Hot sauce has been around forever, right? It’s just one of those things that have always existed, like water and the Sun? Nope! Whilst hot sauce itself has been around for a very long time, it has only been in recent times that hot sauces have taken off and become the craze that it is today!
We can trace the origins of hot sauce (perhaps not in the way we’re used to consuming!) all the way back to around 7000BC! Aztec tribes in Southern Mexico began to cultivate cultivating chilis and use them for their flavour but also as medicine. In fact, an Aztec painting shows a mother punishing her child by holding them over the smoke of burning chili peppers!
By the time Columbus and the Spanish arrived in South America, sometime in the 16th century, Aztec agriculture was quite sophisticated, even to the point where they were able to develop several distinct types and strains of chile pepper. According to records, found from those conquistadors, they found anchos, jalapeños, and even smoked chipotles at Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. It is thought that Columbus brought these peppers back to the Western civilization, where they grew in popularity, as people began to experiment with different spices. The peppers particularly became popular in Asia, amongst the cultures that valued and prized spicy foods.
It is widely believed that the first commercially produced hot sauce was ‘born’ in 1807 in Massachusetts, sold simply as “cayenne sauce.” This then led to a company in New York manufacturing the first bird pepper sauce, and then the growing of tabasco chilis.
Tabasco sauce is the quintessential hot sauce out there on the market, with many people believing that this was the very first hot sauce that launched. A chap called Colonel Mansell White started growing tabasco chilis in the mid-1800s; who gave the seeds to a man called Edward McIlhenny (who many people will recognise as the ‘inventor of Tabasco sauce’). McIlhenny started growing the tabasco peppers in Louisiana, on his plantation on Avery Island. Over the next following years, McIlhenny’s Tabasco Sauce would revolutionise the hot sauce industry and become one of the most well-known brands of hot sauce around the world. This cultural phenomenon paved the way for other brands of hot sauce to launch. Interestingly enough, Tabasco’s initial success wasn’t due to its appeal on the consumer market, but rather through sales to hotel chains and catering companies. It was only much later that it became the consumer success that it is today.
Since then, many other developers have launched their own hot sauces, all trying to make their mark in the hot sauce market: either through interesting tastes and flavour combinations, or by the sheer heat the hot sauce contains. Manufacturers across the world have put their ‘spin’ on the traditional hot sauce; involving spices and seasonings native to that country. Practically each continent has their own ‘hot sauce’ or version of ‘hot seasoning’, depending on the plants and types of peppers grown there.
What is the Scoville Heat Scale?
If you ask someone to describe how hot a chili is, what would they say? “Yeah, it’s…you know…quite hot. Like, not hot hot, but not meh…” Even though taste and heat is very subjective, the Scoville Heat Scale gives us a standardised level on which to base all spicy foods. It measures the amount of capsaicinoids (the spicy chemicals) in a substance, and from then we get a general sense of how hot and spicy something is. It goes from 0 (a bell pepper) all the way up to 16,000,000 (capsaicin – the actual chemical that produces a pepper’s heat). Each hot sauce has its own rating on the Scoville Heat Scale, and it can be used to determine how likely the hot sauce is to make you sweat and cry. According to the Guinness World Records, the hottest chili pepper is the Carolina Reaper, which measures at 1,500,000 on the Scoville Heat Scale! Pepper spray, used by the police, is 5,300,000 on the Scoville Heat Scale!
