What Is The Best Tasting Hot Sauce

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Poi Dog Chili Peppah Water

What’s The Best Hot Sauce? (Taste Test)

If you like a really watery, vinegary hot sauce, youre going to love this. The ingredients are simple: water, rice vinegar, distilled vinegar, red and green peppers, onion, sugar, sea salt, ginger, and ancho pepper. Its quickly becoming my favorite breakfast hot sauce and I can no longer have a BEC without it.

– Ryan Pfeffer

Why Trust The Spruce Eats

Donna Currie is a writer and product tester for The Spruce Eats. She specializes in product reviews and recipes, has written her own cookbook, and knows what to reach for when she wants to add a spicy kick to everything from eggs to tacos to marinades.

Lindsay Boyers, who updated this piece, is a functional nutritionist specializing in gut health and mood disorders. She’s written more than a dozen books and cookbooks and created over 1,000 original recipes, using the highest-quality and tastiest ingredients she can find.

Shaquandas Hot Pepper Sauce

  • Heat: Medium

It should be no surprise that another entry from Karma Sauce is on our list of the best hot sauces. Gene O. knows his flavors, and when we saw he was tackling a dumping sauce, we were super excited to try it.

And we were not disappointed. Cosmic Dumpling stars with rice vinegar, and blends together jalapenos, tamari, brown sugar, orange juice and sesame oil into a delightful dumpling dipping sauce.

But it isnt just good for dumplings. It can improve almost any food, from pizza to salmon to pork and more. Karma Sauce offers some of the best sweet and tangy sauces out there, and Cosmic Dumpling is near the top of our favorites.

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The Bronx Greenmarket Hot Sauce

I love the garlicky kick of The Bronx Greenmarket Hot Sauce from Small Axe Peppers. Its unique and just subtle enough, and the garlic perfectly compliments the bright, fresh vinegar/serrano pepper base. The serrano peppers used also happen to be grown in The Bronx, and a portion of the proceeds from every bottle sold go to community gardens in that borough.

– Bryan Kim

Get The Bronx Greenmarket Hot Sauce

Best Hot Sauce For Pizza

Best 20 Hot Sauces to Try in 2020

Casa Firelli Italian hot sauce

Love hot sauce with pizza? Firellis Italian chilli sauce is designed for exactly that. Made in Italy from roasted red peppers, Calabrian red chillies, balsamic vinegar plus garlic, porcini mushrooms, salt and spices, it has a strong roasted pepper flavour, balsamic sweetness and slightly fruity, subtly smoky heat. Its great with pizza, in hot dogs or try in a Bloody Mary.

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La Victoria Salsa Brava

Sodium: 60 mgIngredients: water, tomato paste, red jalapeño peppers, onions, modified food starch, salt, distilled vinegar, spices, citric acid, garlic, sodium benzoate

We’re not fans of the modified food starch found in the recipe. With so many other hot sauces on the shelf, there’s no reason to splash processed carbs on your food. Leave behind the La Victoria!

Dance Party: Matouk’s Calypso Sauce

Heat level: Moderate to hot

Flavor: Tasting this ketchup-thick hot sauce for the first time, you’d swear that there was tropical fruit in it. But nope, that’s just the fruity pickled Scotch bonnet peppers you’re tasting. There’s garlic, mustard, and celery seed in the bottle, too, but there must be some kind of magic going on to make the flavors of mangoes and pineapples appear where they aren’t. In any case, it’s darned delicious on eggs and sandwiches.

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Torchy’s Tacos Diablo Hot Sauce

The only restaurant branded hot sauce to make the cut is Torchy’s Tacos Diablo Hot Sauce. The thick sauce has a medium-to-hot spice level, with flavors of tomato, garlic, and vinegar. If you don’t have a Torchy’s Tacos near you then you might be able to find the hot sauce online or at Whole Foods. Add this hot sauce to anything you want to jazz up with big flavors and a decent amount of spice.

For Your Hot Dog: Lottie’s Barbados Hot Sauce

Best Hot Sauce of 2021? (Ultimate Taste Test!)

