![]() He adds, “It's what pepper spray is made from.” He’s the world’s first hot sauce sommelier and owner of Heatonist, a hot sauce specialty store in Brooklyn that carries First We Feast's Hot Ones blend. "A 10-million Scoville sauce would be made from only Oleoresin Capsicum, an extract from chiles that distills their pure heat," Noah Chaimberg tells me. (For perspective, a humble jalapeño is around 10,000 Scoville units.) Not everyone considers those things “sauces” though, as they can only occur courtesy of extracts, the HGH of the spice world. As more product enters the market, one way to differentiate yourself from the rest of the pack is by ratcheting up the Scovilles in novelty bottles-seemingly lethal formulas that sometimes hover in the seven- or eight-digit range. The widespread interes t has also primed us for a certain type of chilehead with the courage to sign a legal disclaimer before entering the "XXX Hot" category of hot-sauce tasting. ![]() Centuries later, companies like Tabasco and Huy Fong's (Sriracha) broke through the mainstream, setting the stage for a global interest in hot sauce. Historically speaking, hot sauces began where hot peppers grew, in Central America, perhaps some 2000 years ago, deployed sparingly to add flavor to a humdrum meal. ![]() Subtlety and understatement are not exactly mantras in the modern hot sauce biz, especially when you look at bottles boasting slogans like "100% Pain" and "Insanity." It should be no surprise, then, that we're in the middle of a Scoville Scale arms race-a chile pepper blitzkrieg that can feel more like a death march than a road to enlightenment, as companies vying to outmaneuver their competitors keep pushing the heat levels to the extreme outer-reaches.īut while these "warnings" only seem to encourage more and more YouTube dares, hot-sauce wasn’t always a game of one-upmanship. ![]()
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