Many people have the perception that the world of hot sauce is filled solely by the ones that dominate the grocery store shelves.

Names such as Tabasco, Frank’s Red Hot, Cholula, and Tapatio are ubiquitous (had to find a use for that word) in restaurants and food markets virtually worldwide. Many of these are combinations of a few types of peppers, vinegar, and salt. Nothing too extreme. To get an idea of what some of the basics of hot sauce are, see this article courtesy of www.wisegeek.com:

“Hot sauce” as a specific term refers to liquids used as food flavoring which are made using a chile pepper and vinegar. More generally, the term is used to refer to any flavoring for food that adds spice to the meal.

There are thousands of brands of hot sauce, made from a wide array of chiles, spanning a range of hotness. In recent years it has become trendy for companies specializing in hot sauce to advertise their product as virtually “too hot to eat,” playing on a desire by many to consume the hottest possible hot sauces.

The spiciness of a hot sauce is determined by the Scoville scale, measuring the levels of capsaicin, the chemical that lends chile peppers their hotness. This scale measures how many times an extract of the pepper must be diluted in sugar water before it is undetectable to a neutral taster. The pure chemical of capsaicin has a rating of 16,000,000, while sweet bell peppers are listed at zero.

Tabasco sauce is one of the world’s most popular hot sauces. It is a relatively mild hot sauce, with the original variety having a rating of 2,500-5,000 on the Scoville scale. Tabasco also puts out a number of other hot sauces, including a mild green version which has a rating of 600-1,200 Scovilles. Tabasco sauce has been produced since 1868, and has since become a world-wide phenomenon.

While the most popular hot sauces in North America are primarily of Mexican origin, including Cholula, Tabasco and Tapatio, a number of Asian hot sauces have a strong following. Thai peppers, the most common pepper in extremely spicy Asian hot sauces, have a Scoville rating of 50,000-100,000, or ten to twenty times that of Tabasco sauce. Even the spiciest of Tabasco sauces, made from habanero peppers, is only 7,000-8,000 on the Scoville scale.

Many people also use horseradish to add spiciness to dishes. Wasabi is the most popular hot sauce made from horseradish. While the active ingredient in wasabi is not capsaicin, as in chile-based hot sauces, the sensation is very similar in many ways. The heat can be very intense, and often localizes in the nasal cavities, but in general it fades much more quickly than the heat from chile peppers.

The flavors found in hot sauces vary as greatly as the spiciness, dependent on the variety of pepper used, but also influenced by how the peppers are prepared beforehand. A common example of this is the chipotle flavor found in many hot sauces, which is created by smoking the jalapeno peppers first. The addition of other vegetables, such as tomatoes or onions, also affects the flavor in hot sauces, and is a technique used in many Mexican salsas.

In the past ten years a large number of small manufacturers have begun producing extremely spicy hot sauces. Their names reflect their incredible heat. These hot sauces can range from the very spicy–90,000 Scovilles in one case–to far beyond what should be consumed in an undiluted form. One such sauce has a Scoville rating of over 7,000,000 or nearly one-half the strength of pure capsaicin. To put this in perspective, the defensive weapon, pepper spray, is made from capsaicin, with a common Scoville rating of about 2,000,000.

Commonly, the above-mentioned sauces leads one to discover that there is much more out there to try. This article by Dave DeWitt is one such journey:

Romancing The Sauce

Enjoy…and go out and eat some hot sauce!

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