Hot sauce tasting: The ultimate guide to America’s most popular brands

Hot sauces are there when you need them most. Thanks to the natural preservative properties of chiles, vinegar, and salt — three ingredients nearly all hot sauces contain — hot sauces are usually shelf stable, and thus ready for action at any time. Lunch looking pallid and sad? Leftover pizza in need of some excitement? Just grab the closest hot sauce bottle and begin drizzling.

But you want to know a great secret about most hot sauces? The bestsellers aren’t that spicy. That’s what I found after sampling eight of the most popular hot sauce bottles in the U.S. I picked the group based on Instacart’s recent list of the company’s most frequently purchased hot sauces, numbers from Datassential, a Chicago-based food industry market research firm, and from what I could easily find on Chicago grocery shelves. (Sorry, Texas Pete. I couldn’t track you down.)

We measure the spiciness of a chile using Scoville heat units (SHU). According to “The Chile Pepper Bible” by Judith Finlayson, Scoville levels used to be measured by seeing how much sugar water it took to dilute a chile’s extract before tasters failed to detect any heat. These days, “chemists use high-performance liquid chromatography to analyze capsaicin concentration.” Even with the fancy new equipment, the data is still presented in Scoville heat units.

Turns out most of the bestselling hot sauces are milder than a jalapeno. Cholula only has 1,000 SHU and Tabasco is slightly hotter at 2,500 SHU, while the jalapeno, which “The Chile Pepper Bible” claims is only a “mildly hot” chile, has 3,500 to 10,000 SHU. And that’s nothing close to the mighty habanero, which regularly scores over 300,000 SHU!

Unfortunately, finding reliable SHU scores for all of the hot sauces I tasted was harder than I imagined. A number of websites claim to have the scores for all the hot sauces, but I couldn’t confirm where they got that information. Only a few companies, such as Tabasco and Cholula, display Scoville numbers on their websites. Representatives from Valentina Salsa Picante claimed they have never measured the Scoville ranking of their hot sauce. Both Frank’s RedHot and Huy Fong Foods, the maker of the country’s best selling Sriracha, knew the Scoville numbers for the chiles used in the sauce, but not for the finished sauce.

But hot sauces bring more than just heat to the table. In particular, vinegar plays a huge role, adding a bracing element that makes a hot sauce seem more forceful and incisive on the tongue. Hot sauces with a lot of salt also seem extra assertive at first, though this sensation vanishes after a few seconds.

It’s also important to understand that hot sauces are not all the same. For example, Louisiana-style hot sauce brands, such as Tabasco and Crystal, feature few ingredients and loads of vinegar, while Mexican-style hot sauces, for example Tapatio and Valentina, are usually hotter, thicker and often have a number of spices mixed in. And then there’s Sriracha, which is in a class by itself.

What follows is not a ranking of which ones I think are best, but a breakdown of what you can expect from each, because they all have different roles to play, and I think it's important to point those out. Some have vinegar-forward profiles, while others prefer to hang back and let the chile heat build slowly.

How did I taste them? I spent a few days carefully pouring hot sauces on to spoons and then slurping, which I wouldn’t recommend to an outsider. But I believe it’s time to better understand our hot sauces.

Tabasco

Type: Louisiana-style hot sauce

Ingredients: Distilled vinegar, tabasco chiles, salt

Edmund McIlhenny founded this classic American hot sauce company back in 1868. Unlike most Louisiana-style hot sauces that use cayenne chiles, Tabasco uses tabasco chiles. These are mixed with salt and vinegar before being aged in oak barrels for “up to three years,” according to Tabasco’s website. I was surprised by how much spicier Tabasco was than its competitors. It has an official count of 2,500 to 5,000 SHU. The thin sauce has a heat that lingers on the tongue for a long time. I also picked up on a slightly smoky background, perhaps from the wood barrel aging. Tabasco only has 35 milligrams of salt per teaspoon, which is the second least of the sample group.

“Louisiana” Hot Sauce

Type: Louisiana-style hot sauce

Ingredients: Aged cayenne peppers, vinegar, salt

First created in 1928, “Louisiana” Hot Sauce is much milder than Tabasco, with a heat that pops up for a second before dissipating. But it has a strong initial rush of flavor thanks to a lot of salt. In fact, at 200 milligrams per teaspoon, it takes the prize as the saltiest hot sauce I sampled. If you pour it on something very bland, “Louisiana” Hot Sauce could add a lot of flavor. But if the dish is already salty, it might be overkill.

Frank’s RedHot

Type: Louisiana-style hot sauce

Ingredients: Aged cayenne chiles, distilled vinegar, water, salt and garlic powder

Frank’s Redhot originated in 1920 in Louisiana, but it’s probably best known as the base of the original Buffalo wings recipe from the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York. It has a stronger vinegar kick than Louisiana, and seems slightly milder even though several websites claim that the Scoville rating is about the same. This is probably due to the addition of garlic powder, which provides a rounder, sweeter base. It’s easy to see why this sauce plays so well with chicken wings.

Crystal Hot Sauce

Type: Louisiana-style hot sauce

Ingredients: Aged cayenne chiles, distilled vinegar, salt

Because it uses cayenne chiles, Crystal Hot Sauce has a flavor profile close to Louisiana, albeit with a much bigger cayenne kick. The heat lingers confidently on your tongue for quite a while. Crystal also has a more prominent dark chile flavor, and a slightly subdued vinegar profile compared to Tabasco. This can oddly make it seem less spicy at first, before the chile heat begins its ascent.

Valentina Salsa Picante

Type: Mexican-style hot sauce

Ingredients: water, puya chiles, vinegar, salt, spices, sodium benzoate

Valentina is thick and complex, with an intriguing citrus note that comes at the end. According to a number of online sources, its SHU is almost twice as high as Frank’s or Louisiana, yet the heat never overwhelms the other flavors. This is what I drizzle on my avocado toast at home.

Cholula Hot Sauce

Type: Mexican-style hot sauce

Ingredients: water, chiles (arbol and piquin), salt, vinegar, garlic powder, spices and xanthan gum

Known for its distinctive wood top, Cholula is thinner and slightly spicier than Valentina, with an official rating of 1,000 SHU. It also has a complex chile profile, thanks to the use of two kinds — arbol and piquin. With 110 milligrams of salt per teaspoon, it’s nearly twice as salty as Valentina.

Tapatio

Type: Mexican-style hot sauce

Ingredients: water, red peppers, salt, spices, garlic, acetic acid, xanthan gum, sodium benzoate as a preservative.

In 1971 Jose-Luis Saavedra Sr. created a Mexican-style hot sauce in California called Cuervo. Four years later, it was renamed Tapatio, which is a term for someone from Guadalajara. Tapatio is thick like Valentina, but no one would ever confuse the two. After a few seconds, a genuine heat floods your tongue that eclipses even Cholula. This is the hot sauce you want if you really need to spice something up.

Huy Fong Foods Sriracha

Type: Asian-style hot sauce

Ingredients: fresh red jalapenos, sugar, salt, garlic, acetic acid, potassium sorbate and sodium bisulfite as preservatives, xanthan gum

Sriracha has exploded in popularity over the past several years. While the condiment originated in Thailand, the most popular brand here comes from Huy Fong Foods in California, where it’s been marketed for use in Vietnamese restaurants. You’ll recognize it as the bottle with the large rooster on it. Unlike the hot sauces mentioned above, it has a prominent sweetness that helps to temper the chile heat. So even though some claim it has a higher Scoville rating than many, it doesn’t taste like it.

nkindelsperger@chicagotribune.com