Everything You Know About Sriracha is a Lie.

America [Music] this is sriracha it's one of the world's fastest growing food products ubiquitous across the United States but where does it come from the bottle has English Vietnamese and Chinese characters and the name is borrowed from a small coastal town in Thailand well we're in Thailand too so we went in search of the truth and to our surprise found it this is a story that crosses borders and continents that involves wartime refugees in Thai royalty and even the fall of the Chinese emperor this is the incredible story of sriracha [Music] China's a town is now is very famous because of uh so many manufacturers moving down there because it's close to the port the seaport the Thailand port and also very good communication on the highways to to Bangkok so if you see like the last 20 years uh Sirata was developing so much better than other women say than chonburi because of the manufacturer also the seafood export see that's one of the best place also among in Thailand to support export we're on the highway between Bangkok and Pattaya for one reason it's because there's a town in Thailand named sriracha and while we don't know what we're looking for we figured we'd start there Sriracha the town not the sauce is an industrial city of about 19 000 people an hour and a half by car from Bangkok it's not on the tourist Trail when it's mostly famous in Thailand for its Automotive factories and agriculture but what about the sauce there is an official Canon of this stuff and it's a story that's been told over and over in print and even in a documentary so we won't spend too much time on it there's plenty of resources online if you want to know that story but here's the quick synopsis in 1975 a Vietnamese man named David Tran started making chili sauce in his hometown near Saigon after the war he fled to America with about 3 000 other refugees on a cargo ship called the Hui Fong arriving in California he started making chili sauce again and selling it to other immigrants from Asia in the beginning he'd package his sauce in old baby food jars eventually buying an old Chevy van and selling his sauce from the window and over time he fine-tuned his recipe first using serrano chili peppers and then changing to the more accessible jalapenos his business thrived and he opened his first factory in the early 1980s naming his company Hui Fong Foods after the name of the ship that brought him to America and choosing a rooster as a logo because in the Chinese Zodiac his birth year of 1945 was the year of the rooster he no longer sold out of a cargo van as he opened a real shop near Chinatown in Los Angeles in 1987 he expanded to a 68 000 square foot production facility in Rosemead California and by the early 2000s the Hui Fong Factory expanded to another location 10 times larger now David Tran as with so many immigrant stories is proud of his American success and he's carefully marketed Sriracha as an American brand the official story of why it's named after a town in Thailand is that he passed through this place on his way out of Vietnam and was stunned by its natural beauty but there are a few problems with this story first there's a lot of places renowned for natural beauty in Thailand but this is a strange one Sriracha is not a resort town it's an industrial area near the container port and second in Thailand there's a sauce called sriracha 2. and supposedly that sauce has its roots right here [Music] thank you not seeing any chili sauce no I wonder if there's chili sauce no no that's just a it's just noodles this so far does not scream Sriracha to me this might be something let me see what's let me see what's on the table here oh yeah there we go we found Sriracha in Sriracha this is what's called sriracha sauce in Thailand you typically find it at Chinese Thai restaurants as a dipping sauce for deep fried stuff like chicken wings or seafood or served with rice noodles or omelets like this one let's go back to David Tran's version of sriracha for a second the American Sriracha uses just eight ingredients fresh jalapeno peppers salt sugar garlic powder acetic acid two preservatives and xanthan gum is a thickener the main difference between that sauce and what's called Sriracha in Sriracha is that instead of garlic powder this sauce uses cloves of garlic pickled and vinegar and instead of jalapenos Thai chili peppers are used which are a bit spicier and we know this because as we left the downtown of sriracha we found a family here still making their own version of the sauce in a traditional way [Music] thank you okay um [Music] foreign alloy as it turns out the story of this sauce in Thailand has its own official Canon the story is famous here as David Tran's origin story in America it starts in the 1930s when a man from this Village traveled across Asia on business where he tried all manners of hot sauces some sweet some spicy some Sour but he'd never tasted one that combined all those flavors so he started to make his own his daughter a young woman named tanam chakapak took his creation and spent years perfecting the recipe selling jars of her sauce from her family's home she opened a factory in 1949 naming her sauce Sriracha panich quickly scaling up her production to meet demand across the country and eventually overseas Sriracha panich was a Smash Hit across southeast Asia finding a particularly devoted audience in Chinese immigrant communities in Vietnam and Thailand and then spreading to all corners of the continent in fact by 1975 when David Tran made his first chili sauce this Sriracha was not just sold in his native Vietnam it was the best-selling hot sauce in that country sales continued to grow and in 1984 Miss choco pox Factory was bought by a company called Thai teparos which moved production to an enormous facility in samud prakhan directly between Bangkok and the town of sriracha Sriracha panich Remains the best-selling brand in this category in most of the world and tanam chakapak is known as the founder the creator of sriracha as far as The Narrative of the sauce goes that's pretty much how it started but a bit more digging and a few Strokes of good luck took us in an unexpected direction that finds this same sauce a thousand miles away and almost a century further back in time you know I was pretty surprised that there was no like statue to the Sriracha chili sauce in town right like uh I think all of us when we went