Tapatio (pronounced ‘Tah-pah-tee-o’) has the type of back story that we’re used to hearing from hot sauce manufacturers. Mr. Jose-Luis Saavedra, Sr., the founder of Tapatio, started his family-run business in 1971, in a small warehouse in California. Since then, it has grown and expanded to become a very recognisable brand of hot sauce on the market. The sauce’s name ‘Tapatio’ is actually the name given to people from the city of Guadalajara in the Jalisco province in Mexico (where the founder was originally from).
I discovered Tapatio by accident. I was searching the internet for the latest hot sauce news a few years back, when I saw an article about a new flavour of Doritos in the USA, flavoured with Tapatio. Personally, I am a fan of when crisps and snacks involve other flavours and sauces into their products, as it allows me to discover new and exciting flavours. But, unfortunately, with them being exclusive to America, I couldn’t find a way of importing them over here in the UK (and I didn’t fancy having to spend a truckload of money on flights, just for a bag of crisps!). So, I decided to buy a bottle of the Tapatio sauce itself, to see what all the fuss is about.
The label of Tapatio could easily fade into non-existence in the supermarket: there’s a happy little Mexican man on the front in a sombrero. I mean, there’s no mistaking that this is a Mexican hot sauce: I think subconsciously we associate ‘Mexican sauces’ with being hot, so perhaps it is just clever marketing on their part. Looking through the bottle and at the sauce itself, you can see a rich red colour, with small black specks in (the pulp of the peppers) and looks quite thin (you might have to shake the bottle before use, like with ketchup). When I opened the bottle and started to pour, I was right: the sauce is quite thin and runny.
Once you open a bottle of Tapatio and smell the contents, you are hit with a spicy blast of red peppers and garlic: exactly what you want to smell from a hot sauce. Unlike other sauces available to buy, Tapatio doesn’t contain any vinegar, so there is not that ‘sour’ smell of strong vinegar when you open it. I was extremely pleased with the smell when I opened the bottle and it made me very excited to start tasting!
I decided to try and replicate the Tapatio-flavoured Doritos that I was unable to buy from the Internet, by buying a bag of Doritos and just covering them in some Tapatio sauce. Surely, it was that simple? It was. And it was delicious. Tapatio is absolutely correct when it claims to be ‘muy salsa’ (very saucy) – in a way, it feels almost like a salsa rather than a ‘pure’ hot sauce. Although salsa is usually a bit thicker and chunkier, Tapatio has a wonderful assortment of spices embedded in the sauce, that at one point I forgot I was tasting a hot sauce and thought it was simply just a spicy salsa!
The key word there is ‘spicy’. Because, yes, although I have just likened Tapatio hot sauce to a salsa, there is still a kick there to it due to those red peppers. It certainly was not the hottest sauce that I have ever had the pleasure of tasting, but not the mildest. I would put it somewhere comfortably in the middle, which corresponds well to the Scoville Rating of 3,000. I have added Tapatio to a lot of meals, to spice up the flavour – the peppers and garlic make it a perfect component in any recipe. I have found, though, that the sauce’s flavours and heat seem to intensify once the sauce is heated up – perhaps the flavours are given a chance to ‘sweat’ – I’m not sure, it’s probably got something to do with science. One combination I would urge you to try with this sauce is scrambled eggs: try a light dash of Tapatio over some scrambled eggs. Trust me, it’s delicious!
So, if you’re looking for something a little saucy (steady now!) with a bit of a kick to it – I would recommend Tapatio sauce!