Making home.php only display from one category

I’ve made a category called ‘hot items’ and I want the home.php loop to only consider posts in this category.

I know I could write a Loop that discards everything but posts in the ‘hot items’ category, but there will only be about 10 items in the category at once and I don’t want it to have to cycle through 1000s of posts discarding them to get the ones I want. Seems very inefficient.

Whats the best way to do this? I guess I just need to make the home.php like a category template somehow.

Thanks

Dave WP