To meet your own idea of what tastes “right,” perhaps. My personal experience, from living along the Mexican border, is that Tabasco is quite popular amongst the Mexican-Americans and Mexican-Mexicans.
I am inclined to agree with the basic premise of this thread - too hot is kinda silly. Having said that, we all know that “too hot” is in the eye of the beholder. Is there an official “Too Hot Line” that, once you cross it, you are officially Posturing?
I really like Yucateco Green Habanero sauce. Too hot for most civilians (so my friends and family tell me), but I put it on pretty much anything that isn’t dessert.
Oh and a clear corollary to the OP: if you talk about how hot you can take it in general conversation, you’re posturing, even if we are talkin’ about Tabasco or other low-voltage sauces…
Did you do a poll on this?
Just picked up some of this from the grocery. I usually like hot red sauces and try to stay away from habanero sauces, but I gotta admit although it’s pretty hot this sauce does have a lot of flavor and is quite tasty. I ate some with a burrito and it has nice savory overtones outside of the heat.
I’ve long enjoyed adding Trappey’s Red Devil to any number of dishes, but more for the flavor than the heat. At the local Hot Sauce Festival, I bypass all the booths making claims about “heat” and go to the ones that emphasize “taste”.
A plug for a sauce with flavor: Lingham’s. It’s a Malaysian sauce with a wonderful taste. Use it where you would use Tiger Sauce. You can bump the heat easily without affecting the taste by adding your favorite bum-burner. 
Not formally; my statements are based upon personal observation.
Look at what people in this thread are saying; look at what everybody says on sites like the formerly-linked The Habanero Hamburger “Hall of Flame”; look at the names of these hot sauces. It’s patently obvious that these things exist for, and are used for, the purposes of posturing.
Here’s another vote for Quizno’s Batch 81, which makes their so-so turkey sub into a lunch I could eat three or four times a week. Likewise, Dave’s Gourmet Insanity and Endorphin Rush are staples of my spice cabinet. I put a drop into sautéed veggies before making omelettes, and a drop into a serving of macaroni and cheese… it adds the right amount of “serious” heat and a smoky-sweet taste that counterbalances the bland creaminess of most macaroni-and-cheese dishes. I’ll use three or four drops in a small tupperware of puréed peppers and spices that form the basis for my chili. I brown the beef in the spicy vegetable mix, and then add flavors that compliment and tone down the spiciness; this gets me a chili that tastes delicious for about ten seconds, and then burns just a little on the second or third bite.
I felt I needed to correct myself. A habenero is in the 100,000-400,000 range. I was off by about a factor of ten. :smack: But I did see a sauce advertised as having 1,000,000 scoville units, so it was hotter than a habenero. It was on some Food Network special, and a few people tried it, purely for the machoism of trying it (they even said as much.)
I am. I’m seeing that people tend to use it more for flavor than for machismo.
I don’t doubt that there are some people who use it just to show off, but I’m betting that they are a smaller portion of the population than you think.
I must be reading a different thread to you, because the people talking about flavour mostly aren’t talking about the super-hot sauces.
Maybe there are a whole load of silent individuals out there who buy the super-hot sauces for the flavour without a trace of egotism involved. I don’t really care; this is not GQ, so I’m not interested in playing the ‘cite’ game.
Mangetout:
Speaking as someone who has occasionally gotten a little bit of residue from the bottle cap onto my fingers: I really don’t think the penis and the hot sauce are comfortable co-subjects of the same thread.
Worse still is if you get it on your fingers and touch someone else’s genitals.
Our local Chinese restaurants keep big bottles of Tabasco for their Mexican clientele.
Can we please discuss something other than sauced-down genitals?
I think once the hotness of the dish overwhelms any other flavor, you’re in the realm of posturing.
Atomic wings? You don’t, by any chance, go to the Alehouse for your wings, do you?
(Of course, I’m sure Atomic is a very popular name for the ‘super-hot’ variety of wings.)
Sometimes I want to add heat to the recipe without altering the actual flavor. At those times, a heat additive made of just capsaicin in some sort of neutral medium is what I’m looking for.
Having said that, I prefer the flavored sauces over the heat additives more than 99% of the time.
I tend to use your garden variety “crushed red peppers” I buy at the grocery store for this. I find them fairly neutral tasting. Sometimes I have to add a lot to get the heat I want, but that is my problem; I assume that the peppers they are crushing aren’t habaneros or anything fancy…
Alehouse is a very popular name for the restaurant as well ;). The Miller’s Alehouse by me serves Mt. St. Hellens wings, but no Atomic ;).