Hot Sauce Expert Guesses Cheap vs Expensive Hot Sauce | Price Points | Epicurious

I'm Noah Chamber and I'm a hot sauce expert oh yeah let's take a look at what we got here ruddy brown color very consistent some hot sauces you'll have more chunks you have more body to them this looks like it's been blended thoroughly little seeds here and there but pretty sparse seeds would be coming from the Chili Peppers themselves this guy here a little bit of flex that could be some spice or maybe some black pepper but looks very consistent and uniform let's see what they smell like lots of aroma here definitely cumin and little hints of chili pepper on this guy not as much going on smells a little bit like a michelada it seems like the type of thing you'd mix with a beer to make a michelada let's give these a taste nice speckling throughout getting a bigger variety of ingredients here lots of flavor right off the bat definitely tasting that cumin getting onion nice heat right away at the front of the mouth pretty mild but slowly building in heat so I'm guessing more than one type of chili pepper in there different types of peppers will have different heat profiles so some might get you right at the tip of your tongue and fade quickly some like a habanero will get you at the back of the throat and some like a ghost pepper take a little bit of time to build so I'm guessing there's probably some ghost pepper in here let's give this guy a try looks perfectly uniform it's all one color seeing very little variation in there that's a very simple and straightforward arrives in one way and it leaves the same way it doesn't stick around for too long when you're buying hot sauce you're paying for two things the flavor and the heat the capsaicin that's in Chili Peppers triggers this reaction in your brain that actually makes your body think that your mouth is on fire so your brain releases all these great chemicals and compounds and adrenaline to help you deal the situation it perceives as being really dangerous and all that stuff makes you feel great so if I had to guess which one is more expensive I would definitely go with the one that has a lot more complexity a lot more depth of flavor different ingredients and the more expensive chili peppers these ghost members tend to be pricier which is what I'm guessing is in there my guess is definitely that a is it more expensive let's take a look yeah without a doubt so when you're shopping for a Mexican style sauce definitely check the labels for one you know is water and ingredient and water can be okay but is it right at the top of the ingredients list also be on the lookout for salt sometimes with Mexican sauces they'll use a lot of salt to replace some of the other flavors that you could otherwise get and that sodium can add up really quickly so just be sure to check the label in terms of color nice bright color can be really attractive but is it filled with stabilizers and artificial preservatives that are keeping the color that way for me I'd prefer something that looks a little more natural because it's probably going to taste a little more natural all right let's see what we have here I've seen some nice separation here got a little bit of oils floated to the surface lots of seeds settled at the bottom little flecks here and there something no settling or separation let's see what they smell like so I'm gonna shake it up especially with these vinegar-based sauces where you're gonna get some settling so when you see at the grocery store it might be a little clear on the top totally natural and just know to shake it so roma wise it's a vinegar base sauce so you definitely pick that up right away but you don't get the burn in the nostrils that you'll get with the standard distilled vinegar this has a little more warmth to it a little more pungency some types of natural vinegars where it's a little closer to the fermentation you'll get a little bit of that funkiness to it which i think makes it really interesting let's take a look at this guy here give it a shake too I'm not sure as necessary here mmm sweet aroma definitely getting yeah lots of chili pepper smell smells almost faintly like strawberries I'm curious about the type of pepper in there let's give these a try hmm I love that so taste wise these vinegar sauces picking it up in the cheeks right away heat wise not super hot not picking up a ton of heat sweet on the back of the tongue though so that's interesting is it hard to put the finger on exactly what type of peppers in there but nice vinegar tones you could tell it's a quality vinegar in there let's give this other guy try definitely a lot more saltiness right off the bat he has salt on the tip of the tongue nice Chili Peppers though I'm thinking Cayenne or Anaheim pepper overall though this all kind of dominates the flavor so guessing which of these is more expensive I'd have to go with a on this one just based on the look of it I'm guessing it's a smaller batch process that went into making this product I can see the ingredients I see the seeds from the peppers that are in there definitely more nuanced tasting the vinegar it's not standard distilled white vinegar it's something with a little more interest to it in fermentation that's a little more active the sauce over here well still really tasty add