooking. They would cut the heat in the Carolina Reapers as long as you got the ratio between the two right.

When the mass spec first produced its ingredient list, one particular item stumped it. No storyline about recreating a recipe would be complete without a secret ingredient. Finn described it as his grandma’s love, but Hodgins burst his bubble when he announced it was Guinea grains, a pepper-like spice from West Africa. How he, or the mass spec, figured that out when neither could determine the type of peppers granny used in her sauce is left a mystery.

At this point I had what I was going to get from the show, so I fed it all into Perplexity and asked it to generate a recipe for me. As I suspected, the recipe Perplexity came back with was a basic Carolina BBQ sauce, with the addition of red Carolina Reaper peppers and yellow bell peppers. Unlike Hodgins’ expensive mass spec, Perplexity also gave me the all-important ingredient quantities. I tweaked it a bit and came up with my recipe for the hot sauce.

As it cooked up on the stove in my test kitchen, Janet commented several times about how good it smelled. And it did smell good. I warned her as I left it to cool not to taste it…it was really hot and Janet doesn’t like really hot. She doesn’t even like sorta hot, but like a kid at Christmas with a pile of gifts under the tree she couldn’t resist. She declared it hot enough to burn the crap outta her mouth, but she didn’t love it. Big surprise…she doesn’t love any hot sauce that’s hot.

If I’m being honest, I probably didn’t need to add that second Carolina Reaper — it was really hot even for me. But I did love it.

Get the Recipe