Louisiana hot sauce

When it comes to hot sauces, Louisiana doesn’t lack for variety. A tour of the condiments aisle in even the humblest grocery store reveals a range that far outstrips the selection of, say, ketchup brands. Golden mayonnaise. Calandro’s location on Government Street had not just one rack, but an entire display of caps packed with a galaxy of hot sauce offerings, with names ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Apparently, even in our highly corporatized food culture, the hot sauce segment remains something of a wild frontier, with the hearts and long-suffering taste buds of hot sauce aficionados still on the line. Why? Is it because hot sauce occupies a unique culinary niche, one that can be considered a souvenir, a pantry accessory, and a manly rite of passage, as well as a livelihood? Is it because the hot sauce department is the only section of the supermarket where teenagers feel at home? How else to explain a food segment that might attract customers with names like Ring of Fire or Bayou Butt Burner? Try marketing salad dressing or guacamole on those terms. Boop; hot sauce is unique, so this month I undertook a very subjective search to decide if one sauce could be considered superior to another; or yes, if you’ll pardon the expression, the whole thing is a lot of talk. And here, I offer my discoveries.

The oyster speaks. With the help of a couple of asbestos-tongued hot sauce snobs, I returned to Calandro’s to select a number of sauces. Necessity, not concern, required that we choose no more than eight candidates (it’s hard to make sensible comparisons when trying to narrow down a field of forty contestants). So we narrowed our choices down to just those sauces made in Louisiana (Texas, and interestingly, New Jersey, are other states that many hot sauces originate from); then we chose to remove all sauces with really silly names. In other words, although I suppose it is possible that Sir Fartsalot brand sauce really does offer a superior seasoning experience, it was omitted from this survey.

Thus provided, the tasting team went to The Chimes and ordered four dozen fresh Louisiana oysters and not a few beers. Each sauce was then applied to six oysters for the careful consideration of the tasting team, who approached the task with enough enthusiasm to convince casual listeners that we were tasting 1982 Bordeaux, not pepper sauces, and it wasn’t long before than adjectives like “vibrant”. , “brothy”, “citrusy” and “full-bodied” were all the rage. Evangeline’s Louisiana Hot Sauce was praised for its stickiness, but disparaged as “a close cousin to hot ketchup” due to its spicy buffalo wing flavors. “Where are you going?” the panel complained about the Slap Ya Mama sauce, which was pronounced as “run and run,” failing to provide that satisfying hit of hot pepper at the end. Reppeaux’s Hot Sauce from Sterlington, Louisiana featured plenty of smoky pepper flavor on the front and was described as “biblical” both for its raging late-afternoon heat and the fact that Joshua 24:15 is cited on the label. The iconic Crystal Hot Sauce, which I had long accepted as my personal favorite, turned out to be all salt and vinegar, turning lurid orange in color and showing a bit of a peppery flavor when considered alongside more flavorful sauces like pepper sauce. Justin Wilson from Baton Rouge, who had a lot of heat and a nice citrus note. You could also taste the oyster through it, which was nice. The southern cajun hot sauce, a ‘cooked’ rather than cold fermented sauce that contains onions and sugar among its ingredients, was flavorful and not overly spicy, but overwhelmed the delicate oyster and seemed more suited to barbecue. In the end, opinions converged in favor of Louisiana Gold Hot Sauce. The cadillac in the hot sauce garage at Bruce Foods, Louisiana Gold, wowed us with a burst of fruity pepper flavors up front, without so much salt to obscure the oyster’s own sea-breeze brine. It was also the hottest of the eight, but with a full flavor that had us reaching for the accompanying lagers with renewed appreciation. Unfortunately, we couldn’t come to the same conclusion about Bruce Foods’ Louisiana Gold Horseradish Sauce, which initially looked promising due to the presence of horseradish, but ultimately tasted mostly like mustard and wine. We could shake it over a Bloody Mary, but not an oyster, some other time.

Peppers, vinegar, salt, a spice or two. Since most hot sauce recipes don’t stray far from these few ingredients, it’s surprising how much they differ from each other. So the next time you feel like eating oysters, remember that you are in the heart of the hot sauce. It’s another thing we have to be proud of.