Last night I watched a commerical for a new hot sauce. The pitch was that it was delicious and NOT hot. “It’s delicious and I can taste it because it isn’t hot at all!” Well then, what you got there is just sauce, stupid. Stop calling it hot sauce.
Just now I see a Kool Aid commercial where Mr. Voice Over asks the kids what flavor Kool Aid they want: “Orange!” “Blue!” “Strawberry!” cry the delighted children old enough to know that blue isn’t a flavor.
And do NOT start me on “fuzzy slippers on my teeth.”
Part of the problem is that the definition of hot sauce is no longer dominated by Tobasco. It’s come to mean anything you add to alter the taste of a dish. I have heard A1, and Worcestershire sauce both asked for as ‘hot sauces.’ I don’t like it, but I don’t think we can blame the advertising bozoes for this one.
Just what does the blue stuff taste like? The (few) times I’ve tried it, it’s not really tasted like anything, so blue seems more accurate than raspberry, or whatever else they call it.
“Blue” is too a flavor. It is a flavor not found in nature, but consistently found in many food products whose main ingredient is “high fructose corn syrup.” They’re also the color blue.
It’s like “purple” which purports to be grape - but tastes like neither grapes nor grape juice, but “purple.”
Just now I see a Kool Aid commercial where Mr. Voice Over asks the kids what flavor Kool Aid they want: “Orange!” “Blue!” “Strawberry!” cry the delighted children old enough to know that blue isn’t a flavor.
[QUOTE]
I have found that if I ask the kiddos what color they want, they will tell me a flavor. If I ask what flavor, they reply with a color.
ME: What color do you want?
KIDDO: Watermelon.
ME: What flavor do you want?
KIDDO: Pink
I blame the cake industry for having white cakes (and frosting now) and yellow cakes. Damn them! Heaven help us when brown becomes a flavor.
As anyone who has ever read a thread of mine can tell you, with this, as with everthing else, I place the blame solidly on the…
Carnies!
That’s right, it is due to the actions of Carnival operators, and circus folk. As I recall, a group of clowns were soaking their red clothing in a barrel, and the water was used to make lemonade. Thus, pink lemonade was born, as was the idea of marketing something based soley on color.
The denaturing of hot sauces in this country down to blandness is an ongoing process. Lots of people must like it (what is this new dingbat sauce they’re advertising, anyway?) but I would appreciate the hot mustard packets at Chinese take-out joints actually being the maxillary-sinus-clearing flamethrowing condiment I enjoy, and not French’s with a mild attitude.
It’s gotten ridiculous when you have to specify decently hot food at places where it should be the rule, not the exception. I ordered a dish at my favorite Mexican place the other evening, and was asked if I wanted the spicy version (yes, naturally). Dang, everyone knows that unless food causes rivulets of sweat to run off your scalp, you’re not ridding your body of toxins and getting those hippocampal neurons to fire properly.
(Yes, I know I’m setting myself up for a clobbering via Gaudere’s Law, but it still had to be done.:p)
I don’t think ‘hot’ is utterly meaningless. Yet. It is getting there. I’d first heard the arguement that hot sauce A was better than hot sauce B because it added flavor, not heat, back in 1987.
As for hot sauce and chili sauces. I think of chili sauces as being exemplified by Heinz Chili Sauce, a ketchup-like mix that includes some mild chili peppers. (And therefore useless for anything but making Thousand Island Dressing.) Hot sauces are IMNSHO something like Tabasco, or Dave’s Insanity Sauces, where a very little adds a lot of ‘heat’ or flavor to a dish. Because of this, I’m always confused by those packets of chili sauce you’ll see at some restaraunts.
Taco Bell isn’t as bad as Taco Tico. I went there for the first time last semester, and got a little cup of mild, hot, and volcano, so that I’d know how hot each was.
The mild was sweet, and not hot at all. Like watered-down ketchup.
The hot may have had a bell pepper thrown in it or something. I could discern a little heat.
Volcano? Volcanoes are known for spewing liquid rock. This “volcano” sauce was much less than that. I had to use a little plastic dixie thing (fast food workers know what I’m talking about.) for each of my tacos.
