I like a good hot sauce.
It’s not, like, my personality, but I enjoy them. There are enough different hot sauces that having a bit of a collection of them is reasonable.
Cholula is a mainstay, working equally well on Mexican and egg-based dishes. Although admit Tabasco is my general go-to. The green Tabasco works particularly well on Chipotle for whatever reason. Tapatio is right in there working maybe slightly better on the rice-y-er Mexican stuff. Red Hot on my chili or wings, absolutely.
Those are all big names. Hot sauce has quite a long tail.
There plenty of Tier-2 (in popularity) sauces. Think Tiger Sauce, which is quite sweet and tends to work well on dishes that evoke that anyway (I’m thinking sautĂ©ed peppers and onions, for instance). Yellow Bird is having their hot sauce moment lately — I quite like the literally yellow habanero style — which has a tang to it that works well with chicken I think. Roasted veggies like carrots and broccoli? There I like the Portland all-timer Secret Aardvark. Much Asian food is born to pair with Sriracha, of course. I’m a big fan of Heatly lately.
I’d call Tier-3 that whole genre of hot sauces people buy you when they go on vacation and stop into a store that only sells hot sauces (right next to the oil & vinegar shop!). These are the Johnny’s Burning Butthole sauces and Sally’s Simmering Sweetspot. They have cheezy cartoon graphics on them and there are hundreds and hundreds of them, and some of them are perfectly good, but you never quite know what you are going to get and it’s easy to forget even after you’ve tried it.
Tier-4 is the bottle you got from the local restaurant in town with an ambitious chef trying to diversify income streams.
I’ve taken too long to get to my point though.
SOME of these hot sauces say “Refrigerate after opening.” on the bottle, a rule you probably shouldn’t break (unless you’re a Johnny’s Burning Butthole kinda guy).
SOME of these hot sauces… don’t.
And my theory is: the bigger and more successful the hot sauce brand, the less likely it requires refridgeration.
I ain’t trying to knock fridge brands. Yellow Bird, Heatly, Secret Aardvark are all favorites and require it (along with all Sriracha’s, which makes more sense as it’s so ketchup-like).
I will admit though that I don’t love it. I don’t really want a whole area in my fridge that’s loaded with hot sauces. That veers too closely into personality territory. Much easier to have some basic cabinet space for them.
So anyway. If you wanna go huge with your hot sauce brand, you can’t require refrigeration. The next big-Tabasco needs to sit right out on those diner tables with the salt and pepper.
This year I made my own hot sauces using home-grown peppers and white wine vinegar. I even went to the extent of buying a pH tester, because the internet told me “pH level needs to be below 4.6 to prevent harmful bacteria growth, but ideally, it should be 3.4 or below”
Anyway, long story short: my bottles of 3.4pH hot sauce are now growing mold in the corner of my kitchen
lol.
do you have any theories on how you could prevent the mold? Even lower pH?
(as in, outside of refrigeration, that is.)
I’d love to try Yellow bird, that sounds delightful. However, I find something quite off-putting about refrigerated hot sauce. It’s supposed to burn my mouth but it needs to stay cold? I’ll take something out of the cupboard over that any day mmkay thanks.
i’ve been putting hot sus on everyting these days
Since I am the only one in my household that partakes of the hot sauces that will scar your psyche, I keep them refrigerated being where I am in Phoenix. They keep longer and I get to enjoy them.
Sauces high in vinegar and thin, almost watery don’t need to be in the fridge. Doesn’t matter the pH. If it is handmade/chunkier/less vinegar-y, store it in the fridge. Longer shelf life and the taste is not ruined. Hot sauces can last up to two years on the shelf unopened and they will be fine.
If you open an old bottle and the smell is off or there is mold then of course bin it. I’ve made my own for years and tested a lot of hot sauces and never had an issue with the way I store them.
Chris, check out Big Red’s hot sauces here in Phoenix. They got a fantastic line if you’re looking for something new to try. I highly recommend them to everyone.