Lousiana-Style Hot Sauces

Louisiana-style hot sauces ought to have only three ingredients: Peppers, vinegar, and salt. No thickeners. No preservatives. That's how I see things. Nevertheless, one finds the addition of various gums as thickeners and sometimes garlic powder. I can tolerate the thickeners, but I really dislike the addition of garlic.

#1 - Tabasco

Nothing off-the-wall here. Of those you’ll find on the shelf at the supermarket, my favorite is Tabasco. It has the fermented fruity complexity and the just-right level of heat. Nothing tastes quite like Tabasco. When I get the chance to go home to Mississippi, my soul finds a spicy salve in finding a bottle of Tabasco on pretty much every table when I go out to eat. I especially enjoy a few dabs of it on over-easy eggs, and I keep a bottle of it in my glove compartment for emergencies.

#2 - Crystal

Crystal is very good, too. It has the fruity character of Tabasco, but it isn’t aged as long or probably in the same way, so it lacks the oak-barrel complexity. It is also significantly milder than Tabasco. For this reason, lots of people swear by it, and I understand that. The flavor of the peppers comes through crystal clear. Crystal is very good indeed. In a universe in which Tabasco never happened, Crystal is my #1.

Interestingly, I’m a fan of more heat than offered by regular Crystal, so you’d think I’d prefer the hotter flanker. Inexplicably, the hotter flanker has xanthan gum. Despite this, it is only a step or two hotter and hardly worth the effort. Stick with regular Crystal. You can’t go wrong.

#3 - Louisiana Hot Sauce

Lousiana brand is different and distinctive. It is more smoky and salty and completely without the fruitiness that marks Tabasco and Crystal. I know of no other Lousiana-style sauce that has anything approaching this flavor profile, and I’d be very interested to know how it is achieved. I find the hotter version of it quite lovely. I think it is just a hint too salty, though, which is why I don’t use it more often. I think this one is severely under-rated, though, and I find myself reaching for it when I make tuna salad or deviled eggs.

#4 - Texas Pete

You will often find Texas Pete on tables in Georgia and South Carolina. It has no connection to Texas as that's just marketing. Texas Pete is better than nothing, but it uses a thickener and I find off-putting. If it get past that, Texas Pete has one single note, the earthy pepper note. It is really good at that one note. It is delicious, and when I think about it, it is kind of remarkable. You’d think another note might creep in there. Nope. One note. That’s all you get. I think Texas Pete is a better choice for making hot wings than Frank's.

Texas Pete’s hotter flanker is fun because it’s quite hot. I really want to point it out because it is significantly hotter than the original. A lot of the time these flankers claim to be hotter but you try them and they are underwhelming, Not a problem here. Hot Texas Pete is hot. It has the one-note Texas Pete with the heat jimmied up to eleven.

#5 - Frank's Red Hot

This is what passes for Lousiana-style hot sauce North of the Mason-Dixon line. It was the one I'd get when I asked for hot sauce in restaurants in Pennsylvania. That's if they had a hot sauce at all. Spicy isn't appreciated much there, so the first thing you might notice about Frank's is that its name is a misnomer: It is not hot. You could feed this to a baby.

It has garlic in the recipe, and I don't like that. I don't want a garlic note in my hot sauce unless I'm eating Sriracha. Probably because of its tameness, it happens to be world’s best-seller. I mean, it isn’t bad. It isn’t good, either. It has none of the aged character of the above sauces. You can taste the garlic, but you can't really pick out a strong pepper note. It isn't fruity. It isn't smoky. It is just boring.