Louisiana Hot Sauce

When it comes to hot sauces, Louisiana isn’t lacking for variety. A tour of the condiment aisle in even the humblest grocery store reveals a range that vastly outstrips the selection of, say, ketchup brands. Or mayonnaise. Calandro’s Government Street location had not just a shelf, but an entire end cap display stocked with a galaxy of hot sauce offerings, with names ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Apparently, even in our highly corporatized food culture, the hot sauce segment remains something of a wild frontier-one in which the hearts and long-suffering taste buds of pepper-sauce aficionados are still up for grabs. Why? Is it because hot sauce occupies a unique culinary niche-one that can be considered souvenir, pantry decoration, and manly rite-of-passage, as well as sustenance? Is it because the hot sauce department is the one section of the supermarket in which teenaged boys feel at home? How else to explain a food segment that can attract customers with names like Ring of Fire or Bayou Butt Burner? Try marketing salad dressing or guacamole on those terms. Nope; hot sauce is unique, so this month I set out on a highly subjective quest to decide whether one sauce could be considered superior to another; or whether, if you’ll pardon the expression, the whole thing is a lot of hot air. And here, I offer up my discoveries.

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The oyster speaks. With assistance from a pair of asbestos-tongued hot sauce snobs, I returned to Calandro’s to select a series of sauces. Necessity, not trepidation, required that we choose no more than eight candidates (it’s tough to make sensible comparisons when trying to narrow a field of forty contestants). So we restricted our choices to only those sauces made in Louisiana (Texas and, interestingly, New Jersey, are other states from which lots of hot sauces originate); then we elected to eliminate all the sauces with really daft names. In other words, although I suppose it’s possible that Sir Fartsalot brand sauce really does offer a superior condiment experience, it was omitted from this survey.

Thus provisioned, the tasting team went to The Chimes and ordered four dozen fresh Louisiana oysters, and not a few beers. Each sauce was then applied to six oysters for the careful consideration of the tasting team, who tackled the assignment with enough enthusiasm to convince casual listeners that we were tasting 1982 Bordeauxs, not pepper sauces, and it wasn’t long before adjectives like “vibrant,” “brothy,” “citrusy” and “full-bodied” were being bandied about. Evangeline’s Louisiana Hot Sauce was praised for its viscosity, but disparaged as “a close cousin to hot ketchup” on account of its tangy, buffalo-wing flavors. “Where does it go?” complained the panel about Slap Ya Mama sauce, which was pronounced to “run up and run away,” without providing that satisfying hot pepper wallop in the finish. Reppeaux’s Hot Sauce from Sterlington, Louisiana, presented abundant, smoky pepper flavor at the front, and was described as “Biblical,” as much for its wrathful late heat as for the fact that Joshua 24:15 is quoted on the label. The iconic Crystal Hot Sauce, which I’d long accepted as a personal favorite, turned out to be all salt and vinegar, luridly orange and showing little pepper flavor when considered alongside more flavorsome sauces like Baton Rouge’s Justin Wilson’s Pepper Sauce, which packed lots of heat and a pleasant, citrusy note. You could taste the oyster through it, too, which was nice. Southern Cajun Hot Sauce, a ‘cooked’ rather than cold fermented sauce featuring onions and sugar amongst its ingredients, was tasty and not overly hot, but overwhelmed the delicate oyster, and seemed better suited to barbecue. In the end opinions converged in favor of Louisiana Gold Hot Sauce. The cadillac in Bruce Foods’ hot sauce garage, Louisiana Gold wowed us with a burst of fruity pepper flavors up front, without so much salt as to obscure the oyster’s own sea-breeze brininess. It was the hottest of the eight, too, but in a full-flavored way that had us reaching for the accompanying lagers with renewed appreciation. Alas, we couldn’t reach the same conclusion about Bruce Foods’ Louisiana Gold Horseradish Sauce, which seemed initially promising on account of the presence of horseradish, but ultimately tasted mostly of mustard and wine. We might wave it over a Bloody Mary, but not an oyster, another time.

Peppers, vinegar, salt, a spice or two. Given that most hot sauce recipes don’t stray far from these few ingredients it’s astonishing how much they differ from one another. So next time the urge for oysters grips you, remember that you’re in the hot sauce heartland. It’s another thing we’ve got to be proud of.

Source by James Fox-Smith