Persistence and a willingness to take risks is the secret to success for this heat-loving "Penguin."

Sometimes, if you want something done right, you've just got to do it yourself. Hot sauce aficionado Dave Peligian took that idea, hatched with a buddy one night over a couple of beers, and ran with it. Their idea became a two-year long experiment. That experiment has since become a growing business.

The Providence native, a graduate of Classical High School and Bryant College, loves his hot sauce—and he'll try any kind that crosses his path. "One night we got a hold of one that I had not tried, and it was really bad," Peligan says. "We decided we could do better, so we looked up a YouTube video on how to make hot sauce, bought some ingredients, and made a batch—our original recipe."

I was throwing in cinnamon, whatever. It was a blast," Peligan says. And the taste? "It was awful. It was actually worse" than the sauce that inspired their foray into sauce-making. Not that they let that stop them.

"A lot of the early recipes were so bad, we couldn't even share them with friends," he admits.

He many not have hit on his hot sauce recipe—yet—but Peligan clearly had the key ingredient for success: he's persistent. Undeterred by his inedible sauce, he kept going—even after his buddy lost enthusiasm for the endeavor. At least once or twice a week for the next year and a half, Peligan rolled up his sleeves, chopped, mixed, cooked and tasted, until he finally hit on the winning recipe.

Peligan didn't see any point in quitting while he was ahead. He knew he had a good product, and wanted to get it out there. He started to look around for a commercial kitchen when a friend told him about Hope & Main in Warren, Rhode Island's first culinary business incubator, which was not yet open for business. He attended an early information session and was one of the first fledgling culinary businesses to sign on. He's been in production at the Warren site for a year now.

A server at Harry's on the Hill (the new Federal Hill outpost of Harry's Bar and Burger) when he's not perfecting or producing his product, Peligan's sense of humor and energy suggest sales and marketing are particular strengths of his. And he admits he probably prefers that side of the business, as much as he enjoys experimenting with recipes. "I like to think of ways to get into people's heads." Thus the company name, The Spicy Penguin. "The cold, and the black and white lane pops on a shelf of hot sauce where every other bottle is red with flames," he says. It's also a little personal. "Penguins are small, and they like to have a good time. That's me."

Right now, Peligan is producing small batches of his habanero hot sauce and mango and orange salsas. The sauce is hot; the salsas are tomato-based and less so. To the extent that he can, he sources ingredients locally. Spicy Penguin products are available at Grapes and Grains, 24 Bosworth St. in Barrington, Olive del Mondo, 815 Hope St. in Providence, and online at www.thespicypenguin.com. Right now, Peligan is focused on getting his mail-order business humming. He's working on scaling up production, though with some products, like his, you can't just double or triple your yield—recipes need to be tweaked.

"I'm ready to go, I hope to be humming along within the month," Peligan says, laughing. "I'd better be!"