Hot Sauce

Hot sauces are widely enjoyed and created from a variety of distinctive elements from all over the world. There is a variety of variations of hot sauces that grace in almost every cuisine in the world. In the U.S., hot sauce has been popular for decades. Today, the United States is awash with hot sauce as its popularity has been increasing for the past years. It has been a more common part of everyday meals, transforming chicken wings, noodle dishes, and plain eggs into incendiary meals.

What is it made of?

Chili peppers are the main ingredient of most styles of hot sauce. And Chili peppers are part of a genus plant called Capsicum that contains the agent capsaicin. Capsaicin is an irritant that creates a burning sensation to any human tissue that it touches. And of course, small quantities of it produce a small zing that can be found in hot sauces.

Hot sauces most combination is usually chili peppers, vinegar, and salt. Plenty of hot sauces are fermented to add that flavorful element.

A Brief History of Hot Sauce

Hot sauces have been around since ancient times. It can be traced back to Aztec civilization as far back as 7000 BC - when someone discovered how good it is. Most likely, the first hot sauces were likely mixtures of water and peppers. And through time, humans started breeding pepper plants to get the most suitable traits of their peppers.

In the United States, the history of hot sauce can be traced around 200 years ago. So, here’s how it all went down.

Chili peppers are native to the Americas, and they spread throughout the continent through birds as most birds cannot taste the spiciness of chili peppers. When Christopher Columbus arrived in America, the chili peppers went global. And people from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean started developing their own spicy food and spicy sauce.

Around 1807, the first bottle of cayenne sauce appeared in Massachusetts 1807. Around the 1840s, the first seeds of tabasco pepper made their way in America from Mexico. And in 1849, the first recorded plantation of Tabasco chilis was in New Orleans owned by Colonel Maunsell White. He started bottling and selling hot sauces made of chili peppers.

Edward McIlhenny got seeds from White and started to grow peppers in Louisiana where he started his tabasco sauce and paved the way for the growth of hot sauce in America.

And in 2020, Chef Amy Coram Reynolds started her line of sauce - Saucy.

Did you know that

Hot sauce with chili peppers is healthy. Chili peppers contain a lot of Vitamin C that is more than what an orange has. It also has a Vitamin A that is more than what a carrot has.