Heat level: Moderate

Flavor: This sauce starts out tasting just like a high-quality yellow mustard, but a moderate amount of habanero chilies gives it some lingering heat and fruitiness, while West Indian spicing lends a hint of curry flavor. It’s the perfect hot dog mustard for chili-heads, though don’t limit its applications to between buns!

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Curry And Spice: Iguana Gold Island Pepper Sauce

Heat level: Hot

Flavor: This sauce gets its bright gold color from cayenne peppers, mustard, and turmericit’s definitely the most curry-forward of all the Caribbean-style hot sauces in this lineup. Uniquely, it contains cucumbers , which have a welcome cooling effect in the face of all that heat. It hits you fast, but doesn’t linger long. Try it on fried eggs.

The #1 Worst Hot Sauce Istaco Bell

Sodium: 30 mgIngredients: water, tomato purée, vinegar, jalapeño peppers, salt, chili pepper, dried onions, spices, xanthan gum, sodium benzoate, potassium chloride, maltodextrin, yeast extract, datem, natural flavor

You might be wondering how a hot sauce with just 30 milligrams of sodium ended up at #1. Well, just check out that ingredient list. It looks like a novel written in a foreign language. But trust usthat’s not Spanish. The only thing those ingredients can be translated to is health consequences. We’re not really surprised, though, because Taco Bell is notorious for selling fattening foods that are rife with additives. There is nothing real about this sauce, so we are pleading with you to feel the burn from somewhere else and kick this condiment to the curb.

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Zombie Apocalypse Ghost Chili Hot Sauce

How hot can you handle? Ghost chilis are among the hottest in the world, and the bottle of Zombie Apocalypse Ghost Chili Hot Sauce contains sixteen pods from them. The Scoville range is 500,000 units, which is well beyond what youre going to find at 99.9% of restaurants that claim to serve spicy wings and burning hot food. Everything is gluten-free, all-natural, vegetarian and devoid of extracts.

Are you ready to take the Zombie Apocalypse Challenge? The challenge is to still be standing after eating this, without downing an entire gallon of milk in your quest to escape the torching heat. This is definitely not for the faint of heart proceed only if youre a true lover of hot sauce, and the stuff on the grocery store shelves just hasnt been cutting it lately. Its like dipping your tongue in lava its the hottest hot sauce out there. To some, that sounds horrible, but to you and I, thats right where we want to be. An amazing gift for foodies who like spicy food.

Porcus Mild Bacon Hot Sauce

The Best Hot Sauces

The name of this concoction from Voodoo Chile Sauces, in case they tried to cancel Latin at your prep school, is hog.” And inside that bottle is something that we never knew we needed: a bacon-flavored mild hot sauce. But this is no gimmick: The incredibly smooth sauce packs a little bit of punch, sure, but not enough to make weak tongues buckle. The complex flavor profile includes smoke in addition to tomato and pork, which manages to augment the flavor rather than overwhelm. Needless to say, this is perfect for eggs, pulled pork, burgers, bloodies, and anything else where peppers and bacon make things better.

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A Frame Datil Pepper Sauce

St. Augustine, Florida is home to the datil pepper, a super-spicy pepper similar to a scotch bonnet. One of my favorite hot sauces that features the datil pepper is the A Frame Datil Pepper Sauce. The sweet and spicy hot sauce can be used in a variety of ways. Think of it as an alternative to hot honey, with a thick honey-like consistency, but with little flecks of datil pepper throughout. If you think a sweet and spicy kick is what your favorite meal needs then this is the right sauce.

Huy Fong Sriracha In Bottle

Yeah, you can get standard Sriracha bottles on Amazon, but these packets are perfect for stashing in your bag, your back pocket, or your desk drawer to fuel that Sriracha craving, whenever, wherever. And the bottle shape of the packets isn’t just for the cute factorthey also serve as easier-to-rip-off tops than your standard fiddle-with-each-corner-til-the-ketchup-explodes-all-over-your-shirt condiment packet. Stop stealing handfuls of mediocre hot sauce packets from your deli. Spring for the good stuff because you’re worth it.

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Forget Tapato And Cholula: Valentina Black Label

Heat level: Mild to moderate

Flavor: In this world, you’re either a Tapatío person or a Cholula person. I’ll take either of those if it’s available, but in my kitchen, you’ll see Valentina instead. It’s smoother and more flavorful than the other two, while still packing that classic Mexican hot sauce flavor. The ingredients are simple , but the flavor is complex. The Black Label stuff is labeled “extra hot,” but it’s still mild enough to use every day, at every meal.

