Six hot sauce bottles arranged from mild to ferocious beside fresh chiles cut open, a dish of fermented chile mash and a plate of eggs with a few drops of sauce

Hot Sauce: The Complete Guide

Published 9 Sep 20268 min read

Filed under Hot Sauces Espinaler Noma Projects Shaquanda's

A chile pepper does not want you to eat it. Capsaicin, the compound that makes it burn, appears to have evolved to discourage mammals, whose teeth crush seeds, while leaving birds alone; birds' version of the heat receptor does not respond to capsaicin, so they swallow the fruit whole and spread the seeds intact. Every hot sauce on earth is a mammal's revenge on that arrangement.

The revenge has gotten sophisticated. There are hot sauces made from a mash aged in oak for up to three years, sauces built on Scotch bonnet, a sauce from a Copenhagen test kitchen built on sweet corn and yuzu, and sauces made from record-holding superhot peppers. This guide covers how heat is measured, the major styles, how to read a label so that heat comes with flavor, and how to cook with the stuff instead of just enduring it.

How heat is measured

In 1912 a pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville diluted an alcohol extract of chile in sugared water until a panel of tasters could no longer feel the burn; the dilution at which the heat disappeared became the pepper's Scoville rating. The scale survived, but the method has been joined by a more precise one. New Mexico State University's chile researchers call high-performance liquid chromatography the most accurate way to measure heat: the fruit is dried, ground and extracted, and the instrument measures capsaicinoid concentration directly, both the total and each compound on its own.

Two cautions about the number. First, the same NMSU researchers point out that genetics and growing conditions both move a pepper's heat, so any single figure is a snapshot of one test. Second, heat is not flavor. A sauce's heat also depends on how much pepper is in the bottle and what dilutes it, and the number tells you how much you will sweat, not whether you will want a second bite.

The Scoville ladder, from bell pepper to Pepper X

Pepper or sauce	Heat (SHU)	Where it appears in this guide
Bell pepper	0	The baseline
Noma Corn Yuzu Hot Sauce (finished sauce, producer figure)	1,230	The chef sauces
Jalapeño	2,500 to 8,000	Chipotle is a smoked, dried jalapeño
Habanero	100,000 to 350,000	Fruit-forward sauces
Scotch bonnet (one tested pepper)	350,000	Caribbean sauces and Shaquanda's original
Bhut jolokia, the ghost pepper	1,000,000	Where the superhots begin
Carolina Reaper (Guinness, 2013)	1,569,300 average	The superhots
Pepper X (Guinness, 2023)	2,693,000 average	The current record

The ranges for bell pepper, jalapeño, habanero and ghost pepper come from Penn State Extension; the Scotch bonnet figure is a single result listed by the Chile Pepper Institute. The ladder also shows something no single source does: a finished chef sauce made with yellow habanero can sit below a raw jalapeño. In Noma's Corn Yuzu, the yellow habanero is 1 percent of the recipe.

The Louisiana style

Tabasco is the template for the Louisiana style. Its recipe, which goes back to Edmund McIlhenny, uses three ingredients: aged red peppers, salt from Avery Island and distilled vinegar. The peppers are crushed with salt into a mash, which is aged before the vinegar goes in. On Avery Island, where Tabasco has been made since 1868, the mash ages in white oak barrels for up to three years before mixing. The result is a thin sauce meant to be shaken on by the dash, and it suits eggs, oysters, gumbo, greens and anything fried. If a label lists vinegar before peppers, expect a thin, vinegar-forward table sauce in this family.

Caribbean, Asian and everywhere else

Other traditions take the chile in other directions. Caribbean sauces build on Scotch bonnet, a fruity, aromatic hot pepper, and Brooklyn's Andre Springer, a Bed-Stuy native of Barbadian descent, built his original Shaquanda's sauce on it. Southeast Asia contributes sriracha, a garlic-and-sugar chile sauce, and sambal, which is closer to a paste. North Africa's harissa and Korea's gochujang are chile pastes rather than sauces, though the line blurs.

What the great regional styles share is a chile treated as an ingredient with its own flavor. A Scotch bonnet is fruity before it burns; a chipotle, a smoked and dried jalapeño, tastes of smoke. Good sauces let you taste that.

Fermented versus fresh

Fermentation is the biggest divide among hot sauces. In a lactic fermentation, salt draws juice out of the vegetable and forms a brine, and the lactic acid bacteria that grow in it give the vegetable an acid flavor; North Carolina State Extension puts the process at one to four weeks, depending on temperature. A fermented chile sauce applies that process to the pepper, and Tabasco's long barrel aging of its salted mash is a slow cousin of it. Fresh, or cooked, sauces keep the raw chile's brightness. Neither is better. A fresh habanero sauce on tacos and a fermented sauce in a braise are both correct.

