Hot Sauce - A Quick Culinary Pick Up

To make a good hot sauce use a good hot chile pepper.

• Tabasco® Sauce (McIlhenny) uses aged Tabasco peppers [arguably both the world's greatest and most often underestimated hot sauce]

•  other hot sauces based on the tabasco chile pepper, including:
• Crystal Hot Sauce (also uses aged Tabasco peppers)
• Franks Hot Sauce
• Louisiana Hot Sauce

• other hot sauces:
• Melinda's (habanero)
• Sambal Oelek (Sambal Ulek)
• Harissa
• Barbecue sauce
• Texas Pete

Plus more than 7,000 additional chile-pepper-based commercial hot-sauce brands.

Some hot sauces contain only chiles, vinegar and salt. Other hot sauces have a great many additional ingredients including:

• black pepper
• cumin
• coriander
• turmeric
• fragrant peanut oil
• extra virgin olive oil
• sugar
• garlic
• onion
• ginger (many people do not appreciate exactly how hot ginger can be - see below*).
• Szechuan pepper

Some might argue, though, that the character of a hot sauce depends most on the character of the chile peppers used. For instance, if a hot sauce is based on the smoke-dried ripe Jalapeno chile pepper (aka chipotle) then the hot sauce will have a smokey earthy flavor. Habanero based hot sauces sometimes just bring heat. They can be so hot that very little actual flavor can be detected.

*Indian curries are made hotter by adding ginger - as in the expression "ginger it up."  At a Thai curry restaurant, however, there will frequently be bottles of hot sauce on every table.