The Searing History of Hot Sauce

Tom Blank of Weird History Food explained the searing history behind hot sauce, which started with chili peppers grown in South America and Mexico that eventually traveled around the world.

The history of hot sauce begins with a history of Red Hot Chili Peppers. Not the band, the actual peppers. Scientifically speaking, chili peppers are the berry fruits of the capsicum plants, which are in turn members of the Solanaceae family of nightshade. Chili peppers are, of course, famous for being red hot because they contain capsaicin, a substance which mimics the feel of heat

Each geographical area injected local flavors to make their own versions including sambal (Indonesia), gochujang (North Korea), zhug (Yemen), nam prik (Thailand), piri piri (Portugal), harissa (North Africa), shatta (Egypt) and more.

Long story short, the whole world got their hands on hot peppers and everyone went to work making hot sauce. Some things are just meant to be. 

Blank also looks at the commercial side of hot sauces, particularly the marketing of heat challenges, such as Hot Ones, which never gets too hot. However, sometimes the heat can be too much for some. In fact, the internet Paqui One Chip Challenge, which was a single extremely spicy chip flavored with Carolina reapers, had to be removed from shelves after a tragic reaction.

The cheeky marketing stunt was intended to be harmless fun because …nobody ever really gets hurt during a heat challenge except when they do. The one Chip challenge was pulled from shelves in 2023 after a teenager in Massachusetts ate one and died of cardiopulmonary arrest, triggered in part by the ingestion of a high amount of capsaicin.

Heat challenges have cooled off a bit, although hot sauces haven’t.

What is the hottest hot sauce in the world? …The Source hot sauce reaches a mind blowing 7.1 million Scoville. ….but it’s like a cool drink of water compared to Mad Dog plutonium number nine. Among the purest and hottest pepper extracts in the universe. Mad Dog tops out at an astonishing 9 million Scovilles, that is. And we are not kidding here. Spicy enough to potentially kill you. And if you’re asking whether selling something that’s spicy should be illegal, the answer is probably.