a lot of salt to it and that always makes me a little bit questioning when I see a taste a lot of salt in a product what's that salt covering up also the consistency that we see here perfectly uniform throughout tells me there's a very commercialized process so the types of machinery that they use to make a sauce with that type of consistency on the shelf it's not something that's really gonna have a lot of involvement by hand I guess is that a is more expensive let's take a look yeah that makes sense so when you're shopping for a vinegar-based sauce at the grocery store just look at the type of vinegar that they're using and the most common that we see is distilled white vinegar and that's been used for a long time and people use it for cleaning around the house and for cooking and preserving apple cider vinegar which I suspect is what's in here has become really popular in the last few years people like it for its suppose the health benefits but I really like it for its flavor it has a little more pungency to it a little more funk but vinegar can be fermented from all kinds of different things so as you travel around the world in China they have a black vinegar fermented from rice and in South Korea they have persimmon vinegar so all kinds of fun stuff going on so there's a big variety and we're seeing more and more hot sauce makers leveraging that variety all right let's take a look at what we have here rich red color not a lot of movement at all I can turn it totally upside down it's really taken its time very uniform consistency throughout not seeing much of anything colored here little likes of pepper flesh here and there whereas over here definitely faster movement and sometimes that can be related to the content of the sauce and sometimes also a lot of hot sauces that are out there you're gonna see artificial thickeners or things like xanthan gum designed to make them not move around as much so usually if something's moving pretty easy that could be a good sign that it's natural to me it looks almost creamy and normally when we see that in a hot sauce it's usually because there's oil in there and when the oil is whipped or blended as part of the sauce making process it will emulsify a little bit and give it almost this creamy look to it it almost always is it's not dairy let's see how they smell definitely getting healthy notes of garlic in there and a little bit of funk maybe something like fish sauce or some type of fermentation almost a little bit of a pickle I smell appealing though well that's that's different smells definitely like peppercorns so not chili peppers themselves but peppercorns like black pepper that we think of that'll have a much more floral aroma bed really appealing it nice too let's give them a try okay that's rear ah wouldn't know it anywhere really tasty so anybody's free to call their sauces sriracha and some people will do it as an homage to some original sauce some people do it as referencing a place in Thailand and some people do it just because that term has become so synonymous with hot sauce where they are that they thought that that's just what you call hot sauce the classic elements I picked up in here it told me right away what this is it's a little bit of that pickled flavour paired with the overt sweetness and that medium heat really indicates to me that there's a sriracha so let's give this other one a try hmm right away superb right up front the foot well front of the mouth getting flavors of lemon and ginger super floral this loaded with those peppercorns and then just a hint of sweetness towards the back and now a heat that is slowly building and building this is actually a pretty hot sauce really tasty though this is for people who are well versed in hot sauce and who who like it at the spicier end of things it might actually have some more of this one just to cool off hot sauce to cool down I'm thinking Asian for these sauces because the sriracha flavors the garlic that's in there the pickled flavors it's a strong indicator and in this sauce here the ginger and the very floral peppercorns that are in there really give a strong Asian vibe to it so definitely considering the amount of heat that was in this one the mouthfeel the different types of ingredients and aroma I'm definitely gonna guess that this is the more expensive sauce this one tastes really high-quality but a lot of sugar in there it's a little more day-to-day and pedestrian you could use a lot of it so I don't imagine it would be too pricey let's take a look yeah definitely more expensive over here important to keep in mind when evaluating the price differences with different things that they each have their place you know if you want to go nuts and use a ton of sauce something like this might be a better bet that being said I imagine that this bottle for eighteen dollars is gonna last you a lot longer than this one over here because with this sauce you really only can be using a small amount at a time when we talk about Asian sauces we're talking about a big geographic area a lot of different cuisines a lot of different cultures so when you read that ingredients list there might be some things on there that you've never heard of before but it's a really fun area to experiment with all right let's see what we got here this rich brown