Hot Sauce - The Misunderstood Flavor

How many times have you heard, "I don't like hot sauce, it's just too hot." Have you ever heard someone say, "I don't like iced tea, it's just too cold." It's not about the temperature, it's about the flavors. Less than 20% of hot sauce is very hot, while the majority is a flavor enhancer for your meals.

When most people hear "hot sauce" they think chicken wings, and that is simply unfair to the talented brew masters of these highly evolved flavor enhancers. There is always the one person who has to prove their dragon breath talent and orders the last name on the list that go from mild to Volcano III. Then while eating their chicken wings, they start to sweat, their face turns red and they exclaim, "It's hot, but I've had hotter." While it is true there are hot sauces that you can find in sports bars with creative hot names such as Hell's Inferno, Three Mile Island, or the Widow-maker, there is a much broader collection of mild to medium that will add flavor to any dish.

These sauces comes in various degrees of hot: Mild, Medium, Medium-Hot, Hot, Insanely hot, and as an Extract that is not for general consumption but is a highly concentrated version that is an add-on to existing sauces, but only one drop at a time.

If you're looking for blazing hot sauce then you must understand the Scoville heat scale that ranks heat levels of peppers used in them with a ranking from zero for Bell Peppers to 50,000 for cayenne peppers, to 1,000,000 for the Naga Jolokia pepper.

Hot sauce may be the given name on the bottle, but "flavor enhancing" can come from additional ingredients like apples, garlic, peach, and raspberry... Peach and Raspberry? Yes... and don't forget dessert hot sauces in other flavors to enhance your pancakes, oatmeal, cheese cake and even ice cream.

Adding more heat to your various dishes when you sit down to eat is a common experience such as adding a dab of heat to scrambled eggs, but the creative cooks know that adding a raspberry sauce to a pork roast in a crock-pot will work for you all day. The incredible selection of flavored sauces is a must for all crock-pot cooks who like to add the flavor at the start of cooking, and then enjoy it at the end of a slow cook experience.

Most supermarkets have the small shelf space showcasing the usual generic hot sauce sampling of Tabasco, Crystal, Frank's, Cholula and maybe a few other choices, but my research found numerous other brands with over 600 different labels with various heat levels, and an extraordinary array of flavors.

People often focus on the word "Hot" and forget the last word is "Sauce" and that really encompasses the bigger meaning behind the product. While the original idea of hot sauce was being hot in various degrees, today's sauce labels are as descriptive as the Food Channel's cookbook. To name a few... Honey n' Habanero, Mango Passion, Garlic, Lime Cilantro, Wasabi Ginger, Pineapple, Cranberry, Peachy Perversion, Chocolate Habanero, Mango Peach, Passion Fruit, Orange Habanero, Balsamic Blackberry, Pumpkin, Smoked Tomato, Whiskey, Bourbon, Chocolate Orange, Key Lime, Lemon Herb, and the list goes on and on.

Hot sauce is just hot? Far from it, my cooking friends. You have a selection of flavors to enhance every meal that is only limited by your own creative imagination.

Michael Charles Messineo invites you to visit his website http://authorsden.com/rigby for additional reading of stories, poems and articles.