Let's talk hot sauce!

I don’t remember if we’ve had a discussion about hot sauce, or spicy foods in general, so let’s dig into it!

For my own list, the top of it these days and for the last few years is Sriracha! Easily. It’s amazing on eggs, pizza, mac n’ cheese, you name it, it’s awesome.

I’m also a fan of Cholula, but haven’t been into it since Sriracha hit the scene.

And a good old stand by, what I spruced up my pizza with and inspired this thread, some Tabasco sauce! Green is a great alternative, though I’m eating traditional red.

Any other great hot sauces out there? I’ve tried a lot, and I’m a big fan of flavor over raw heat, but I would hate to think there is something out there I’m not putting on my burritos and the like that I should be!

I love, love, love Cholula chili garlic. It’s pretty mild, but great flavor, which is what matters to me. If I want pure heat, I can get that other ways.

For Mexican style hot sauces, I’m all about Valentina these days. The thick, almost velvety texture is glorious, and the mixture of spicy-tangy is great on Tex-Mex fare. Scroll up in the “Cooked Lately” thread for awhile and you’ll see some very tasty flautas I made that are drizzled with a healthy helping of it.

Like you, though, @Scotch_Lufkin, I mostly go for Sriracha these days. The spicy-garlic notes, texture, heat level, etc. just hit at the right point for me to work on a lot of things. It’ll go onto banh mi sandwiches when I make those, get mixed into Mayo with some sugar and maybe a little rice wine vinegar for spicy mayo for breakfast sandwiches, get drizzled over my fried eggs or omelets, etc. It’s just great.

When I do break out Cajun cuisine, I take a tip from my pawpaw Riley’s playbook and exclusively use Crystal-brand Louisiana-style hotsauce. I’m not sure I could convey to you precisely how it differs from Tobasco (it’s been a decade or more since I had the big T), but it just feels “right” for red beans and rice, gumbo, po boys, etc., and I have many fond memories of the mean old man shaking his big glass jar of it over everything mawmaw Joyce prepared, much to her chagrin :)

I buy chohula original and tabasco chipotle in bulk by the gallon from amazon, then fill plastic squeeze bottles. Haven’t tried chohula chipotle or chile-garlic yet, I’ll add them to my next shipment.

Depends upon the level of heat. When I was younger I was the guy that would taste napalm for a lark.

A story from a past life:

When I was younger (how many of my comments begin this way?)(too many) I was hanging out with a girlfriend. We were in Greenwich Village in NYC. We both loved spicy food. We were lucky enough to come across a small shop that sold nothing but various hot pepper concoctions.

They had a table with a bunch of open jars, plastic spoons and tortilla chips.

So while chatting with the owner we sampled several of the sauces and enjoyed them all. With the bravado of a couple of young morons, we asked why there wasn’t anything “really hot” on the table.

She grinned and said that the really hot stuff (I am not joking) was kept behind the counter.

So she brought out a jar of sauce and warned us to only try a very tiny bit. The friend and I laughed. (This probably sounded like the laugh of a pair of drunks stepping out of a low flying plane over an active volcano, wearing blindfolds)

We both took a chip and dipped it into the jar and scarfed them down.

The next half hour or so are a blur. Some of the screaming was probably mine. No doubt the higher pitched ones.

I got some relief by pounding my head against the walls. The girlfriend got some relief by pounding on me.

I do not know the name of the evil that we consumed that day. But this does not matter. The night was supposed to be spent in lascivious revelry.

Instead it was spent fighting each other for access to the bathroom and howling. We loved each other so much.

Breakfast was milk. Ice cream. And yogurt. There was no oral sex for several days.

Don’t ask.

That was amazing. I love the idea of you two coming back to that vendor the next day to find out what that shit was, only to find a vacant lot, a for sale sign covered in dust, and the howling wind that sounds exactly like laughter.

I had a similar experience on my honeymoon, actually. Young, dumb, and full of hot sauce I guess. I ordered some food in Mexico, my wife and I had an amazing time in Mexico, and the waiters were very cool and patient with us. But I just had to ask for “your hottest sauce” and they both exchanged a glance, grinned, and brought me out a little container of some sort of very grainy and oily sauce that I dumped on my food. I am pretty sure to this day I am only tasting at 80% of full human capacity.

I love hot sauces. Tobacco chipotle is solid, but Chiluba and Valentina are my standards these days. Valentina extra spicy is my main one.

I do sample many other sauces as I see them, and I’ve also done the ‘bring your hottest’ gig. Thing is it doesn’t phase me. Sure it’s spicy, and I use it sparingly, but more than a few times I’d put a dot on someone’s chip, watch them eat, then douse mine. Admittedly the main appeal of that is the look of utter incredulity, not the taste. Because, let’s be honest, past a certain point there is a distinct degradation in taste.

