What a fun job, tasting hot sauces! I had a great time with my 13-year-old and her Ethiopian pal, who assured me of her skill in this department thanks to the traditionally spicy food her family eats at home.
We tasted the sauces on their own and with food. Both are essential: with the first drop, you’re looking for the flavour profile and overall taste; with the second mouthful on food – in our case a margherita pizza – you’re looking for how the heat and flavour of the sauce cut through. The moment the heat from the chillies comes into contact with food, especially carbohydrates and fats, the potency is reduced and the heat is sucked up. If you want a sauce to season food and enhance its flavours, then you need more heat than is obvious, and definitely more heat than when tasting the sauces on their own.
It was lovely to see the habanero chilli making an appearance, although it’s always hard to contain its heat and harness its fruity, floral flavour. The best sauces had some fermentation going on to round out the chilli heat and balance the flavours. And, as with most things in life, a bit of ageing helps enormously!
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The best hot sauces
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Best all-rounder
Tabasco Original red hot pepper sauce
£2.50 for 57ml at Asda
£9.99 for 350ml at Amazon
★★★★★
The deliciously tangy, rounded flavour coming from the fermentation of its chillies gives this hot sauce a huge lead in terms of taste. It is hot, but the flavour soon dissipates on contact with food.
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Best bargain
Lingham’s chilli sauce
£2 for 358g at Ocado
£12.79 for three 358g bottles at Amazon
★★★★★
Quite sweet but in a rather delicious way. Not so much a hot sauce as a sweet chilli sauce, but very moreish nonetheless. A great accompaniment to a burger.
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Best splurge
Sauce Shop Original hot sauce
£2.80 for 160ml at Tesco
£2.95 for 160ml at Sauce Shop
★★★★☆
Delicious. Quite garlicky, but almost meaty in its flavour thanks to the ageing of the chillies. I really liked the all-round flavour of this one, and it would be my favourite if it were less garlicky.
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And the rest …
Cholula Original Mexican hot sauce
£2.30 for 150ml at Tesco
£3 for two 150ml bottles at Amazon
★★★★☆
Classic Mexican with flavours of cumin and oregano. Not too spicy, and lots of flavour that stays in the mouth for a while. I like it.
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Morrisons habanero hot chilli sauce
£1.70 for 165ml at Morrisons
★★★☆☆
Very spicy. There are background notes of that distinctive, fiery habanero flavour, then vinegar and heat. There is something almost olive-like about the taste.
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Encona Original hot pepper sauce
£1.70 for 220ml at Sainsbury’s
£1.30 for 142ml at Waitrose
★★★☆☆
A pleasing blend of habanero and scotch bonnet. The onion gives it a little something interesting but it’s pretty acidic.
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Frank’s RedHot Original cayenne pepper hot sauce
£2.20 for 148ml at Ocado
£1.65 for 148ml at Asda
★★★☆☆
I tasted celery salt at first, then salt. This sauce has a nice flavour of red pepper and citrus, but they disappear quickly, leaving just the saltiness.
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Tingly Ted’s Xtra Tingly sauce
£3 for 265g at Sainsbury’s
£2 for 250ml at Asda
★★★☆☆
Extremely citrusy and lemony, then hot. The very distinctive taste took over from food. Good, but different.
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Asda Fiery habanero chilli sauce
Quite watery, distinctive flavour, but vinegary. Not a lovely aftertaste.
