“The soft ones?”
“About three hundred pounds.”
He laughed.
“Those peppers?”
“Five dollars for the truckload.”
Daniel shook his head and tasted the pork again.
“What’d you put in it?”
Clara hesitated.
“Mostly peppers, smoke, salt, thyme.”
Daniel stared at her for a moment.
Then he reached for another spoon.
That was the reaction she had been waiting for.
Not praise.
Not surprise.
A second taste.
He tried the sauce on eggs from the prep station.
Then potatoes again.
Finally, he spread a thin line across toasted bread.
Each time, he used less.
Clara noticed that, too.
The sauce wasn’t working because it overwhelmed the food.
It worked because the smoke seemed to connect with whatever was already on the plate.
Daniel screwed the cap back onto the bottle.
“How many of these do you have?”
“Five more.”
“I’ll buy them.”
Clara shook her head.
“You haven’t even served it yet.”
“Then leave this one for free.”
“For research?”
That made her smile.
She left the bottle.
For the next six days, Clara heard nothing.
By the seventh, she had convinced herself customers hadn’t noticed it.
Maybe Daniel hadn’t even used it.
Then, shortly after three in the afternoon, someone knocked on her door.
Clara opened it.
Daniel stood on the porch holding the empty bottle.
For one terrible second, she thought he had come to complain.
Instead, he held it toward her.
“I need more.”
Clara looked at the empty glass.
“How much?”
Daniel shook his head.
“No.”
He pointed toward the barn.
“How much can you make?”
Clara didn’t answer.
For the first time, the problem was no longer whether anyone wanted her sauce.
The problem was whether she could make the next bottle taste like the first.
Daniel’s question followed Clara all the way back to the truck.
How much can you make?
A month earlier, she would have heard opportunity in those words.
Now she heard risk.
Making one good bottle had been exciting.
Making ten bad copies of it would be worse than never selling any at all.
Back home, Clara opened her notebook and felt her confidence shrink.
Her notes were full of useful observations, but the best batch had been recorded in the language of instinct.
Light smoke.
Enough salt.
Dark red.
None of those were measurements.
For a moment, she sat at the kitchen table with Daniel’s empty bottle beside her.
She had wanted proof that someone else cared about the sauce.
Now that she had it, she was terrified she had made something she couldn’t repeat.
So Clara started over.
She weighed the peppers before they went into the smoker.
She wrote down how long each tray stayed over the wood.
She separated thick-walled peppers from thinner ones and stopped judging smoke by color alone.