I once started a thread titled “Proposition: Food should not hurt” on this board.
I fail completely to understand the trend in the US for all food to have exactly the same flavor profile and for that profile to be nothing but the strongest capsicum available at the moment.
I don’t mind a little heat now and then. In fact I love a good curry. But going out of your way to find the worst chili sauce on the market and then dumping it on everything from your scrambled eggs to your desert is madness.
It used to be a sign of being low class and lacking all tact to dump ketchup on any food you were served. Now it seems to be the height of fashion.
People on this board rant and rave about people who limit their food choices to one or two familiar things. Then they turn around and say they only eat food that tastes like Sriracha. How is that any different from only eating chicken nuggets and white bread?
Well, the peppers are fermented, so that’s what you’re smelling. That is actually what I like about Tabasco sauce–that fermented funk, but I love fermented foods in general.
I confess, but I am completely unaware of this “trend.” Americans, in general, are not really spicy food eaters. I mean, hot peppers have become more accepted, and there certainly is a niche market of people who like things hot (like me), but there certainly is no trend to flavoring things with “the strongest capsicum available at the moment.” (Well, okay, the ghost pepper thing is marketed, and it’s a pretty niche market, but I can’t think of any other instance where an ultra hot pepper became a flavoring trend. There was a chipotle trend, but that wasn’t really about the heat, but rather the smokiness. And chipotles aren’t super strong, either.)
Sriracha is okay and there is always a bottle in the house. I’m not in the “put hot sauce on everything” club, though, no matter what sauce is up for discussion.
I disagree, I have had food served with a hot pepper rub, jalapeno mayo, chopped hot peppers in coleslaw, jalapenos floating in the soup, all with no mention on the menu that the food was highly spiced and served in a non-ethnic restaurant. This kind of seasoning is now so mainstream that they don’t even mention it in the descriptions anymore. And you can’t seem to avoid it. What used to be standard family restaurants now have half of their menus devoted to chipotle this and jalapeno that. And even if you choose something without the name of a pepper in the title its likely to come with some condiment with hot peppers as a main ingredient.
As mentioned above even Burger King now has half its menu served with hot sauce. How much more mainstream can you get?
It’s really just a different category of condiment than those. If those are “hot sauce” in American, sriracha is something else. No more in common with Crystal than with hong you or harissa.
I really don’t know what you’re talking about, as this has not been my experience at all. Perhaps it’s just the type of restaurant you visit, or where you live, but a standard family diner around here you’ll be lucky if you can find a dish with hot pepper in it. Most people I know do not tolerate spice particularly well, and it’s never been difficult to eat out. I like spicy foods, and it’s difficult for me to find spicy foods on most standard menus.
I feel about it the same way that Colonel Potter from MASH* feels about tomato juice: “I like it…but it doesn’t like me.” For some reason, it always seems to flare up my hemorrhoids.
THANK YOU! Everyone else I’ve mentioned it to tells me that they can’t smell anything like that, or that it’s just the vinegar. The peppers being fermented very much explains it. :):):):)
Yeah, that’s part of the signature flavor. You can even read about it on their webpage. They salt a bunch of peppers and throw them into oak barrels for up to 3 years. That gives the sauce a bit of a lactic acid tang to it, in addition to the acetic acid (and I’m sure there are probably other products of fermentation and aging that go into it.) I believe Crystal is also aged, but it doesn’t quite have the same kind of funk as Tabasco (or at least not that I’ve noticed, which is why I prefer Tabasco.)
I like it just fine. It one of the staple of sauces I keep on hand. I went overboard with it a couple of years ago so I’m mostly over it now but once in a while I’m in the mood for it.
I had assumed that Crystal had added sugar to their sauce since it tastes far too sweet compared to Tabasco, but recently looking at their ingredients that turns out to not be the case. I had assume they’d used sweeter peppers but I guess it’s the fermentation.
I’ve not noticed Crystal tasting sweet, but it does have a bit of a cleaner, fruitier flavor, if I had to describe the difference between the two. Tabasco also seems to be a bit more vinegary (which is another reason I like it), but we’ve had a thread before where other posters’ impressions were the other way around. To me, while I prefer Tabasco, they’re really pretty much interchangeable. They’re not that different. I also enjoy Louisiana Hot Sauce quite a lot and, currently, that’s the one that gets the most play in my household for the Louisiana style hot sauces, but I tend to cycle through sauces.
In my book, if it’s a sauce, primarily made with chilies that’s spicy, then it’s hot sauce. It’s maybe not the same category of hot sauce, but it’s still hot sauce.
Kind of like beer in that regard. Saying that sriracha isn’t hot sauce is like saying that a hefeweizen isn’t beer, because its taste profile isn’t the same as most other beers.