there we kind of had the idea that like this is going to be a place that's uh proud of the fact that the entire world knows the name of this town because of this sauce but it was really hard to find any indication that this is actually where the sauce comes from like in my hometown which I guess is about the same size as sriracha I'm if somebody found out that like ketchup came from Charlottesville Virginia um we would have like a 500 foot tall statue of a ketchup bottle built right in the middle of downtown like there would be a ketchup parade like once a week and it surprises me a little bit that like Adam is that is that something is that fair to say that like the um the town itself doesn't really seem to care that much about they're not really taking advantage of the the Sriracha potential tourism let's say well um yes the government might can do that but you know it's going to be uh more famous but is already famous among Thai that every time know about that chili sauce and uh and about the city so you see that why Syria is becoming famous for the chili sauce because you need to understand when the Chinese Community moving down there the most of Chinese food is his team they need to use the sauce and that's how this sriracha sauce is actually made in the chili sauce actually in Thailand is is made by a Chinese Community for a long time ago because not normally the in Thai food they don't really much use in in chili sauce but every time you're gonna eat some any kind of Eastern food you need to use the chili sauce it did seem interesting that this sauce spread through Chinese Thai communities every restaurant we found serving Sriracha also served Chinese food and even David Tran well he was first generation Chinese born in Vietnam now this region of Thailand the area called chonbury that includes Sriracha it has a long history of Chinese migration generally beginning around the 1880s that was when an agricultural famine in southern China brought waves of people here in search of jobs or better farmland as has been the case throughout history people would cluster around others from the same home towns bonded by a similar language or family connections helping each other build a new life in a new place most of the Chinese immigrants who settled in Bangkok for example came from here an area called chaosan in eastern Guangdong pretty much all of the Chinese Thai food in Bangkok comes from that region in chonbury there are clusters who arrived in Thailand from there too there are also Pockets from Hainan island and from fujian now this is when luck starts to enter our story two of my closest friends happen to be Chinese food historians Chris and Steph from Chinese cooking demystified in fact they've recently moved to Bangkok in part to research the Chinese diaspora and its connections to Thai food I sent a message to Steph asking if there were any chili sauces similar to Sriracha that she knew about in southern Chinese cuisine that might have existed in the 1880s Lots she answered but I'd need to be more specific so I repeated the recipe we learned at the last restaurant and that was where things started to snowball there are chili sauces from all across Asia but it's the pickled garlic that's uncommon in fact it's so uncommon in a thick and sweet chili sauce that there's only one other example any of us could come up with and that happened to be one from Steph's own hometown of Guangzhou [Music] now Guangzhou or Canton in the west was not one of those places that sent waves of migrants to Southeast Asia it was and still is the cultural and financial Hub of southern China it's incredibly uncommon to find families here that take their roots from Canton but we just met one because as it happens the family that owns kasempochana and most of the ancient Chinese community in this one town of sriracha is Cantonese I met Steph in bangkok's Chinatown at a place where she goes when she needs to find sauces or condiments from Southern China the interesting thing is that for the Sriracha especially the older style ones that we got it's like tastes exactly like the chili sauce that you would have when you're having Liza in Guangdong exactly the same even the consistency what is that sauce so the sauce is like my dad told me it's like a pickle chili and garlic and they blend it together like the pickle chili and garlic is in vinegar that they boil it together and some news our shops make it themselves some lunch on noodle shop make it themselves uh that tastes exactly the same in the sauce I never knew that Sriracha has garlic actually I always thought it's just like a chili sauce and and then you told me there's garlic and you're like oh wait isn't that just like the chili garlic sauce that we always have and then we started to look into that direction a little bit too just look at what like the counties one is and yeah and then turns out it's like basically have the same ingredient is there any way to know how far back the Cantonese version of garlic chili sauce actually goes well uh according to my dad in the like early 20th century there's already a famous sauce making factories brands that already has it that it's one of their famous products this is where we got our second piece of good luck because as it happened at this store in the middle of Bangkok without us even knowing what we'd stumbled across we happened to find a bottle of a Cantonese garlic and chili sauce that looks and tastes an awful lot like what we call sriracha and it's a sauce that happens to have been exported to Thailand two generations before the first bottle of sriracha panich ever came off the assembly line for this story we have to go back to the latter years of the Qing Dynasty in the 1880s when a group of young men called the four Outlaws would meet in Hong Kong's Soho District to plot the overthrow of the Chinese emperor according to Legend these men would meet the small noodle shop where they'd dine on wonton soup mixed with a very special garlic chili sauce one of those Outlaws by the way was a man named Dr Sun Yat-sen who would in 1911 successfully lead the Rebellion against the emperor and later serve as the first president of the Republic of China anyway that story might be apocryphal but what is certain is that just three years after the garlic chili sauce forays of the four Outlaws two brothers Tam kitsang and Tam tatsang started bottling their own version of the sauce just a block away