It really depends on the dish and what you want out of the hot sauce.
My general, everyday preference is Cholula or Crystal. Both those have a distinctly hispanic/tex-mex flavor profile. For east and southeast Asian cuisine, I prefer Sriracha. If I really want the hot sauce to be the focus of the dish, I tend to prefer Marie Sharp’s, especially the carrot or grapefruit varieties.
i love yuzu kosho, most brands are fine. i’ll put it on anything remotely asian. panda express gets the yuzu kosho. instant ramen gets the yuzu kosho. homemade gyuudon gets the yuzu kosho. plain white rice gets the yuzu kosho. its so good
Best I can find locally is Enconas Carolina Reaper sauce but I will say it’s nowhere near hot enough to justify that name imo. Always a bottle of Sirracha handy as well.
El Yucateco Black Label Chile Habanero
I drink the xxxtra hot version, way too much, Amazon sells them in half gallons which really should be a felony honestly.
But it goes with everything and is just hot enough that I can tune the taste.
Grace Hot Pepper Sauce. It has this tangy, buttery flavour and a nice amount of heat that accentuates food without melting your face.
I think they use a few different peppers in the mash as while it has a little of the apricot fire Scotch Bonnet taste to it, as you’d expect from a Caribbean brand with a bunch of Scotch Bonnets on the label, it’s not the predominant chilli flavour here. I think the mash gets slightly fermented too due to that buttery taste the sauce has.
Before the pandemic it was 50p for an 85ml bottle, I miss that. £1.50 for the same size bottle still feels like a rip off.
Edit: just looked Grace Hot Pepper Sauce up as I’ve been thinking about it all day now since making this comment, and their website says the peppers used are a blend of Habanero and Cayenne in the mash. So my tasting apricot fire is likely a placebo from the image on the label, lmao.
I was going to buy some based on your description, but it’s more than twice £1.50 here in Canada, $13.99 for two bottles.
Fucking hell. For two 85ml bottles? That’s insanity.
Dirty Dick’s. Besides the obvious, being able to say “Hey, lemme put some dirty dicks on your taco,” and the like, the stuff is phenomenal. It is not for everything, like, say, a Tapatio would be, but I use it most of the time.
Dirty Dick’s is a sweet heat, and they kill it in both departments. Nowhere on the bottle do they advertise how many Scoville units, because it’s silly. They created a sweet yet spicy sauce that is perfect for pulled pork, or beef/chicken tacos, pretty much anything in the tex-mex spectrum (the texmextrum, if I may).
I have yet to try it with Asian or Indian fare, and I won’t even begin to speculate, because I am far from some culinary genius, I just follow recipes well.
So yes, allow me to shill for putting dirty dicks on your food.
I used to use Franks or Franks Buffalo sauce in everything. It’s not very hot but has excellent flavor.
Now you made me go count: I have 7 different ones on the counter plus 5 in the fridge, more if you count horseradishes and spicy mustards (probably the empty bottle in recycling doesn’t count). I love the home made one, the chili crisp, and the dragon sauce, but my best answer to the question has to be Mellissa’s because I have so many of their flavors. They’re all a little different: maybe sriracha is good with one food but too sweet for another. Maybe I want to taste that Louisiana flair on my shrimp but that chili can stand up to reaper sauce
Scandinavian Gold from PepperPalace. A lot of Pepper Palace stuff is good.
I love spicy olive oils infused with chilis
Good ol’ Sriracha because of its versatility. It goes well with so many foods.
Hmm it’s the sweetness that makes it not versatile for me. I love it in pho though!
I’ve tried a few different brands of sriracha, and there were only like two that I liked. The others had more sweetness that I didn’t like.
Tapatío
Delicious sauce, but I personally wouldn’t consider that hot at all.
I love all kinds of hot sauce (sate/sambal is my #1. Does that count as sauce? It’s more a paste). But my widespread you can find this anywhere go-to for eggs and potatoes is good ol’ Tapatio. I’ll take Valentina’s too, since it’s so similar.
This was my go-to for a while. I still keep this one on hand, but I recently have been defaulting to Hoff Sauce more recently. If you see it for sale, I recommend you give it a try.
I love pretty much anything by Melinda’s
I recently got a bottle of Melinda’s Garlic & Habanero sauce. It might be my favorite hot sauce that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.
Was coming to praise the Ghost Pepper Wing Sauce. It’s so good on and in so many things, but especially a chicken sandwich from a local joint we go to on Wednesdays. I look forward to that every week.
Tapatio, Valentina’s, or Cholula.
Cholula Chipotle!
Secret Aardvark habanero sauce is so, so good. I’ll put it on just about anything. It’s by no means the hottest sauce out there, but I’ll put its flavor up against any other sauce. I buy this stuff by the case at this point.
I knew I would find this comment here. It’s so damn good, got some in my fridge right now.
Agreed, that and yellow bird habanero are the two sauces that I need to have a supply of at all times.
Also highly recommend the smoky aardvark if you haven’t tried that one yet. It’s not in as many stores as the original, but it’s delicious.
Damn, thought I’d beat you to it lol
Frank’s RedHot
Do you….
put that shit on everything?
You bet your ass I do
I’m a pepper head, but for some dishes, that cayenne vinegar is a necessary flavor component.
That’s my favorite on most foods. For Mexican I go with Valentina and for Asian food I go with Sriracha
I like Franks in wing sauce but prefer Cholula for pretty much anything else.
Cholula with mayo and ketchup makes a great fry sauce.
