If you ever find yourself in southern Louisiana, the Tabasco factory on Avery Island is worth the visit! You can see the factory floor, try as many variants of the sauce as you want, and learn a ton about the history of the company.
It's also a beautiful property complete with a ecologically important bird sanctuary. Just a fascinating day!
I took a detour to visit there once, many year ago, and it was well worth it. I remember being surprised by how small the factory seemed compared to what I expected.
The US military was the major vector for Tabasco spreading globally. It has been a ubiquitous part of military rations forever. Some other foods became globalized the same way (e.g. spam) but this might be the most successful example of the US military as a food marketing vehicle.
My main issue with Southern-style hot sauce like Tabasco is that it tends to be far too vinegar-forward for my taste. I strongly prefer Mexican-style sauces.
> My main issue with Southern-style hot sauce like Tabasco is that it tends to be far too vinegar-forward for my taste. I strongly prefer Mexican-style sauces.
For what it's worth, this is sort of the point of this sauce- like malt vinegar, it makes more sense as a condiment than an ingredient. A lot of Southern and Cajun dishes don't have much acidity in and of themselves, so a vinegar-forward sauce helps balance them out while adding a little bit of heat as well.
Yucatan Sunshine was my favorite hot sauce for a number of years and then became almost impossible to find in the US Midwest. So interesting to see someone else mention it and on HN of all places! :)
Chili oil is a completely different condiment, as it doesn't have the acid, but it's also often 0mg of sodium. I quite like S&B brand, but there are many Chinese varieties that are quite tasty.
A secret of mine is sesame oil. Delicious, also with no sodium. I use it almost as a soy sauce substitute (but even still at much lower quantities due to the calories/fat). It’s not salty at all, but has a certain punch that I like for similar foods.
S&B La-Yu is made with sesame oil, which is unlike most Chinese varieties. Part of why I like it so much. (It's not 100% sesame oil, but the sesame flavour comes through clearly)
Tabasco is much more of a spice than a sauce, and I reckon thats one of the reasons its so popular. I can put Tabasco on many more foods of different types than I could with Cholula, Franks, Tapatio, Valentina, or Sriracha
That's interesting. I find most of those that you listed, aside from Valentina (I am NOT a fan), as something I can put on basically everything--and actively do.
Out of the hot sauces, Tabasco is my least used these days. 30y ago, it was really all that was available; but, now, we have such a wide and varied option set at just about every restaurant that I find myself almost never using it.
Everyone has their preferences and we keep Crystal Hot Sauce, Tabasco, and whatever hot sauces we've created on hand. Our last hot sauce was a ferment using Genghis Khan Brain peppers, which was absolutely amazing; covered all the bases we wanted in a hot sauce for general use.
For Tabasco, we keep it on hand, because it seems to pair well with a lot of the sauerkraut dishes we prepare.
Before everyone gets into the obvious snobbery and taunts. I was a professional cook for many years and a pretty advanced fermenter myself.
If you don't respect tobasco you don't understand hot sauce. You don't have to like it, I find very little use for it and don't generally keep it around.
But their mastery of a complex and unpredictable natural process, and ability to consistently produce exactly the product they intend to, at this scale, decade after decade, is a nearly incomprehensible feat of food production.
And for some foods you exactly do want "spicy vinegar" which is pretty much their flavor profile. You gotta respect it to respect yourself.
I can also respect the mastery that results in every keg of Heineken being functionally identical. I don't have to like the stuff. Or, heaven forbid, drink it.
Anyone who's brewed beer can understand two things at once.
1) The brewmasters of mass-market lagers are legitimate masters of their craft, because that style leaves absolutely no room for error and nowhere to hide mistakes. You can screw up an IPA and cover it in hops, at least to a point. You can screw up a porter or stout and cover it in malt. You have to nail a lager.
2) The product itself is still usually insipid, flavorless, and not worth drinking.
I respect tabasco for what it is, and I do use it when I want "spicy vinegar", but I often want more heat than vinegar.
But yes, the consistency of tabasco is very impressive, especially given how simple the recipe is (and how little salt is used, compared to similar sauces!)
