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The Best Hot Sauces, Ranked

6. Louisiana Hot Sauce Original

• Score: 22.5/30

Hot sauce rivalries run deep in the Pelican State, especially between Louisiana Original and Crystal. Both were founded in the 1920s and are made of the same ingredients: aged cayenne peppers, vinegar, and salt. In our rankings, Louisiana edged ahead of Crystal by half a point, but let the record state that it was a very close call. The judges shouted out its peppery flavor, good acidity, and mild heat that's suitable for seasoning and cooking.

8. Tapatío

• Score: 17.5/30

Of all the taco truck standbys, our tasters came in with the preconceived notion that they liked Cholula, which is made in Jalisco, Mexico, best. But in the blind tasting the wooden-capped Cholula didn't crack the top 10, which just goes to show that you can't trust anyone, not even your damn self. (This revelation sent Talde into a mini-existential crisis about whether his formerly great palate might be wavering in his old age.) 

Tapatío, which was created in Southern California in 1971 by Jose-Luis Saavedra, scored higher than almost all the Mexican-style sauces in the tasting. But the reception was lukewarm at best, with Talde and Johnson describing it as mid-grade, kind of flat, and lacking craveability. Evans was a little more forgiving: "You have to respect the cover art. I love the sombrero guy!" (Fun fact: Sombrero guy was originally a sombrero crow. When it launched, Tapatío was called Cuervo which means "crow" in Spanish, but had to change its name when the tequila company threatened a lawsuit.) 

9. Huy Fong Sriracha

• Score: 16.5/30

This California-based company is a true American success story: It was founded in 1980 by David Tran, who fled the Vietnam war and immigrated to America aboard a ship called the Huy Fong. A few years ago, his Sriracha was the hottest sauce in the game, inspiring a movie, a cookbook, and widespread cult fandom, but our tasters asserted that it's now been hyped beyond its worth. The condiment is so omnipresent that Johnson calls it the new TABASCO, and Talde thinks it's "mad basic, like every dude who says Jay Z is the best rapper alive."

 

The tasters also complained that rooster sauce dominates whatever it touches, is barely spicy enough to qualify as hot sauce, and contains questionable ingredients like potassium sorbate and sodium bisulfate. When Evans wondered aloud why Huy Fong became such a pop-culture phenomenon, Talde offered that it's probably because "there's a cock on the bottle."

Complete list (Thrillist.com)