I eat hot sauce on everything. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, I’ve got a hot sauce for it. Hot is tasty. Hotter’s tastier. Hot sauce is my life. I collect hot sauces, I make hot sauces and my son and I possess a hot sauce emporium. We stock our hot sauce store with every imaginable hot sauce. He likes hot sauce more than I do so I suppose that means we bear the hot sauce gene. We are always looking for new ways to process a chili and compel it to taste better.
But we run into folks regularly that originate from a different gene pool. They don’t like hot sauce. They know little about hot sauce. They need help. So we chose to compose a real short introduction on hot sauce basics since most of these people have brief concentration rates and a limited understanding of facts. Probably since they don’t eat hot sauce.
In easiest language, the “hot” in hot sauce is from natural material known as capsaicinoids, found principally in the ribs and stem portion of the pepper. (If you want to be technical, chili is not a pepper. Pepper is the black Piper nigrum fruit known for its place in the duo salt & pepper.) Capsaicin is the chief capsaicinoid to cause the fiery sensation and, so you know, it’s not doing you any destruction even though it’s telling your brain it is.
The hot in hot sauce is measured using an ancient (early 1900’s) system called the Scoville scale, named after pharmacist Wilbur Scoville. A truly abstruse, truly inaccurate system but one that is the standard when they’re speaking of hot sauce heat. The only consistently accurate way to quantify hot sauce “heat” is to use a system known as gas chromatography. But most hot sauce manufacturers do not want to use a pricey and tedious way to quantify the heat of their sauces so we’re pretty much stuck with what the producers tell us. But using the Scoville scale, 16 million Scoville scale units would be the hottest hot sauce scientifically possible to reach. So if you see a container of hot sauce that claims a 17 million Scoville scale rating, be unconvinced. On the milder side would be the classic Tabasco sauce which has a Scoville rating of around 5,000 Scoville units.
If you’re just starting out with hot sauce and uncertain what to select, take a quick look at the ingredients and see if you can identify the chili the producer used. If you want to begin on the milder end of the heat scale, try a sauce made with a jalapeno, cayenne or Tabasco chilli. However, if you’re ready to go to the high end of the hot sauce spectrum, try a hot sauce made with either the habanero, scotch bonnet, piri-piri or datil chili.
If you’re looking for a hot sauce somewhere beyond the hottest hot sauce, then you don’t need this primer course. We’ll save our discussion on the extracts and jolokia sauces for another day.
By Jay Potter, hot sauce connoisseur, spreading the love and warmth that comes from hottest hot sauce appreciation.