Only the Brave - Hot Sauces Rise in Popularity

The hot sauce industry has exploded in recent years! Not due to the intense heat, but because of the intense demand for heat in our food. To put it into perspective, the US industry alone is worth a whopping $1 billion.

Spurred by the competition to grow increasingly hotter chillies, the temperature which some of these sauces reach is astronomical. With the chillies come the sauces, and with the sauces come the challenges. In eateries all over the world, you can find ridiculous challenges put up inviting the hot heads to make their mark, demolishing chicken wings, ribs and burgers smothered with incredibly hot sauces.

The Scoville Scale

The heat of both peppers and sauces are measured using the Scoville Scale (SHU or, Scoville Heat Unit). The scale registers heat from 100 Scoville or less, to over 3 million. The hottest pepper on record to date, is the Carolina Reaper, which registers at 2.2 million Scoville.

Sauces and Extracts

As well as sauces and peppers, you can also buy chilli extract. These concentrated liquids from hell reach as high as 16 million Scoville at present, although there’s always someone traying to make it hotter.

Extracts are used to create the hot sauces. Just a tiny drop in any sauce of the pure capsaicin crystals, added to a sauce can create insane levels of heat. With extract available quite readily, making your own mind-blowing hot sauces has become a fairly straight forward process.

Making your Own Sauces

Making your own sauce is great fun, and really simple. With just a few ingredients, chillies, salt, water, garlic, onion and perhaps tomato, roughly chopped, blitz the mixture in a food processor and then leave to ferment for 24-hours in a glass jar covered with cheese cloth.

After 24-hours, stir in some vinegar, cover again with the cheese cloth and leave to further ferment of at least a week. You can leave this for up to 3 months and the flavour will only increase.

Once the mixture is ready, you can add it to any number of fruits or vegetables to create your own hot sauce, to your own taste. It’s all about fun and experimentation. With different ingredients and seasonings you can make a huge variety of flavours and heat. If you want a little extra heat, why not add some extract?

For a more detailed recipe, check this link.

Our Hot Sauces

Whilst we’re not concealing anything considered to be even remotely lethal, we do have some real flavoursome sauces in stock. Our El Yucateco is a blend of fresh green habaneros, garlic and fine spices, coming together to create a tangy, spicy and delicious condiment.

Need to make some kicking buffalo wings? We also stock the original and best buffalo sauce, Frank’s Hot Sauce, which you can find here.

You can check our full range through this link.