(Also, lovely to see a fan of DCSS in the wild!! Going to play a felid summoner later.)
if you live in a place where tomatoes still have some flavor try this: cut a couple tomatoes in small cubes / triangles, add a tablespoon of olive oil, a teaspoon of red wine vinegar, a dash of tabasco, crumble some good tuna in it (like Tonnino or Ortiz) and sprinkle some oregano and salt on top. Goes well with crusty bread, preferably toasted.
That was my fathers' go to summer meal in Italy and I can't think of anything else I'd rather eat when it's hot outside, preferably with a cold lager.
I will take just about any hot sauce over Tabasco. If a place doesn't have Cholula, they're not a good restaurant (or are a _very_ good restaurant, and don't have hot sauce at all).
I don’t want a hot sauce to do more than add some acid and heat to my eggs or po’boy sandwich, therefore Tabasco. I find others too present and opinionated, making the dish just taste like the hot sauce.
Tabasco has a lot of acid and salt in it; in addition to (very minor/mild) flavor the big additions Tabasco brings to the party are Acid, Salt, and some heat. Cholula is more like a taco sauce, Tabasco does a lot to the food it is on. If you have a poor sense of smell, you'll probably enjoy Tabasco more than Cholula because it's adding a lot of chemical process, not just the minor flavor.
Tabasco is hit or miss, usually good with seafood. Tapatio is my preferred hot sauce with eggs or avocado! And the price point is ideal. Cholua is best with dinners, but the price point can get in the way.
>If a place doesn't have Cholula, they're not a good restaurant
If you're comparing only the taste profile of the two, then perhaps, but Cholula is not as hot by comparison, at least to me. Which is why a decent restaurant (US) needs both. I don't like the excessive vinegary taste of tabasco, my work around is to mix it with ketchup on the plate.
The annoying thing with hot-sauces is that they're somewhat like a vintage product and longer it ferments the more lag the decisions have on the sales.
The management decisions to scale up production take years to materialize on your food.
Even if you hate what you got out of a bottle you bought this week, that taste is not what made the sauce popular years ago. Popularity seems to cause a quality fade in everything that scales out of a single factory.
For example, the Sriracha from 7 years ago tasted totally different than today & it is the peppers that changed, not the recipe. Palo Alto fire fighters has gotten more cumin than chillis as the spicy stuff goes to the XX version. The Athabascan sauces I've loved from Alaska have slowly morphed sweeter and maple.
Tabasco for all its faults hasn't changed that much in the 20 years I've been having it.
Huy Fong also famously had a blowup with their main pepper supplier that ended in litigation and the supplier starting a competing brand, so it's not surprising their Sriracha now tastes differently, given they literally had to source different peppers for it.
I rarely have Tabasco. I don’t think it’s very good. It’s too watery, too much vinegar, not enough heat and the flavor is too sour forward. I also like my hot sauces where all the sourness comes from the lactic acid from fermentation. I’m not sure if Tabasco adds vinegar after the fact, but it feels like it does.
Another thing I really like in hot sauces is the slight carbonation fizz you get from the still fermenting hot sauce which isn’t in Tabasco or for that matter in anything you can buy in stores.
Making hot sauce at home is extremely cheap and very easy. I have a lot of hot sauce maybe more than a gallon a month and if I wanted to buy that in stores I would be spending hundreds or thousands. The stuff I make it home probably costs $20 in ingredients for the entire month.
The steps are simple get a 64 ounce mason jar get a fermentation lid for it. Fill it up completely to the top with chopped up peppers. Add a 3% salt solution to it all the way to the top. Get a glass weight to push all the peppers down and ensure they’re under the solution. You can add a clove of garlic if you want and then just let it sit for 7 to 10 days and then blend it. If you get fuzzy mold at the top, throw it away, but you will almost never get mold if you ensure that all the peppers are fully submerged.
western world, some part of it to be more precise, not exposed to rich variety of other sources of spiciness...
