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."