from where sunyat-sen's group would meet the year was 1891 and their brand would be named kamchuan kunik The Tam Brothers learned their recipe in their hometown of shunda just outside of Guangzhou City a place known throughout China as the Cradle of Cantonese cuisine but the sauce they'd grown up with was thin and viscous at their Factory the brothers came up with a technique of adding sweet potato flour for a pleasant thick texture not unlike Sriracha today by the early 1900s their sales had increased to more than a hundred thousand Hong Kong dollars per year and by the 1920s their product was being sold overseas and was even honored at the British Empire exhibition in 1924 at Wembley Stadium I have no idea if kanam chakapak might have tasted this exact garlic chili sauce or maybe a homemade version from some local immigrants or maybe she and her father really did simply invent something similar all on their own but let's consider two things first this exact sauce was being exported at that time to Cantonese communities around the world and second there was a Cantonese community in Thailand and it happened to be in the village of siracha one last note by the way this is almost definitely unrelated but still pretty interesting in 1904 sunyatsen himself the Revolutionary who loved his garlic chili sauce he took a trip to Bangkok where he stayed for several months raising money and political support and apparently he made such an impact that what was then the main street in bangkok's Chinatown was renamed in his honor to this day the alley still exists called soy sunyatsen and just a few feet away there's a Cantonese restaurant right there in bangkok's Chinatown that survives since before the fall of the last Chinese emperor it's called The Canton House and it's been serving food in this location since 1908 or 27 years before tanom chakapak bottled the first version of her sriracha and guess what's on their menu serving as a dipping sauce for Guangzhou dishes like garlic fried shrimp sumai and fishma so we have the pieces a garlic chili sauce served in shunda since at least the 1870s was developed starting in 1891 in Hong Kong into a form that closely resembles what we still see today cluster of immigrants from exactly that region of Southern China moved to a Coastal Thai town called Sriracha in search of better farmland and work opportunities bringing the sauce with them where it caught the attention of the locals including an entrepreneur named kanam chakapak who began Mass producing it in 1949 this sauce then spread to Chinese communities across southeast Asia including in Vietnam where it was noticed by a man named David Tran who began to bottle and sell his own version of the sauce using the same name Sriracha in the United States after arriving in 1978 as a refugee the only thing we're missing is a first-hand account someone who actually lived this history to tie those pieces together and once again fate Smiled On Our mission just a mile away from bangkok's Chinatown there's a shop that's been making and selling their own sriracha sauce since 1932 three years before the origin story of sriracha panich begins this version is called gold medal sriracha and the owner a man named lakutsuan prasop is now 84 years old and still following the recipe of his mother who learned how to make the sauce in the 1910s from the Chinese immigrants in her hometown siracha okay problems okay okay my God the first maker in Thailand Mr lockout's parents opened this shop in 1932 across the street from the grounds of the Imperial Palace and again much like in China Sriracha found itself at the center of historic upheaval 1932 was the year in which Siam had a revolution and Rama VII abdicated the throne in the country for the first time became a constitutional monarchy instead of an absolute Kingdom the new King was said to be a fan of gold medal sriracha and the sauce itself no matter where it might have come from is by now an essential part of Thailand's culture so we'd gone on quite a journey and all we had left to do was taste everything [Applause] the American version of sriracha started exporting to Thailand in 2017. since then the brand has gained some traction here showing up in upscale restaurants and on grocery store shelves selling around 60 000 bottles in the first two years and Sriracha panich has reciprocated shipping their version of original Sriracha to America for about the last three years but while that brand hasn't gained much traction in the home of the rooster and both products have lost market share to upstart srirachas from big companies and small new artisanal players tanam chocobox Sriracha panich has established a new top market for export that of course is China where more than a hundred thousand bottles a year are sold to customers who think this sauce pairs perfectly with their traditional Chinese foods very likely never knowing that it probably started from there in the very first place maybe it's fitting that Sriracha is a sauce that's now been claimed by Thailand China Hong Kong Vietnam and the United States in another generation it'll probably be so ubiquitous all over the world that where it came from won't really matter at all it'll be everywhere and every place might have its own origin story of someone who first took the idea of a sauce of pickled garlic and fresh chili and came up with new techniques or evangelize the sauce to a wider audience or brought it to the mainstream it's also important to note that the three most significant players in modern Sriracha history The Tam brothers tanom chakapak and David Tran they all understood that this sauce didn't belong only to them so none of them trademarked their recipes they're all out there printed on the bottle are freely available online to be recreated at home or if you really want at your own Sriracha factory because if this story is any indication in another generation there will be another chapter to this book and it might come from anywhere but it started from here or here or maybe here [Music] subscribe for more from OTR and follow the links below to follow us on Instagram or Facebook

Channel: OTR Food & History

Views: 885,682

Keywords: OTR, otr, Sriracha, sriracha sauce, sriracha history, food history, chili sauce, thai food, thai-chinese, guangzhou food, cantonese chili sauce, Si Racha

Id: t8pacTAmaFA

Length: 26min 14sec (1574 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 26 2022