Best I can find locally is Enconas Carolina Reaper sauce but I will say it’s nowhere near hot enough to justify that name imo. Always a bottle of Sirracha handy as well.
I used to use Franks or Franks Buffalo sauce in everything. It’s not very hot but has excellent flavor.
Now you made me go count: I have 7 different ones on the counter plus 5 in the fridge, more if you count horseradishes and spicy mustards (probably the empty bottle in recycling doesn’t count). I love the home made one, the chili crisp, and the dragon sauce, but my best answer to the question has to be Mellissa’s because I have so many of their flavors. They’re all a little different: maybe sriracha is good with one food but too sweet for another. Maybe I want to taste that Louisiana flair on my shrimp but that chili can stand up to reaper sauce
I love spicy olive oils infused with chilis
Scandinavian Gold from PepperPalace. A lot of Pepper Palace stuff is good.
El Yucateco Black Label Chile Habanero
I drink the xxxtra hot version, way too much, Amazon sells them in half gallons which really should be a felony honestly.
But it goes with everything and is just hot enough that I can tune the taste.
Vicious Viper has a really nice taste and has my preferred hotness level.
i love yuzu kosho, most brands are fine. i’ll put it on anything remotely asian. panda express gets the yuzu kosho. instant ramen gets the yuzu kosho. homemade gyuudon gets the yuzu kosho. plain white rice gets the yuzu kosho. its so good
Grace Hot Pepper Sauce. It has this tangy, buttery flavour and a nice amount of heat that accentuates food without melting your face.
I think they use a few different peppers in the mash as while it has a little of the apricot fire Scotch Bonnet taste to it, as you’d expect from a Caribbean brand with a bunch of Scotch Bonnets on the label, it’s not the predominant chilli flavour here. I think the mash gets slightly fermented too due to that buttery taste the sauce has.
Before the pandemic it was 50p for an 85ml bottle, I miss that. £1.50 for the same size bottle still feels like a rip off.
Edit: just looked Grace Hot Pepper Sauce up as I’ve been thinking about it all day now since making this comment, and their website says the peppers used are a blend of Habanero and Cayenne in the mash. So my tasting apricot fire is likely a placebo from the image on the label, lmao.
I was going to buy some based on your description, but it’s more than twice £1.50 here in Canada, $13.99 for two bottles.
Fucking hell. For two 85ml bottles? That’s insanity.
Those Wings brand little packets that are white on the front and clear on the back
It really depends on the dish and what you want out of the hot sauce.
My general, everyday preference is Cholula or Crystal. Both those have a distinctly hispanic/tex-mex flavor profile. For east and southeast Asian cuisine, I prefer Sriracha. If I really want the hot sauce to be the focus of the dish, I tend to prefer Marie Sharp’s, especially the carrot or grapefruit varieties.
Dirty Dick’s. Besides the obvious, being able to say “Hey, lemme put some dirty dicks on your taco,” and the like, the stuff is phenomenal. It is not for everything, like, say, a Tapatio would be, but I use it most of the time.
Dirty Dick’s is a sweet heat, and they kill it in both departments. Nowhere on the bottle do they advertise how many Scoville units, because it’s silly. They created a sweet yet spicy sauce that is perfect for pulled pork, or beef/chicken tacos, pretty much anything in the tex-mex spectrum (the texmextrum, if I may).
I have yet to try it with Asian or Indian fare, and I won’t even begin to speculate, because I am far from some culinary genius, I just follow recipes well.
So yes, allow me to shill for putting dirty dicks on your food.
Crystal and Sambal, depending on the dish. Tabasco if it’s gumbo or soup or whatever but Tabasco is more concentrated and I like it best as an ingredient than as a sauce.
Good point about Tabasco.
My wife got me a bottle of Da Bomb as a joke for Valentine’s and I’ve been working through that for over a year.
I was just gifted a whole season of hot ones sauces. Came with da bomb evolution and havent tried it yet
It’s definitely the worst of all of them. Zero redeeming features.
I’ve had da bomb beyond insanity before so im curious how i react to this one.
Its an experience, not a flavour.
Sirracha because it’s easy to get everywhere. I also make my own Vietnamese chilli oil.
Marie Sharp’s, a hot sauce company out of Belize. Sooooo good.
100%!! Probably also mentioning that Melinda’s essentially ripped off Marie’s recipes during some sheisty imporg deal.
Carrot based Habenaro sauce: although it appears they have a few versions. (Figured if I was going to search what these were I might as well share the quick results)
Yellowbird also makes a carrot based habenero sauce that’s really good!