The Kroger brand hot sauce I mentioned in the OP is a vinegar and cayenne based Louisiana style sauce. It is probably indistinguishable from the Tabasco brand except maybe by an expert (which I am not).
I have noticed that my rate of consumption of hot sauce has increased dramatically since I bought the bottle with the larger aperture. That is no big deal since this brand is only 89 cents for a 12 fl. oz. bottle.
I think my ranking would have to be Habanero, Blue Agave Sriracha, Serrano, Jalapeño, and I freaking love the jalapeño. It’s my default taco sauce.
I opened my new bottle of Kroger brand hot sauce this morning. Alas, the bottle included the aperture-reducing plastic insert this time. It’s going to be a dull, sad day.
The plastic insert is not difficult to get out, you can even push it back in. I usually use a corkscrew, a knife with hot sauce on it would be unpleasant to get a cut from.
Needlenose pliers or even small dykes are another tool good at removing plastic inserts from bottles with little risk to the operator.
my go-to is the green pepper Cholula
I’m curious to try it. In general if I see a sauce marketed as “ghost pepper” and it’s only moderately spicy I’m going to chuck it on pure principle. Words have meaning damn it.
Just ordered the trio this past week. Only broke into the original so far and I liked it quite a bit. Pretty low on the heat meter, but very tasty on the torta I ordered from my favorite burrito joint.
Yeah, it’s probably around the level of a standard habanero sauce, like El Yucateco? So nothing like any of the Dave’s Insanity products. I enjoy the flavor of it. Tabasco’s Scorpion sauce is pretty interesting, too, though I wish it had a larger aperture. It tastes like Tabasco with a real kick to it. I like that one, too, so if you like the funk of Tabasco and wish it were a bit hotter (and have that Capiscum chinense type taste), it’s worth a shot.
I consider El Yucateco pretty darn hot. Probably approaching the maximum hotness one should eat unless you’re being performative.
Glad you’re enjoying them; BTW you likely won’t enjoy chocolate plague or any of the reaper based sauces then. They’re on a whole different level from El Yucateco. I still like them on certain foods and in moderation as they taste quite good.
Smokin’ Ed is a madman. I’m perfectly happy to leave the reaper and pepper X based sauces to you lunatics.
I have a bottle of the scorpion pepper-flavored Tabasco sauce. It is not a pure scorpion sauce: it essentially consists of normal Tabasco sauce plus guava, pineapple, and scorpion peppers. Heat level is 35000, compared to 2500–5000 for plain Tabasco sauce. Indeed it has an extra kick and capsicum chinense + extra fruit notes.
It’s homeopathic hot sauce.
They take a giant industrial vat of ordinary, say, jalapeno- or habanero-level sauce, then drop in an intact ghost pepper, promptly fish it out, and label their product as “made with ghost peppers”, where the “made with” part is in an asterisked fine print at the bottom.
There’s just the barest ghost of a hint of a flavor of actual ghost pepper. Real thin and almost invisible.
Is that like an extra dry martini?
My go-to hot sauce most of the time is either Huy Fong sriracha or green jalapeno Tabasco, which isn’t very spicy but has a lot of flavor and goes well on eggs or potatoes. I also have a bottle of strawberry basil reaper hot sauce from a company I funded on Kickstarter when it was starting out, which goes surprisingly well on vanilla ice cream.
I’m growing ghost peppers this year, my greenhouse ran out of carolina reapers, which is unfortunate as I like their flavour; my only other option was moruga scorpions and I’m not a big fan of their taste.
If I am successful I’m going to maybe try my hand at making a hot sauce as I’d be the only one in the house eating them and I figure bottled sauce will last longer.
