Mini-Reviews

The idea here is to run through a bunch of commercial hot sauces that I've already tried. There are not a lot of extreme ones here. This is mostly to try to get everything brought up to date.

Crystal Hot Sauce

Spent plenty of this time when I was down on my luck and only had a buck to get me some sauce to pour on a little cluck-cluck. I've been around the world culinarily and spent some time with Asians (more on that in a future post) and the bruthas and the Latinos and damn near everyone, including the boring predominant cuisine of the white-bread motherfuckers that made me seek out the heat in the first place. This is possibly the weakest and cheapest of the vinegar-cayenne blends out there. It is the Rothschild vodka of the hot sauce world, but in a pinch, it's better than nothing and much better than....

Louisiana "Original" Hot Sauce

I could call this the heartbreaker sauce and not be far off. At a time when I couldn't readily get my beloved Red Devil, I found this at a local store and bought some after hearing from a friend that it would do the damn thing. After burning through a few bottles, I happily was beginning to conclude that maybe I had an effective substitute...until the day that I bought one, opened it, had some in ramen, put it back in the fridge and opened the door to find the top half had turned green, as in some sort of mold or something. I tossed the bitch and heard later from that same friend that hers had done the same thing. There is no excuse for that, so despite this being a pretty decent vinegar-cayenne sauce overall, no way am I going to fuck with something like that, especially when it wasted up my brand new bottle.

Trappey's Louisiana Hot Sauce

Not a bad cayenne-pepper sauce (at one time, I ate a shit-ton of that style sauce...now just a ton), but not Red Devil and not worth the change. I'd say this is slightly hotter, but far less tasty. Red Devil is really a marvel unto itself...

Taco Bell Sauces (Various)

None of these are actually good, but the best-tasting of the lot is the mild, so I always get that. For a long time I didn't and suffered through basically micro-drops of the Hot in an absurd quest to be macho. Stupid, stupid. All of them strike me as basically chili powder-based and taste cheap as Hell. The mild works with all of the product that the chain offers, but will cheapen anything you put it on. Hot and Fire and consecutively more chunky and correspondingly ass-awful. At one time, we (myself and others) used to scavenge and horde this for those awful ramen noodles that keep cropping up in this narrative...it was not a Good Time.

Del Taco Sauces (Various)

You are dealing with ketchup, in all cases. If you like ketchup, you're set. If not, you will have to spike it. Their regular green sauce that comes with the burritos is surprisingly decent, the red sauce less so. It's better than nothing, but not by much. The mild and the one below Inferno are rotten abortions and should be avoided entirely.

Taco John's Sauces (Various)

 At one time, you could buy these by the bottle...after consuming the sauce, presumably one could break the conveniently shaped flask and use it to slit one's own wrists. The dreadful packets with the unidentifiable chucks and alternately tasteless and nasty assault on my taste buds was quite enough for me, however.

Huy Fong Sriracha

Make friends with a Thai person or shop at an Asian grocer's. That's the only way you're going to experience even the remotest sense of What The Big Deal Is (though it is still nothing I would call "good"). If you buy the bastardized American version, you're getting ketchup. Crap ketchup. With a nasty horseradish ring-around-the-tongue.

Frank's Hot Sauce

Someone -- and I'm too drunk to remember now who the guilty party is -- should be shot for telling me to get this. I should be shot for listening. A friend of mine who did not believe in refrigeration (but it has vinegar, which is a preservative, et. al.) kept this crap in a hot closer in the top half of her split-level house. There was not a marginal difference in the taste between her awful bottle and mine. The big difference came down to me throwing mine out without finishing it. Probably the worst of the cayenne-vinegar sauces, yet inexplicably possibly the most popular. The public's taste for crap will forever remain unsatisfied and H.L. Mencken said it best. You will never go broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

La Victoria Salsa Brava/Ortega Hot Sauce

 My parents fed me this cheap crap as a kid. I recently got a bottle of each to see if it was as bad as I remembered. Truth be told, it was worse. I should demand a refund. Both are even worse, somehow, than the Taco Bell sauces.

McIlhenny Tabasco Sauce

Dammit, all those other chilehead bloggers out there are calling this pepper-flavored vinegar and damn if they're not right. Still, this is the original and deserves props for basically inventing the field (though Trappey's might also hold claim to that). As to usefulness, I like to mix it with ketchup at IHOP to spike it a little, but I can't really get past the overwhelming vinegar. There is precious little heat to speak of and although this is a standby in many refrigerators, it has never been one in mine.


McIlhenny Green Jalapeno Sauce

One of the most disappointing things I've had...the taste was not too shabby, but utterly lacking in heat. Pass.

Bufalo Sauce

I forget now which I had, but it was a thick, red paste and nearly impossible to get out of the bottle. Once I did, I was flatly overwhelmed and kind of wished I hadn't. I'm being too harsh, I suspect...the taste wasn't awful, but it also wasn't worth the work to get the shit out of the stupid bottle.

Dave's Insanity Original Sauce

The first of the "boutique" hot sauces that we (the group of us into those things years and years ago) came across...it tasted flatly awful, indicative of extract sauces and honestly, no one ever used it on food...just on drunken "bravery" challenges. The next day after was never very pleasant and it became used much more rarely for that purpose. I can't think of a single reason to obtain this...

Louisiana Gold (Green) Hot Sauce

Have not seen it around for years, but it was one of the more enjoyable sauces I've encountered. Sort of a cross between vinegar-cayenne, but with a nice jalapeno charge...quite tasty. You could do worse than to pick up a bottle, if you come across one.