Original Juan, Pain Is Good, Batch #37 Garlic Hot Sauce





Original Juan, Pain Is Good, Batch #37 Garlic Hot Sauce. I love hot sauce and I love garlic, so this is really one of the most perfect sauces there is.  The flavor is the best of any sauce I have ever had.  The garlic flavor is distinct but not overpowering and the heat is hot enough to make the forehead sweat but not unmanageable.  It is just the right combination of flavor and heat. The habanero flavor is robust and fresh tasting.

This sauce is a thicker one with very small pieces in it, it is somewhere between a paste and a runny sauce, it needs to be shaken as it begins to settle and separate after a few days.

On my scale of 1 to 10, I give this sauce a 10 in flavor and an 7 in heat.  It adds an astounding flavor and enough heat to make my forehead sweat and a medium lived manageable discomfort. It has a quick to come on heat that wears off within a minute or two without having to resort to a glass of milk.  On a standard pulled pork sandwich I use about 15 drops.

I could only find one website that states the Scoville rating for this sauce, they claimed it was 3,251.  I am sure this is incorrect.  My guess (and I admit my guess could be way off) is that this sauce is somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000, yeah that’s a big range but it’s the best I could do.

Kroger Hot Sauce

It would be hard to come up with a more generic name than "Hot Sauce" if not impossible. This sauce is available at Kroger for about $1, I'm not sure if it is made by them or made by someone else and they just slap their label on it.  I classify it with Franks Red Hot, Texas Pete, Louisiana and the like as a Louisiana style sauce, not really hot at all, but for flavor.  I use these sauces alot, the way most people use ketchup. They are not all the same to me I like Franks the best, Texas Pete second and Kroger comes in third.

It has a slightly more cayenne pepper flavor bite than Franks and Texas Pete but less of a cayenne flavor bite than Louisiana. It is one of my staples and a bottle lasts me about a month or three depending on how many other bottles of sauce I have at the time. Garlic is one of the ingredients but I can not detect any pronounced garlic flavor.

Kroger also make a "hotter" version of their sauce that I'll write about another time.

On my scale of 1 to 10,  I give Kroger an 8 in flavor and a 1 in heat.  It adds a tiny amount of heat with basically no discomfort.

I could not find a Scoville rating for Kroger hot sauce, but based on Franks being 450 and Texas Pete being 750 I'm going to guess this is around 500.

Original Tabasco sauce

Original Tabasco sauce, made by McIlhenny Company, Avery Island, Louisiana 70513, was the 1^st hot sauce I ever tried.  For years it was the only sauce I used.  I was 13 and I simply didn’t realize there were more options out there.  Tabasco in my head is the baseline of all hot sauces both in flavor and heat, every other sauce I have ever tried, in my head, has been compared to Tabasco.  It is 0, anything hotter or more flavorful is in the + and anything less is a -. 

That said, these days Tabasco is one of my least favorite sauces.  I don’t particularly care for the flavor. I do like it’s heat level, but I can find the same level of heat in sauces that I like the flavor of much more.

On my scale of 1 to 10,  I give Tabasco a 2 in flavor and a 4 in heat.  It adds a nice level of heat with only the littlest bit of discomfort.

Tabasco has a Scoville rating of 2,500 to 5,000 heat units. (http://www.tabascofoodservice.com/about_scoville.cfm)

Introduction

Why am I here doing this?

I love hot sauces, hot peppers, horse radish, spicy food in general and most recently curry.  There is very little that I eat that does not have some amount of "heat" added to it.  I've loved spicy foods for the better part of my life. Perhaps I will blog on the beginnings some day.

This blog is here with a target audience of 1 person, me.  If anyone else happens to look and likes what they see then all the better.

I realized the other day that I have tried literally hundreds of hot sauces, somewhere around 40ish types of hot peppers, more spicy dishes than I can even begin to recall.  So I'm going to start writing them down as a record for myself.

My goal is to write about the flavor, heat without flavor is not what I'm after, I would prefer a good tasting sauce with no heat at all over a sauce with lots of heat and a bad or no flavor.  I will write a bit about my opinion of the heat level and since that is very subjective I will add the Scoville rating if I can find it.

Enjoy the blog if you happen to find it, leave feedback if you like.  Let me know your opinion of the things I write about and feel free to throw me suggestions of things you think I might like to try.