St. Paul, Minnesota · New Orleans recipes · Family-made
New Orleans recipes, Caribbean-Creole heat, bottled by the family that owns them.
Rasta Tease is a family-run hot sauce and BBQ sauce brand based in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was founded by Peewee Dread, and every recipe in the line comes out of New Orleans cooking — Creole seasoning, Louisiana dishes, and the Caribbean heat that has been part of that city's food for as long as the city has had a port.
That is the whole brand in one sentence: New Orleans is where the food comes from, Minnesota is where it gets made, and one family does both.
The lion on the label is ours and it stays. Rasta Tease is a rasta brand — that is Peewee's own artwork, printed on every bottle, and we are not walking it back. But when somebody asks what the sauce actually tastes like, the answer is not “the islands.” The answer is gumbo, a crawfish boil, a Friday fish fry, and a cast-iron pan.
Peewee Dread founded Rasta Tease and makes the original line — the hot sauces and the BBQ sauce — out of St. Paul, Minnesota, from New Orleans recipes.
Don't Tease 'Em, Please 'Em.
It is printed on every bottle, and it is the whole instruction. Heat on its own is a party trick. The sauce has to be worth finishing.
Try Peewee's originals
The New Orleans Bayou collection
Three of the sauces are not Peewee's. Chef P. Pierre Brown — Peewee's cousin — owns the New Orleans Bayou collection outright: Bayou Classic, Bayou Habanero, and Bayou Reaper. Same family, same city of origin, their own hand on the pot.
They hold both ends of the line. Bayou Classic is the everyday bottle that lives on the table. Bayou Reaper is the one we do not hand to strangers.
Creole is the New Orleans half. The seasoning base, the vinegar, the smoke — and, more than anything, the dishes the sauce was built for: gumbo, jambalaya, red beans, fried catfish, a po'boy.
Caribbean is the heat. The pepper end of the line runs from habanero up to reaper, which is exactly where Bayou Habanero and Bayou Reaper got their names.
Put together: a Louisiana sauce with real heat behind it. Not a novelty burn. Not a souvenir.
Peewee Dread makes the original line. His cousin, Chef P. Pierre Brown, owns the New Orleans Bayou three.
The food is Creole. The business is in St. Paul, Minnesota — and we say so instead of pretending otherwise.
Heat runs 1 to 5, from Bayou Classic at the breakfast end to Bayou Reaper at the other one. You always know before you pour.
Rasta Tease backs the Million Meal March, a meal-donation effort run with Union Gospel Mission Twin Cities and Feeding America.
Union Gospel Mission Twin Cities feeds people in the same St. Paul that Rasta Tease operates out of. Feeding America is the national hunger-relief network. Both are real organizations you can go look up, which is the point.
Get in touchPeewee's originals and Chef Pierre's Bayou three, mild through reaper. Start wherever you are brave.
