Regarding Hot Sauce

There are only a few hot sauces I know by name but I like them all in their own way.

Did you know that salsa means sauce and is generally reserved to refer to finely ground, liquified ingredients that most definitely include peppers and as such does not refer to diced things like pico de Gallo? I did, and now you do.

Cultures and countries all over the world have spicy dishes and some kind of spicy sauce. Curry can be very spicy and comes from South East Asia like from places like India. Sriracha is used with quite a bit of Asian dishes and South America and Central America are known for their spicy sauces. Every region in between also has hot sauce. The Middle East has spiced-up hummus for example and Eastern Europe uses paprika bell pepper powder in just about everything.

One of the most widely known hot sauces in America is Tabasco. I once knew a family whose children had to eat Tabasco if they cussed or otherwise misbehaved. Tabasco was made in Louisiana in the late 1800s, after the US’ Civil War, and has been available at pretty much every restaurant in North America almost ever since. I found out just today that Baton Rouge, the capital of Louisiana, is named for the little red baton farm hands would use to judge a pepper’s ripeness by. Isn’t that interesting? Anyway, Tabasco is supposedly an old Mexican word, so even this US staple has Mexican roots, like my favorite Latin-named hot sauce, Tapatio, which is thicker than Tabasco, named for the people from Guadalajara, Jalisco in Mexico. This sauce was manufactured starting one-hundred years after the patent for Tabasco was filed in 1970 somewhere in California.

So we have Tabasco, sriracha (Huy Fong Foods, Inc. being the most popular company for that right now) almost but not quite as thick as paste, curry powder and paprika powder and paste, Thai sweet chili sauce, which is oh so good with Filipino lumpia, Tapatio, Cholula, Frank’s Red Hot sauce, Gringo Bandito, and Truff, off the top of my head. Within these are the top five most popular sauces at least at a site called Instacart, this according to foodandwine.com. Can you guess which one’s made the top five?

Well most of you have not heard of let alone tried Gringo Bandito, the hot sauce somehow connected to singer of the Offspring, Brian “Dexter” Holland, so you’d be right to guess it did not crack the top ten even. Truff, is a sauce someone bought me for the holidays and is very distinct since there is truffle oil in it to give it a much earthier, meatier taste.

And that is all I have the patience to write about hot sauce.

Hope you enjoyed it.