Fire It Up: Hot Sauces Galore

By Jonathan Berohn

If you don’t agree that the deep burn of hot sauce is the best—OK one of the top five—physical sensations around, you might want to stop here. On the other hand, if you don’t feel that a meal is complete if you don’t have to wipe your eyes and blow your nose, this article is for you. For “chile heads,” finding that perfect sauce is second only to finding the prefect pepper—but that is another column. Here our focus is the sauce.

Sauce, Sauce Everywhere

One of the happy side effects of the upsurge in hot sauce popularity is the sudden appearance of hot sauces in your typical grocery store and supermarket. Where once it was only basic Tabasco (which of course should be held in proper reverence) you can now find a decent selection of stuff right around the corner. For the true believer, though, the sauce that the average consumer will buy falls well short. Fortunately there are plenty of options to let you sear your tongue to your heart’s delight.

Hot Sauce Companies

The Internet, not surprisingly, has also been a boon to hot sauce freaks. If you have a sauce you like, you can probably track it down on the web. Tabasco, for example, offers its traditional sauce as well as its more exotic varieties like chipotle and habanero through its web site. If your taste happens to run more toward the mind numbingly intense, you might try Dave’s Insanity Sauces. Dave uses hot pepper extract to give his sauces their patented kick. You seriously need to be cautious with Dave’s. I’ve seen it cause vomiting, and one storeowner I know loves to tell a story about a drunk frat boy wetting himself whilst trying to show off to his friends. Still, though, if you need the heat Dave’s is hard to beat.

The Ultimate Selection

If you don’t have a favorite sauce, or if you just want to diversify, the best bet I’ve found on the net is. Both Mo Hotta Mo Betta. MHMB has a full selection of just about any hot sauce you could imagine. They also go to the trouble of rating each sauce’s heat by listing its Scoville Rating (the heat index for hot peppers). If you can’t find it at MHMB, chances are you’re not going to find it period.