My favorite place in college had a hot sauce bar with 20-30 rotating commercial hot sauces. Since then, I've ordered occasionally but with so few ingredients, how difficult could it be to make your own? Tomorrow I'm heading to the supermercado to pick up a variety of cheap peppers. Besides that, really all you need is vinegar, garlic, onion, carrots, etc.

Most people know the standard Tabasco, Cholula, Tapatio, Sriracha, etc but there's tons of better options out there. Here's the top 50 bestselling from the site I use: http://www.hotsauce.com/Most-Popular...uces-s/226.htm

My favorites are:


Bee Sting Honey and Habanero (Costa Rica)

Great balance of sweet and spicy. 6/10 for heat as I remember.


Smak My Ass and Call Me Sally Habanero sauce.

7.5/10 for heat. Kicks anything up a notch.

One of my biggest regrets was accepting a bet to consume 2 beer bottle caps full of this:



Blair's Megadeath. Blair's makes the hottest sauces in the world and I think this is something like #15 where #1 is pure capsaicin extract.

Thought my ears were leaking fluid for 2 hours. After 3 days I decided I was going to the doctor for an ulcer check but luckily the symtoms subsided. Bowel movements were unbearable.

1. Castillo Salsa Habanera
2. Valentina
3. Trappey's (does that count?)

Ever hear of something called "liquid stoopid"

You have to sign a waiver claiming you wont sue them.

I haven't heard of that one. Looked it up and it's 250,000 scoville units. For reference, the Blair's Megadeath I posted above is 550,000 scovilles. Cholula is 3500 scovilles. Hottest sauce I've heard of is 16,000,000.

meh, cholula is the best all around hot suace hands down, its the perfect blend of a little bit of heat and good flavor. All those other sauces that people havent heard of are 90% of the time just gimmicky all heat nonsense stuff like your Blairs Megadeath.

Cholula and that other crap is the Bud Light of the hot sauce world.

And no, maybe 10% of "craft" hot sauces are gimmicky and too intense.

Have you tried Cholula lately? I think they've made it very mild and ruined it but would like a second opinion.

Red Hot Xtra Hot

Valentina is the greatest hot sauce I've ever tasted. They also have an extra hot version. Neither are all that hot, but just taste delicious.

or a spicy peanut sauce base from suriname that I mix water, honey, and creamy peanut butter in. It's delicious.

Speaking of Tabasco, has anyone tried this? I've only seen pictures online and have never seen it in person.



Edited to add:

I also got a bottle of this recently and enjoyed both the heat and the flavor. The heat isn't overwhelming and the flavor is good.

My man.

There are three types of hot sauce lovers. Pussies, psycho's, and men with taste. Tabasco/Franks/Cholula/etc. are ok enough, but who are you kidding? That's just flavored salt sauce. I'll start at the bottom and go up:

5. Lee Kum Kee Siracha: What you thought was Siracha is great, but Lee Kum Kee makes an even better siracha that you can get for a buck at Costco. Check it out. Spicy, but not very, and it's full of flavor.



4. Louisianna Supreme Habanero: 2 bottles for $1. I used to think it was spicy, but not anymore. Don't know if they changed or I changed, but it's still tasty and has noticable spice. It's a fantastic workhorse hot sauce.



3. Breckenridge Ghost Chile & Extract Hot Sauce: Hot as balls, best used in 2-3 drop doses to kick up small bowls of whatever. But unlike some of these potent hot sauces, it actually tastes good by itself. It's just concentrated.



2. Lee Kum Kee Hot Chili Oil: Not exactly a hot sauce. It's crushed peppers in oil, but I could eat this by the spoonful. More salty than spicy, but it's tasty as a mother****er and I can't eat pizza without it.



