Hot sauce picks

General disclaimer

The contents of this page are the personal opinions of David Flater.  They do not represent endorsements or criticisms by anyone and have nothing to do with reality, such as it is.  You pays your money and you takes your chances.  Reading this page may cause your aunties to spontaneously combust and Sumerian deities to fly out of your nasal passages at inconvenient times.  Run away!  All trademarks are trademarks of their respective trademarkers, in the U.S. and other countries, but possibly not.  Prosecutors will be violated.

General principles

  1. Viscosity:  The sauce must be thick enough that you can't see through it, but not so chunky that it could be mistaken for salsa.
  2. Purity:  There must actually be chile peppers in it.  Making hot sauce out of tomato purée and pepper extract is like making wine out of grape juice and grain alcohol, or making soy sauce out of hydrolyzed soy protein and caramel color.  You're supposed to ferment it, dummy.
  3. Anti-Salinity:  Tabasco has a sodium content of only 30 mg/tsp, and nobody ever complained that it was bland.
  4. Anti-Novelty:  The label should not be too funny.  There are thousands of novelty labels out there and no particular reason to believe that the bottle contents are worth tasting.

The gold standard

Tabasco Pepper Sauce

Ingredients:  distilled vinegar, red pepper, salt
Sodium:  30 mg/tsp
Heat:  (3.75 ± 1.25) kSHU (according to http://www.tabasco.com/)

A straight-up hot sauce with vinegar and salt, but no smoky or garlicky or fruity taste.  2004-07

Tabasco Habanero Sauce

Ingredients:  distilled vinegar, habanero pepper, cane sugar, Tabasco pepper sauce (distilled vinegar, red pepper, salt), salt, mango purée, dehydrated onion, banana purée, tomato paste, tamarind purée, papaya purée, spices, garlic, Tabasco pepper mash (pepper, salt)
Sodium:  140 mg/tsp
Heat:  (7.5 ± 0.5) kSHU (according to http://www.tabasco.com/)

This sauce is a heavy mixture of twangy flavors, the distinctive habanero flavor not being one of them.  Instead of making a neat sauce using habaneros, they started with a base of regular Tabasco and added stuff.  For tacos, it narrowly beats out original Tabasco just by being hotter, but it's too salty to use all the time.  2004-09

Category:  Cumin

Cumin:  a smoky or barbecue-esque flavor.

Habanero Hot Sauce from Hell

Ingredients:  water, habanero pepper, vinegar, carrots, salt, xanthan gum, garlic, spices
Sodium:  55 mg/tsp
Heat:  est. 7.5 kSHU

Hotter than original Tabasco, with a smoky flavor.  Despite its novelty labelling, it's actually pretty good for barbecue and sloppy joe types of applications.  Not so great for tacos, unless you're into smoky barbecue flavored tacos.  Apparently there is a hotter version called Devil's Revenge, but it contains extract.  2004-07

Category:  Garlic

Emeril's Kick it Up Red Pepper Sauce

Ingredients:  cayenne peppers, vinegar, salt, garlic
Sodium:  140 mg/tsp
Heat:  not much

This sauce has too little heat and too much salt, but the garlic flavor is delicious, and it has plenty of it.  It blows away Tabasco Garlic Pepper Sauce.  2004-08

Category:  Fruity

"The chinense varieties have an unmistakable, fruity aroma and taste that some people describe as apricotlike." -- Dave DeWitt and Paul W. Bosland, The Pepper Garden, Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, CA, 1993.  Habanero or scotch bonnet based hot sauces in which you can taste this twang, possibly augmented with other fruity flavors, are categorized as fruity.

I'm yet to find a fruity type sauce that I really like.  These two Costa Rican made sauces have the requisite heat and good enough flavor, but they get too salty real quick.  They are a little on the chunky side, so the heat doesn't distribute evenly.  2004-07

Tropical Pepper Co. Special Edition XXXXtra Hot Habanero Pepper Sauce

Ingredients:  water, habanero peppers, sugar cane, vinegar, salt, cornstarch, pineapple pulp, acetic acid
Sodium:  150 mg/tsp
Heat:  est. 5 kSHU

Iguana Radioactive Atomic Pepper Sauce

Ingredients:  habanero, cayenne and tabasco peppers, carrots, corn vinegar, onions, lime juice, tomato paste, salt, garlic, ascorbic acid
Sodium:  25 mg / 6 g (est. 150 mg/tsp)
Heat:  est. 5 kSHU

Category:  Spicy

Spicy:  kicked up some other way, with a flavor that is neither smoky, nor garlicky, nor fruity, but definitely not plain.

El Yucateco XXXTra Hot Sauce:  Salsa Kutbil-ik de Chile Habanero

Ingredients:  habanero pepper, vinegar, tomato, salt, spices, sodium benzoate
Sodium:  17 mg/tsp
Heat:  11.6 kSHU (according to http://www.elyucateco.com/)

The flavor is unique, containing relatively little salt but a whole lot of mystery spices.  It's fairly thick, but not chunky.  It's brown, with specks of black pepper or something.  The heat is slow to kick in, but when it does, it's hot.  Definitely a different hot sauce.  It goes OK in Manwich, but on tacos it just tastes weird.  2004-08

Category:  Ketchup

Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce

Ingredients:  chili, sugar, garlic, salt, distilled vinegar, potassium sorbate, sodium bisulfite, xanthan gum
Sodium:  60 mg/tsp
Heat:  not much

There's nothing wrong with Heinz Ketchup, but this stuff makes a darn good substitute.  Flavorful and zingy, it tastes like a mixture of ketchup, garlic and jalapeños.  It's hard to believe there are no tomatoes in it.  Really good on veggie burgers.  2004-09

Category:  also ran

The great is the enemy of the good, not to mention the bad and the ugly.  One way or the other, these sauces didn't make the cut.

...and the winner is:

None of the above.  For tacos, I mix a lesser amount of El Yucateco's regular salsa picante roja with a greater amount of Emeril's Kick it Up Red Pepper Sauce.

El Yucateco Hot Sauce:  Salsa Picante de Chile Habanero

Ingredients:  red habanero pepper, water, tomato, salt, spices, acetic acid, F.D.&C. red 40, sodium benzoate
Sodium:  15 mg/tsp
Heat:  5.79 kSHU (according to http://www.elyucateco.com/)

A straightforward, low-sodium mix of habanero and tomatoes.  It tastes more like habanero than most sauces calling themselves habanero sauces, but there's a lot of tomato in there too.  I don't like it by itself, but it's just the thing to mix into Emeril's to make it hotter and less salty without destroying its garlic flavor.  2006-03

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