Hot Sauces – Recommendations for a newbie

If you really catch the bug you can make your own!

I’ve tried a few times.  The results weren’t bad per se but I’ve yet to come anywhere near close to perfecting it.  Roasting the veg first makes a big difference to flavour.

One time I acquired some bhut jolokia (ghost pepper) from a friend who’d either grown or bought too many.  The best thing about it was the name I came up with, “Pain In The Bhut.”  I was scared of over-using them so went too far the other way and made a fairly pleasant barbeque-adjacent dipping sauce rather than the napalm I was expecting.

I grow a lot of chillies, mainly because i love the variety, different heats and flavours, but this is a recipe i make every year without fail.

Mango, pineapple and scotch bonnet sauce

https://www.greatbritishchefs.com/recipes/scotch-bonnet-pineapple-mango-hot-sauce-recipe

Scotch bonnets have a fruity flavour anyway, and this is a big fruit bomb of a sauce.

I prefer just chopping fresh peppers and using as a garnish. Although that may just be because of the time I was in Cayenne wanting to buy a few habaneros from the market stall, for that night’s dinner, and they only sold them by the 1kg.  We tended to make everything medium hot and then let everyone garnish with fresh habs to their preferred heat and taste.  A kilo of fresh habs goes a long way!

Can’t beat the flavours of freshly chopped peppers.

I need to grow some more of the lemon drop peppers. Fantastic in salads, sarnies, etc. and not super hot.

I prefer just chopping fresh peppers and using as a garnish.

Put the chillies in the curry AND on the curry! this is the way!

pictonroad

Full Member

I love a hot sauce but have recently become obsessed (to the point of eating out of the jar with a spoon) with Lao Gan Ma crispy chilli in oil.

We love this at home! I have to ration the other half! Can only buy 2 jars at a time at the Asian food shop too. It’s so good in stir fry and noodles dishes or almost anything tbf. Have to be a bit careful though as it’s oil to mind the calorie count.

Good old Tobasco is nice. Great splashed on a hard boiled egg.

One thing to note about hot sauces, they do lose a bit of their heat over time. So better guzzle them down whilst they’re hot.

Ugh, hot sauce is an area of cuisine ruined by macho idiots.  I don’t want my food to hurt, and I don’t care who knows that – I just like the taste of chillies.

My favourite supermarket hot sauce is Cholua because I also don’t like the taste of vinegar unless it’s on chips; and Tabasco seems to taste only of vinegar.

No vinegar on chips? What! You philistine 🫣😎😄

He said the opposite…?

So what do you all use the sauce on? Is it a dipping sauce, put it into the cooking process, drizzle over chicken etc???

All of the above?

Depends on the sauce really.  As a dipping sauce I’d want essentially a spicy ketchup; at Nandos, a 50:50 mix of Extra Hot and ketchup is far better than anything they offer on its own.  Tabasco is good as a quick dash in tomato soup.  The nuclear option like Dave’s is invaluable as an ingredient when making a chilli con/non carne.  Sriracha is a good drizzle as I said earlier, a pizza isn’t right without a couple of swirls.  A generic all-rounder hot sauce like Frank’s or Encona is a decent topping for burgers (and I presume wings etc).

Tabasco seems to taste only of vinegar.

Making it a fabulous substitute for vinegar on chips 🤤

Ugh, hot sauce is an area of cuisine ruined by macho idiots. I don’t want my food to hurt, and I don’t care who knows that – I just like the taste of chillies.

Agree 100%…too much chilli will easily overpower and ruin the flavours of any given dish. Heat aside some chillies are actually really tasty.

It’s just an ingredient/spice like any other, but it is a really good one when used appropriatly… it needs to balance and be appropriate for the dish.

If you cant taste the food for the hotness, then you’re doing it wrong…

There is a lot of macho culture around the hotter ones, but it’s just that…

A good examlple is the carolina reaper with honey and fermented soy from ECCC…

Wonderfully tasty but it blows my brains out if I use it as a dipping sauce…it’s a superb addition to many chinese or thai style dishes though, if used in ‘moderation’.

Even raw scotch bonnets have a lovely fresh ‘green’ flavour for want of a better word…but they are too hot for me to eat whole ones.

How the hell people can eat things like nagas and trinidad scorpions is beyond me, it’s just bravado/sadomasochism.

Ugh, hot sauce is an area of cuisine ruined by macho idiots.

I’m not necessarily recommending you try these but having just recently finished this little lot off that I got for father’s day last year I suspect another shipment is due to arrive shortly….

https://www.orrissandson.com/shop

^ not mad hot but very tasty.

£6 for 125ml? Lol…

A big +1 for Mr Vikkis. His hot sauce is a staple, hot enough but very tasty. I got a selection hamper with some pickles for Christmas, a little goes a long way!

+1 green tabasco

Goes on beans on toast, fried egg butties, bean goos, all sorts. The reds are too harsh for my softie palate but the green is tasty.

Have you tried the chipotle one?

It’s amazing. I’ve bought about 10 of them from Ocado as I was struggling to find more when I ran out.