Dave’s Gourmet Crazy Caribbean Hot Sauce

What’s The Best Hot Sauce For Wings? (Taste Test)

This spicy sauce is definitely on fire, thanks to a generous dose of Puerto Rican red habaneros. The secret ingredientcarrotsadds a bit of sweetness and earthiness to the flavor profile. One Amazon reviewer said that the price is a steal since one bottle contains “more hot sauce than one person would ever be able to use in a lifetime.” Challenge accepted.

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Best Mexican Hot Sauces

Valentina salsa picante

This is food & reviews writer Anna Lawsons favourite hot sauce of all time . Not only is the consistency satisfyingly thick and smooth, meaning it pours really well, its also packed full of flavour. It has a low-medium level of heat, rather than blow-your-head-off spice and loads of tangy, citrussy acidity. This makes it excellent for drizzling over tacos, nachos, huevos rancheros or any Mexican-inspired dish. We also like it with eggs, in halloumi wraps or swirled through yogurt to make an easy dip.

Available from:

Kenji’s Favorite Fiery Condiments On The Market

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

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This article was originally published in 2017. It has since been reformatted for ease of browsing and updated to reflect what sauces are available as of 2021.

Naming a “best” hot sauce is an impossible task, akin to naming a best episode of MacGyver or a best style of dumpling. Different hot sauces fulfill different needs, and I wouldn’t want anyone to live in a world in which each fridge held only one bottle. In that spirit, I won’t even attempt to limit my hot sauce recommendations to a single best, or even to a top five or 10. Nope: These are 28 of my favorite hot sauces. I can tell you from experience that if you are planning on attempting this kind of taste test, give yourself a few weeks to space it out, stock plenty of milk and white rice, and keep your plumber’s number on speed dial.

Figuring out where to even begin selecting candidates from the thousands of hot sauces bottled and sold in this country is no mean feat. I started by harnessing the power of social media and asked you all for your recommendations. Anything that got a mention, I researched anything that got more than a couple of mentions, I bought and tasted. I also considered recommendations from renowned chili-heads like Bill Moore, and looked over lists from other major publications.

Finally, I limited my selection to hot sauces that are distributed to stores nationwide or available for purchase online.

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Franks Redhot Original Hot Sauce

Review Highlights:

This is a delicious sauce that is perfect for adding flavor to any dip or appetizer. Its not too spicy, but after its cooked you can taste the kick a little more. Its definitely a mild/medium spice level. The heat comes from the aged cayenne red pepper, but is nothing too intense at all. Read the full review here or

The Best Hot Sauces From Around The World

The Best Hot Sauce â Taste

You might be the type who steals mini Tabasco bottles from the room service cart. Maybe you know how to say spicy, please! in eight languages. Perhaps you’re the daredevil in your friend group who reaches for any flaming red jar at a food stall and just pours, no questions asked. Whatever hot sauce bottles are proudly claiming real estate on your refrigerator door, you love heat, and you’re always looking for more of it.

For hot sauce fanatics, the world of spice is large and varied, and in this guide, we’re here to help you make sense of it. Hot sauce has a place in many kitchens across the globe. It can be made by blending any number of different chiles, spices, oils, and acidsand ranges from burning Belizean habanero hot sauce with carrot and vinegar to tingling Szechuan chili oil with numbing peppercorns.

Below, we run through some of the best hot sauces from around the worldfocusing on the Americas, Africa, and Asia, primarily on native flavorsand where to find them online. Though they are just as important in their own right, we’ve chosen to leave out the many chili pastes, powders, flakes, and salsas of the world . Everything here can be dribbled or poured atop any dish of your choosing. We’re not going to get into technical measures of heat, like Scoville units, since not every manufacturer or hot sauce lover uses that systemas long as you can decipher between words like mild, medium, hot, fiery, etc., you’re good to go.

