Hot sauce

If you do buy commercial hot sauce, what is your preference?


Edit:  if you do make your own, can you share the recipe?

We only buy Louisiana Hot Sauce aka La Hot Sauce.

Made by Summit Hill Foods, New Iberia, La

Ingredients: Aged Peppers, Vinegar, Salt.

I make more hot sauce than we use, so it builds up in the pantry and I have to find places to sell it or give it away. On top of that, I'm a sucker for commercial hot sauce -- when our co-op starts carrying a new one, I'll invariably buy it. Interestingly, if I go to one of those stores with 500 hot sauces, it feels like a tacky gimmick and I'm not tempted.

Sambal is my single most-used hot sauce. It's not very hot and has a lot of garlic. It's good on everything and especially eggs. You've probably seen this one:


Maybe that's not the kind of sauce you mean though, so I'm also going to point to a Yucatan-style habanero sauce. This brand is widely available around me. The bright green (third from the left) was my staple until I discovered the smokey/charred black-label (second from the right):


Cackalacky is mild -- use a lot to make things saucy and a little spicy. It's more about the other flavors, I think. It mostly gets honorable mention for the fun name. :-)


These are all sauces you can use to make a food a little saucy. I also have super-hot sauces that use those little plastic restrictor lids so that you get just a little squirt when you shake it and maybe you just put three squirts into a pot of chili that ended up too mild. But those aren't really my preference.

My preference is Tennessee Sunshine for heat with flavor. We were introduced to it at a restaurant in Colorado in the early 90s and bought a couple of bottles.  Then, maybe 15 years ago, I bought a case in North Carolina.

Christopher, do you mind sharing your hot sauce recipe? my chillies are ripening, and I rather not buy any hot sauce anymore.

Hans, great question!  I failed to ask.

Christopher, I saw this question as something to be answered in the eyes of the reader.  So, if tangy catsup is hot sauce to the reader, it is fine with me.
I was hoping to get introduced to a few products that are new to me.

i too make a fair amount of hot sauce, both vinegar-based recipes and the kind with fermented peppers (and hybrids!), but if i’m purchasing it, my long-time favorite is Marie Sharp’s from belize, specifically the green habanero/nopal cactus one.

hans muster wrote:Christopher, do you mind sharing your hot sauce recipe? my chillies are ripening, and I rather not buy any hot sauce anymore.

I don't really have a recipe, but I'll outline my technique.

1) Ferment chiles. these can be whole chiles with a slice in the tip, immersed in brine -- the way you'd ferment cukes to make dill pickles. Or the chilies can be coarsely chopped and mixed with salt to fit more into a batch. Or they can be blended fairly dry and fermented under a salt cap. (those options are listed from newby-friendly to more advanced). If you're fermenting under an airlock, that's fine. If it's an open crock, mix the brine/mash every day. Ferment for five weeks or more ("more" can mean five years, but that's more advanced). Your brine can be 2% or 5% or whatever the hell -- you don't need an analytical balance for this process.
2) You probably want other stuff in there -- garlic, carrots, herbs, fruit whatever. Maybe you'll ferment it in the same vessel as the chiles, maybe separately and then mix in to taste.
3) Blend the stuff and run it through a fine sieve. You want to exclude the chile skins, seeds, stems, &c. from your sauce. (That stuff that stays in the sieve, though -- dehydrate it, powder it and sprinkle it on everything.) If you're going for a very specific balance and mixture of flavors -- just the right hint of pineapple with the habanero, then blend them separately, mix and taste. I never do that but people swear by it and it makes sense. I just toss the chiles and garlic and whatever into the vitamix and let it go.
4) Bottle and enjoy. Lots of people insist you have to pasteurize it in boiling water while the bottle is upside-down or some shit, but I don't ever do that. I just bottle it and sometimes slap a little apple cider vinegar very gently on the top -- I don't want the acetic acid flavor, because lactic acid tastes better, but I do want the interface at the top hostile to pathogens. That's an unnecessary step, but I've done it. The sauce I'm describing keeps in the cupboard for five years. when it finally goes "bad" it's just oxidized and not as yummy or pretty, still perfectly safe.

If y'all have more questions about this, that's fine but I'll probably split this out to it's own thread in the fermentation forum.

A salt forward hot sauce, I was introduced to The Pepper Plant hot sauce at a small Mexican themed diner in Upstate New York.



It goes well with a lot of things. I will purposefully reduce the salt added to a dish if I know I am going to use this sauce though.

I would call it an approachable level of heat and spice. A mild hot sauce that has enough kick to know it is hot sauce.

Cholula - original or Chipotle, for a lot of things, and avocado hot sauce for pretty much anything, and sometimes, just horseradish sauce. John makes a lot of sauces off the cuff, too, so no real recipes, just starts (usually) with pan drippings, and starts adding whatever he's in the mood for, that will complement whatever we're eating...

Carla Burke wrote:Cholula - original or Chipotle, for a lot of things, and avocado hot sauce for pretty much anything, and sometimes, just horseradish sauce.

The Cholula green pepper sauce is a staple in my house. It is soooo good on darn near everything. I'll have to try the avocado hot sauce!

Cholula Green Pepper Hot Sauce

I'll have to look for the green pepper one! Our absolute favorite is that avocado hot sauce, though. I've tried other avocado hot sauces, but... meh. This one is seriously the bester, in my honest opinion.

I bought a bottle of Cholula Green Pepper and a bottle of the Original.  I will keep my eyes open for the others.  

I go through El Yucateco habanero sauce and Texas Pete on a weekly basis.