Entire continents work without tabasco just fine. Would be a junior mistake trying to make some curry with it for example. Just like its a junior mistake putting in such headline, unless its click bait
I've traveled to about 50 countries, on every continent except Antarctica and I've found Tabasco in every country I've been to, from Tajikistan to Tunisia to Turkey to Taiwan. At a minimum, it can be found at 99% of hotels that serve an "international" style breakfast with scrambled or fried eggs, and I have found it in enough convenience stores in some of the most remote places that it is highly unlikely that western visitors at hotel buffets are the entirety of the domestic market. It may not be the first option for adding heat to food, or even the second, but it's basically always an option, basically everywhere I've seen.
International hotels, I get it. Artificial western bubble without a single touch of reality of the country surrounding such hotel. Of course its there, why it shouldnt be, for folks such as you who expect it, along with continental breakfast. I'd buy it too if I would be running such hotel.
That is not reference on anything, double that for food nor even understanding the place, culture, people, where they come from and where they are heading etc.
If discovering such places is one of purposes of your travels, may I suggest interacting with locals more, eating where they eat, speeping in hotels they sleep in. Backpacking is the best way for such experiences but its not for folks expecting western comfort everywhere they go. In India for example, you wont find it much, definitely not in restaurants. In China, I havent seen it neither.
Well, you're free to make whatever mistaken assumptions you like about the kind of places I go and the kind of travel I do. You're wrong, obviously, but it's not like I can prove that any more than you can.
Some unlikely places where I've found Tabasco, though:
- at a cockfighting ring in rural Mindanao, Philippines.
- in a yurt camp in rural central Kyrgyzstan only accessible by horse
- at the galley on a Taiwanese container ship transiting the Panama canal
- seemingly everywhere in Japan, from cafes to fancy restaurants to izakayas to convenience stores on remote islands to random old peoples' houses in the countryside. "Tabasuko" is literally the Japanese word for hot sauce.
You are perhaps directionally correct if you say that many places have a non-tabasco table condiment which is their first choice for spice, and if that's the point you are trying to make then I will agree and let that be that. But in the "hot sauce" category, if they have "hot sauce", it's more likely than not that "tabasco" will be an option, and that is the point I am making here. There are of course certain places where I found it to be more or less common, but that's hardly surprising. However I reiterate: in my (probably 99th percentile well-traveled, mostly in out of the way places, especially in asia) experience you can find tabasco basically anywhere on the planet, including some somewhat surprising places, to the extent that I think that, if there is such a thing as "the world's hot sauce", it is without doubt which hot sauce it would be.
It's also a beautiful property complete with a ecologically important bird sanctuary. Just a fascinating day!
My main issue with Southern-style hot sauce like Tabasco is that it tends to be far too vinegar-forward for my taste. I strongly prefer Mexican-style sauces.
For what it's worth, this is sort of the point of this sauce- like malt vinegar, it makes more sense as a condiment than an ingredient. A lot of Southern and Cajun dishes don't have much acidity in and of themselves, so a vinegar-forward sauce helps balance them out while adding a little bit of heat as well.
I liked one called Yucatan Sunshine as well, but it's hard to find these days
It's readily available on Amazon, now.
A secret of mine is sesame oil. Delicious, also with no sodium. I use it almost as a soy sauce substitute (but even still at much lower quantities due to the calories/fat). It’s not salty at all, but has a certain punch that I like for similar foods.
Out of the hot sauces, Tabasco is my least used these days. 30y ago, it was really all that was available; but, now, we have such a wide and varied option set at just about every restaurant that I find myself almost never using it.
https://theempirebuilderspodcast.com/244-pace-salsa/
Tabasco is OK, but Pace is the sauce that we always consume before it expires.
No thanks.
Thank you kind stranger.
For Tabasco, we keep it on hand, because it seems to pair well with a lot of the sauerkraut dishes we prepare.
If you don't respect tobasco you don't understand hot sauce. You don't have to like it, I find very little use for it and don't generally keep it around.
But their mastery of a complex and unpredictable natural process, and ability to consistently produce exactly the product they intend to, at this scale, decade after decade, is a nearly incomprehensible feat of food production.
And for some foods you exactly do want "spicy vinegar" which is pretty much their flavor profile. You gotta respect it to respect yourself.
1) The brewmasters of mass-market lagers are legitimate masters of their craft, because that style leaves absolutely no room for error and nowhere to hide mistakes. You can screw up an IPA and cover it in hops, at least to a point. You can screw up a porter or stout and cover it in malt. You have to nail a lager.
