This article excerpt found on MSNBC.com was sort of a hot sauce 101 view on condiments in general. Skip over the stuff about catsup and mayo…those are for wimps!

Hot Sauces
Hot sauces are a lot more than just chili peppers in a bottle that are designed to burn the roof off your mouth. Many now combine a variety of peppers with other ingredients — sweet jams, sweet relishes and even candy. Last year we Americans bought almost $100 million of these and made one of the fastest growing segments of the condiment category. First rule is to read the label and determine what kind of chile pepper or extract is being used. Some products actually have a Scoville number — which is the rating of the heat of the sauce — the higher the number the hotter the chile. The habenero is the hottest pepper — 100 times hotter than a jalapeno.

Keep in mind the longer you cook a food with a hot sauce, the milder it will become. So if you want that heat — add the sauce after you cook your food and not in the preparation

And for those of you that actually do add a little too much hot sauce to your foods by mistake, the best way to cut the burn is to drink a glass of milk!

The most noteworthy trivia from this article was the amount of money that Americans alone spend on hot sauce. $100 million? That’s a lot of hot sauce orders, folks.