1. Matouk's: The mack daddy of hot sauces. It's more viscous than you'll be used to, and spicy by any man's measure, but it's a goddamned revelation. There are 5 types, I believe, but the West Indian Salsa Picante is the leader by a good margin. Though all are fantastic. Don't buy it online. Your local Asian market should have it. Same goes for the Lee Kum Kee Chili Oil.

Texas pete, probably chick fil a's fault

http://www.maddog357.com/

it's not nice though. One drop in a bowl of lasagna and it's spicy. A whole teaspoon and it's good night.

I was right into my Daves hot sauces, especially these two:-


Hurtin' Habanero Sauce

Really nice, not too hot either.

And when I needed to really heat things up:-



Ghost Pepper Jolokia Sauce

They stopped selling them at Tesco here (UK) so I've not had them in a while, haven't come across them in any other shops either sadly.

They're website has an even hotter sauce that I want to try.

Although it's not hot at all this deserves a mention because it's awesome:-

This is by far my favorite type of spicy sauce, but too bad it's oil and so calorie dense compared to most hot sauces at 0 calories .

People that use sriracha, if you haven't cooked with it, cook with it instead of just putting it on top sometimes. Shrimp and onions on a hot pan with generous sriracha is so so good. The heat makes the flavor more concentrated and chars onto whatever you're cooking.

Recently I've been using Valentina, since a liter of that stuff is like 3 bucks. Been eating a lot of salad so just use it as a dressing. It's pretty much not spicy at all though, so I've also been chopping up habaneros and sticking it in some pickling juice and adding it in. Valentina + pickled habaneros is pretty damn good.

^ I've never had peri-peri or naga jalokia. Looks like Dave's makes both.

I think the key is finding peppers you know you like/dislike and knowing your heat range. Unfortunately the SHU scale is fairly subjective the hotter you go. I really like habanero and scotch bonnet flavors in my hot sauces, but not jalapeno, cayenne, or chipotle.

Going to order these to try:


This is right in my wheelhouse considering how much I like their other flavor.




Love the ingredients in this one. Sounds great in bloody marys.

I'm not quite sure how to interpret scoville units. Jalapenos generally are not spicy at all, but randomly in some places they actually are, and I'm pretty sure they didn't add anything extra. They supposedly max out at 8k units, while right now I'm eating habaneros that start out at 100k units. What gives?

Yesss I love hot sauce.

For the basic stuff I'm partial to Louisiana brand for chicken and Cholula for just about everything else. I think Cholula is the clear GOAT standard table top hot sauce.

For eggs/breakfast my go to is Yucateco's verde



For everything else I'm a massive fan of Marie Sharp's out of Belize



I haven't had a hot sauce from them I haven't liked, but I'm yet to try them all. A store local to me carries them on occasion, but I believe it's cheap/easy to order online as well.

Lastly, my favorite hot sauce ever came from a restaurant in Vegas called Frank and Fina's Cocina. Might be outdated as I haven't been in almost two years but their habanero is allegedly homemade, and it's a strange almost white sauce with a lot of heat that is fantastic. I've asked/looked around trying to find a white/grey-ish habanero sauce like it and come up empty. No idea what the stuff is but it could be radioactive for all I care and I'd still eat it. Personal recommendation: Steak burrito. They'll bring the habanero in a small side dish and you can apply it as you like. I'd give it a solid 8/10 on the hot scale though, with Cholula being like a 2 and the Yuacteco being a 6.

Yeah, it's not a great unit of measurement. There's certainly a ton of variance in individual peppers:

You're just snacking on individual habaneros? That's pretty hardcore.

i like spicy. but not crazy spicy. my BIL came home w a vial of something a friend of his at mccormick's gave him. one drop/5ga of chili iirc. he was afraid to keep it in the house bcus of the kids lol.

i love garlic/chili sauces. some scotch bonnets.

love me some Nando's hot sauce

I got hooked on Cholula 20 years ago when they always had in on the tables in the cafe at the El Cortez. Added some to my hash browns and was off and running, good stuff.

I like this one. Strong honey flavor.