I love dumping lots of hot sauce onto certain things. But it usually means consuming much more salt than I should. I did a Google search to try and find a low sodium hot sauce, but didn’t find one. Know of any?
One alternative I’ve used is vinegar + red pepper flakes. But it’s not nearly as good as tomato-based hot sauce.
This website discusses 12 hot sauces which contain between 10 and 117 mgs of sodium per tsp:
Is that low enough?
The usual mass-market cayenne hot sauces (Louisiana, Crystal, Frank’s, lots of store brands) are indeed quite high in salt. However, when I use those for things like eggs or chicken wings, I’m often really after the heat and vinegar first and the salt second. You could spike them with some extra vinegar and some super spicy sauce to amp up those flavors. I don’t myself get much out of dried pepper flakes for sauces.
Look at ‘ethnic’ stores or aisles within a store. El Yucateco (Mexico) has about 100mg Na per serving or Matouk’s (Trinidad & Tobago) with 40mg, both good, and, being spicier, I’m a lot less likely to dump those all over an omelet compared to, say, Texas Pete’s, a cayenne. Commercial Chinese chili oil or crisp is likely to be high in salt but worth checking the labels as you come across them.
There are also some domestic sauces to consider. Trader Joe’s Green Dragon, Yellowbird, Secret Aardvark are all pretty widely available.
I honestly can’t think of a tomato based hot sauce off the top of my head.
The lowest sodium hot sauce in my fridge is Taco Bell hot sauce (flavorful, not hot) at 30mg sodium/tsp.
Is there a threshold you’re looking for?
El Yucateco red (very hot) is 90mg/tsp but seriously, you use that stuff by the drop, not the teaspoon! They make a green one that’s even hotter, so you could probably use even less.
Your problem is that fermented hot sauces rely on salt as a form of bacterial control so there’s a minimum salt level that’s hard to go below without diluting the flavor. Given that hot sauce generally is a small proportion of the total meal, it’s probably better to reduce the salt everywhere else and to treat hot sauce as the primary salt source for a meal.
Valentina extra hot is good. I have been buying the liter bottles of it since about 2010, but COVID seems to have taken it off the shelves around here. It has (had?) 54 mg/teaspoon. I finally found some small bottles of it at Publix, and lo and behold, the label now says 115 mg. Curious.
Yeah, that green one from El Yucateco is atomic hot!
The hotter the sauce, the less you need.
Thanks for that link. I just ordered a couple bottles of Lola’s hot sauce.
Interesting. But I agree that the Valentina Extra Hot is great. It’s my most used all-purpose hot sauce. Luckily, around here, I never noticed a shortage, and they always sell for crazy cheap.
I’m just back from the store where I checked the Valentina Extra Hot. It showed 54 mg/tsp sodium.
If it ain’t Louisiana Hot Sauce it ain’t hot sauce, unless it’s Crystal, which may actually be better but is harder to find. I try to keep salt down too, but in general, authentic hot sauce needs to be made from just 3 ingredients. Cooked and ground chili peppers, vinegar and salt. The type of chili peppers makes a big difference. In foodie places like New Orleans, if they don’t have one or both of the 2 hot sauces I named sitting on the tables of a restaurant, the locals probably won’t eat there.
The amount of salt in them is not really a deal killer because you don’t use much. Just a few shakes will do it. Me, being from down there, I put a LOT more on my food, but nothing else is salted so it averages out. A good way to give bland food some taste is to just put a few drops of hot sauce on it instead of salt. Oatmeal, avocados, chocolate, everything should have Louisiana Hot Sauce on it!
Interesting. My almost-empty bottle in the fridge has 64 mg/tsp. My Tabasco is 35/tsp. My Lousiana Cravin’ Cajun is 140mg/tsp (I seem to be out of the regular. Very delicious, but quite mild, IMO.)
None of these are tomato-based though, and out of the other maybe 10 hot sauces I have in the fridge, I don’t think any have tomato. (Right now, my favorite is the El Yucateco XXXTra Hot Sauce – which isn’t really extra hot as far as today’s hot sauces go, but spicy enough – and that’s at 110 mg/tsp.)
What is the OP’s go-to hot sauce that uses tomato? I mean, they are out there, but it’s not the default for hot sauce, and I’m just curious for what flavor profile you’re going for.
El Yucateco Red Habanero contains tomatoes, though calling it tomato-based might be a stretch.