It’s just hot.

The ideal, for me, hot sauce falls around the chipotle heat level. Nothing like a good chipotle or poblano.

@ArmandoPenblade one downside to Chicago? Crystal hot sauce is hard to come by. You can get it, but maybe only 1 in 10 grocers carries it.

Akabanga is a very good, straightforward Scotch Bonnet chili oil from Rwanda. A nice, clean heat that’s especially good on eggs.

That’s pretty damn tragic. Louisiana brand is an okay substitute, but a little too sour, IIRC. Or maybe mine just went bad :)

Cholula or bust. It’s not like hot hot, but it gives just the right amount of tang and zing.

Scientific terms.

Tabasco Chipotle is the best hot sauce.

My fridge has Tapatio (still prefer it to other similar hot sauces), Huy Fong Sriracha and Secret Aardvark Habenero at all times and some rotating ones. Right now the rotating ones are Yuzu Pao and Ginger Pao (ginger is great, yuzu doesn’t see much use – it’s good but I can’t figure out how to make it fit anything I cook). Tabasco Chipotle is in the rotation and this local place Oregon Brineworks makes an awesome fermented hot sauce too.

My wife and kid went to the local most-everything-from-most-everywhere grocery store a couple of Christmases ago and bought me 5 or 6 hot sauces. They picked this one just because of the plastic brain, but it was the winner of the bunch. VERY hot, but also tasty.

(I didn’t want to do this without the tag, but $14 is way too much to pay for this if you have any other choice)

My cousin owns a hot sauce company, so I should probably post it.
http://www.bigdaddysassburn.com/

I feel like the only person in the world who despises sriracha. It has way too much flavor for me. If I want to heat something good up, I don’t want to also add a clove of garlic and a sweet taste to it. If I want to heat something up that is boring as shit and has no flavor, then I’ve chosen the wrong thing to eat. But if it wasn’t my choice and I still have to eat it, I’ll take tabasco over sriracha any day.

My favorite local taco place has excellent red sauce. Full of smoky heat that compliments their food. I think it might just be ground up chipotles with a little vinegar (maybe) and water, but I can’t get them to tell me. :)

I just ran into Valentino recently and I really like the flavor but it’s not very hot but I see CraigM mentions an extra spicy, I’ll have to look for it.

From an early discussion around here I tried the Tabasco Chipotle and it’s ok when I want that strong Chipotle flavor but it’s not my go to for spice.

Tabasco Habanero though that stuff is awesome. I love the flavor and the heat level it just right for my tastes. Every morning I have my sodium laden V8 Sea Salt and Clam with loads of black pepper, Worcester and my Habanero. It wakes the taste buds up.

Just check for the black label @Chronic

This is my favorite hot sauce ever. I got it from a chef friend who worked in a restaurant in Coney Island next to the Cyclones ballpark. Sadly all gone and no way to get more.

A big bottle of Huy Fong Siracha is in our fridge for guests who want some hot sauce. We use both of the below. We usually mix both of the Yak Sing sauces and use on just about everything. The XO sauce is not for everyone, as it contains lots of seafood, giving it a very unique flavor, but damn is it good.

Finally, we have a stoneware container on the counter with a homemade sauce: lots of various chopped chili peppers (i couldn’t even tell you the name, buy in large bags from the Korean grocery store), some chopped jalapenos, chopped garlic, chopped green onions, and some salt. Hot vegetable oil is then poured all over the mixture until the container is full, then it sits until it’s used up and we make another batch.

Geez, I feel like a heatoholic in this thread. Go-to’s are what I refer to as light heat: Cholula, Tapatio, and Sriracha. I also have some smokier sided sauces that are especially good adding into cooked dishes for the smoke, my fave of those being El Yucateco Chipotle. Then I have the heat sauces, and I like them with flavor as well as heat, so I tend to keep them around the range between a Cayenne and a Habanero, and of those I like El Yucateco (green or red.) I have a ton that get hotter than that which I rarely end up using, like anything by Dave’s Insanity usually. I have a few one-offs I’ve bought from restaurants and some I’ve never opened.

Beyond all that, I prefer just straight peppers in cooked food. Like some of these from last year. I should try to make a sauce. And of the ones I grew, Cayenne was my absolute favorite. Between a Jalapeno and a Habanero, tiny, so easy to portion into a dish, and very flavorful, with a deeper heat and a slightly spicy taste of something I can’t quite place.

For cooking and making homemade salsa, super-cheap chipotles in adobo chopped up add a ton of flavor. They’re incredibly delicious, but actually can be quite surprisingly spicy for some reason. Jalepenos aren’t typically spicy at all, but sometimes (and only sometimes) those canned chipotles can blow your eyes out the back of your head.