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Louisiana Brand Hot Sauce

Spice rating: Tame

The Louisiana Brand Hot Sauce, which was engineered in New Iberia, is tasty enough. As in, it’ll do in a pinch. But we’re knocking the Louisiana Brand down a few pegs because of it’s high sodium content. With a blood pressure-hiking 240 milligrams of sodium, Louisiana has the highest sodium level of any commercial hot sauce. Beyond the staggering amount of salt, Louisiana Brand Hot Sauce is made from relatively harmless ingredients like aged peppers and distilled vinegar.

The original Louisiana Hot Sauce is fairly tame. If you’re after something a little bolder, the Louisiana Brand also puts out some more fiery options like the red chili, habanero, and aptly named Hotter Than Hot sauces. For a bit of flavor variety, there’s also the Louisiana Brand chipotle, roasted garlic, roasted pepper, jalapeño, and Sweat Heat with Honey.

Tastes Like Fancy Booze: Blis Blast Hot Pepper Sauce

Heat level: Mild

Flavor: BLiS is a chef’s hot sauce. The creators are probably most famous for their bourbon-barrel-aged maple syrup, and that syrup plays a unique role in their hot sauce. No, the sauce doesn’t contain any actual maple syrup, but the sauce base, made from cayenne, árbol, and chipotle chilies, is aged for a year in barrels that have previously aged bourbon, maple syrup, and Founders Kentucky Breakfast Stout. The result is a hot sauce with an insanely complex, layered flavor profile that you’ll almost want to sip from a whiskey glass.

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Torchbearer Garlic Reaper Sauce

You know whats better than garlic? Spicy hot sauce. You know whats better than both of those on their own? Both of them combined. Everything you see is gluten-free, non-GMO, all natural, and extract-free. Just like our last pick, Torchbearer Garlic Reaper Sauce was also features on Hot Ones, and uses a blend of some of the spiciest stuff on earth to maker knees weak and arms heavy. Its Carolina reaper peppersthe second-hottest peppers in the worldand garlic, with a hint of chili powder.

While they may sound like heaven, its going to sting like hell. Theyve added enough ingredients to make the Carolina reapers power diminish quite a bit, but it still has 116,000 Scoville units of heat, so its definitely hot enough to entice your heat-seeking side. For comparison, most tobacco sauces only have a maximum of 30,000 Scoville units. If you are looking for the right lunch box, be sure to check out our selection of the best ones on the market.

Best In Show: Nathans Famous Skinless Beef Franks

ReggaeFrank09’s Best Tasting Hot Sauces Reviewed

Host of the annual 4th of July hot dog eating contest, this brand took the title of champion. Our panel unanimously agreed that Nathans Famous combined all of the best qualities into a winning hot dog. It tasted flavorfulseasoned but not saltyand had a gentle snap with every bite. Nathans Famous has had plenty of time to perfect the recipe: The company has been serving up its signature franks for well over a century .

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Best Tasting Super Hot Sauce Top 10 Pick Reviewed For 2022

  • Gringo Bandito Hot Sauce comes in four flavors. This pack contains four 5oz bottles of Super Hot, Green Habanero and Original Red Hot Sauce
  • Tastes great! Hot sauce should taste awesome, not just be hot! Gringo Bandito is the perfect combination of flavor and spice to make your next meal a zinger. Try it on tacos, burritos, pizza, chili, Bloody Marysanything you want to taste great!
  • 1st Place Scovie Award winner for best tasting hot sauce, 1 million bottles sold cant be wrong!
  • All Natural Gluten Free, Vegan, Paleo, Made in the USA, Ships in certified Frustration-Free packaging
  • Brought to you by Dexter Holland, lead singer of The Offspring
  • UNIQUE GIFT – Set includes 30 uniquely flavored hot sauces in individual glass bottles, 0.7 oz each.
  • FLAVORS – Try Garlic Herb, Cayenne Smoky Bourbon, Jalapeno Bacon, Mango Habanero, Chipotle and more!
  • HOT SAUCE – Get ready to take on the hot sauce challenge with this vegan & vegetarian red hot sauce!
  • ELEVATE YOUR DISH – Sauce adds flavor to chicken wings, pizza, tacos, chili, dips and so much more!
  • GIFT BAG READY – Just wrap it up, slip it into a bag or add a bow, and this gift set is ready to go!

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