The chef sauces

A newer category treats hot sauce as a finishing condiment built around a flavor idea rather than a heat level. The clearest example is Noma Projects' Corn Yuzu Hot Sauce (shop Corn Yuzu Hot Sauce), the first product to come straight out of the Copenhagen restaurant's test kitchen: roasted yellow habanero, sweet corn and yuzu milled into what Noma calls a bright, textured sauce with mild heat and major flavor. Sweet corn makes up 54 percent of the recipe and yuzu zest 4 percent. The Noma team uses it on barbecued fish and vegetables, fried eggs and salads, and it is worth a try on a bowl of beans (the heirloom beans guide). Noma Projects also makes an extra spicy version (shop Extra Spicy Corn Yuzu) for cooks who want more heat, and a Mushroom Garum (the Noma Mushroom Garum guide).

Shaquanda's OOOOHMAMI (shop Shaquanda's OOOOHMAMI) comes at the same idea from Brooklyn. Springer's drag persona, Shaquanda Coco Mulatta, is the face of the line, and the name nods to the umami profile. The bottle is built around savory depth as much as heat, with black garlic and caramelized onion in the mix.

The superhots

Recent decades produced an arms race at the top of the scale, and one South Carolina breeder holds its two most recent records. Ed Currie's PuckerButt Pepper Company, based in Fort Mill, bred the Carolina Reaper, which Guinness certified in 2013 at an average of 1,569,300 Scoville units. Pepper X followed after more than a decade of cross-breeding, and Guinness named it the hottest chilli pepper in 2023 at an average of 2,693,000, based on tests by Winthrop University on specimens from four years of harvests.

A superhot sauce can be made from whole peppers or built on capsaicin extract, and the label test below tells you which you are holding. A drop on the tip of a spoon is a full experience.

The Spanish outlier

One Spanish bottle belongs in this guide although it is a different thing from a hot sauce. Espinaler's bottled sauce (shop Espinaler Sauce) is a vinegar, paprika, black pepper and spice sauce made for appetizers. The company says Ventureta Roldós created it in 1950 for the Espinaler house, a tavern founded in Vilassar de Mar, near Barcelona, in 1896. It is shaken onto tinned mussels, cockles and clams (the tinned fish guide) and onto potato chips at the vermouth hour.

How to read a label

Ingredient order. Peppers first means a pepper-forward sauce. Vinegar first means a thin table sauce.
The word "extract." Capsaicin extract or oleoresin means part of the heat comes from an extract rather than from whole peppers.
Named peppers. A sauce that names its pepper tells you what flavor to expect.
"Fermented." Expect the acid flavor of a lactic fermentation alongside the chile.

Cooking with heat

Milk is the classic remedy for a burn, and a 2019 Penn State study backs it. Seventy-two tasters drank spicy tomato juice followed by one of seven beverages; every drink reduced the burn, but whole milk, skim milk and cherry Kool-Aid reduced it most, and skim worked about as well as whole. The researchers read that as a sign that milk's protein may matter more than its fat. In practice, a glass of milk calms a burn better than a glass of water. Alcohol works the other way: the researchers note that ethanol amplifies the sensation.

Hot sauce tends to taste best on rich food: eggs, cheese, fried things, fatty fish. A thick fruit sauce likes a squeeze of lime. Add it at the end and taste as you go, a few dashes into a pot of beans, a vinaigrette, a mayonnaise or a pan sauce once it is off the flame. Stirred into honey (the honey guide), hot sauce makes hot honey, which belongs on fried chicken and pizza. A dash in a Bloody Mary, or in a glass of zero-proof tomato juice (the non-alcoholic drinks guide), is the classic use in a glass.

Storage

Follow the storage line on each label. The Noma bottles go in the refrigerator after opening and should be used within four months. Shake before use.

Where to start

For barbecued fish and vegetables: Noma's Corn Yuzu. For a savory egg sandwich: Shaquanda's OOOOHMAMI. For a tin of mussels: Espinaler. Products ship across the continental U.S. from theambrosianpantry.com (shop hot sauces). The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and visitors can ask staff questions in the shop.

Sriracha and Korean chile paste meet in Bushwick Kitchen Weak Knees Gochujang Sriracha.

See also: gifts for dad who cooks, with chili crisp and hot sauce pairs for weeknight cooking.