2) The product itself is still usually insipid, flavorless, and not worth drinking.
But yes, the consistency of tabasco is very impressive, especially given how simple the recipe is (and how little salt is used, compared to similar sauces!)
(Also, lovely to see a fan of DCSS in the wild!! Going to play a felid summoner later.)
https://dcss.garden/0.34.1/seed/45203
That was my fathers' go to summer meal in Italy and I can't think of anything else I'd rather eat when it's hot outside, preferably with a cold lager.
If you're comparing only the taste profile of the two, then perhaps, but Cholula is not as hot by comparison, at least to me. Which is why a decent restaurant (US) needs both. I don't like the excessive vinegary taste of tabasco, my work around is to mix it with ketchup on the plate.
The management decisions to scale up production take years to materialize on your food.
Even if you hate what you got out of a bottle you bought this week, that taste is not what made the sauce popular years ago. Popularity seems to cause a quality fade in everything that scales out of a single factory.
For example, the Sriracha from 7 years ago tasted totally different than today & it is the peppers that changed, not the recipe. Palo Alto fire fighters has gotten more cumin than chillis as the spicy stuff goes to the XX version. The Athabascan sauces I've loved from Alaska have slowly morphed sweeter and maple.
Tabasco for all its faults hasn't changed that much in the 20 years I've been having it.
Aging takes as long as it needs, but I don't think that the periods are that great for sauces.
Formula tweaking is usually done for costs reasons.
Another thing I really like in hot sauces is the slight carbonation fizz you get from the still fermenting hot sauce which isn’t in Tabasco or for that matter in anything you can buy in stores.
Making hot sauce at home is extremely cheap and very easy. I have a lot of hot sauce maybe more than a gallon a month and if I wanted to buy that in stores I would be spending hundreds or thousands. The stuff I make it home probably costs $20 in ingredients for the entire month.
The steps are simple get a 64 ounce mason jar get a fermentation lid for it. Fill it up completely to the top with chopped up peppers. Add a 3% salt solution to it all the way to the top. Get a glass weight to push all the peppers down and ensure they’re under the solution. You can add a clove of garlic if you want and then just let it sit for 7 to 10 days and then blend it. If you get fuzzy mold at the top, throw it away, but you will almost never get mold if you ensure that all the peppers are fully submerged.
Also: Sriracha begs to differ.
Entire continents work without tabasco just fine. Would be a junior mistake trying to make some curry with it for example. Just like its a junior mistake putting in such headline, unless its click bait
That is not reference on anything, double that for food nor even understanding the place, culture, people, where they come from and where they are heading etc.
If discovering such places is one of purposes of your travels, may I suggest interacting with locals more, eating where they eat, speeping in hotels they sleep in. Backpacking is the best way for such experiences but its not for folks expecting western comfort everywhere they go. In India for example, you wont find it much, definitely not in restaurants. In China, I havent seen it neither.
You may revisit your opinions afterwards.
Some unlikely places where I've found Tabasco, though:
- at a cockfighting ring in rural Mindanao, Philippines.
- in a yurt camp in rural central Kyrgyzstan only accessible by horse
- at the galley on a Taiwanese container ship transiting the Panama canal
- seemingly everywhere in Japan, from cafes to fancy restaurants to izakayas to convenience stores on remote islands to random old peoples' houses in the countryside. "Tabasuko" is literally the Japanese word for hot sauce.
You are perhaps directionally correct if you say that many places have a non-tabasco table condiment which is their first choice for spice, and if that's the point you are trying to make then I will agree and let that be that. But in the "hot sauce" category, if they have "hot sauce", it's more likely than not that "tabasco" will be an option, and that is the point I am making here. There are of course certain places where I found it to be more or less common, but that's hardly surprising. However I reiterate: in my (probably 99th percentile well-traveled, mostly in out of the way places, especially in asia) experience you can find tabasco basically anywhere on the planet, including some somewhat surprising places, to the extent that I think that, if there is such a thing as "the world's hot sauce", it is without doubt which hot sauce it would be.