color and strong consistency tells me that we're looking at barbecue hot sauces so we're taking a look at this one we see it really is sticking in its place nice and thick not a bad trait when it comes to a barbecue type sauce like this pretty even rich chocolatey brown color throughout little bits of chili pepper seeds here and there taking a look at be some flecks in some different coloration got some different things going on so that'll be interesting body-wise it see similar color wise it's got kind of a more Cara moly color in the other one getting smoked right away which is a good sign that's what you want in barbecue getting almost a bit of a citrus note so maybe something like lime in here which would be nice for a barbecue sauce nice amount of complexity smells like there's interesting things going on that doesn't smell great this one has an interesting smell I can't pick out anything too particular something faintly chemical about it almost like a room that was painted a couple weeks ago and you walked in there not the most appetizing smell but we won't hold that against it just yet we'll see what it tastes like but first let's do this eh Wow a lot of flavor going on there definitely some type of citrus I'm thinking lime healthy sweetness most tamarind type of flavors and then in the back you get the smoke not a lot of heat a little bit of heat so I'm guessing something like maybe Chipotle or an ancho chili something like that definitely smoked pepper but that citrusy sweet fruit flavors are really nice balanced a really nice tasting sauce let's move on to be here so be as you can see kept the shape of a droplet maybe even a bit more stiffness and we want and it's it's not going anywhere so that suggests to me possibly there's some additives in here not due to the process of cooking it down over a long period of time like if you made barbecue sauce at home but just more of a chemical way of achieving that effect let's give it a try it's like a sweet bomb right away in the mouth it's not feeling quite like natural sugar it feels to me like some type of processed sugar like a corn syrup or something like that you can feel it a little more towards the back of your throat as it's going down not a ton of flavor overall though past pretty quickly in terms of which one I think would be more expensive I'm gonna have to go with the one that tasted a lot better I can tell from the taste of it that this one took more time that this one had higher quality ingredients and that a little more care was put into the production of it well let's find out yeah so makes sense to me if you're going to the trouble of doing something like barbecue let's say you're gonna be smoking some ribs or something like that to me it's worthwhile to spend a little bit extra to complement that with some amazing flavors that your guests are definitely going to appreciate first is something like this which feels a lot more fast-food almost the store-bought whereas this tastes like the quality of homemade but this sauce seems really reminiscent of a texas-style barbecue and they share a lot of the same Chili's that we'll see from Mexico so jalapenos Serrano's poblanos and natural wood smoke is always going to be the best some less expensive products you'll see with artificial smoke I suspect that's what's happening here and that's where a smoke distillate just like from a jar a little liquid smoke is added to give it the flavor but it never comes across the same way as when the chilies themselves are smoked using real hardwood [Music] let's see here dark colors seen a couple seats otherwise pretty uniform throughout let's take a look at this guy so this one so we'd call pepper dents you can really see that there's a lot of pepper in here I'd expect that pepper would be the number one ingredient this looks like somebody just mashed up some peppers and put them in a bottle let's see how they smell getting some nice nostril burn mild sweetness almost definitely smells very hot when you're smelling a super hot sauce which I'm expecting this is you'll get that feeling in the nostrils right away the nose tells you the pepper wants to warn you that it's hot peppers developed capsaicin as a defense mechanism so animals wouldn't eat them specifically mammals because mammals have teeth and molars and will chew up the seed so peppers don't want to be eaten by mammals because then their seeds are destroyed interestingly birds aren't affected by the heat and Chili Peppers at all because peppers actually want to be eaten by birds because birds don't have teeth so they'll ingest the seeds and then they'll fly away crap them out somewhere into a nice little pile of fertilizer and the pepper then spreads its domain that way and its offspring so the capsaicin and the Chili Peppers is a natural defense mechanism so let's take a look at B oh yeah so that has just chili pepper scent up and down this smells like somebody just cut open a super hot pepper it's a really distinct nostril burning kind of acerbic type of smell almost a citrus undertone to it interesting it's scared to try these too but glad we saved them for lust only gonna take a little bit so don't judge me that's that does not taste good tastes like like a car just did a burnout and he took a bite of the tyre the heats spreading on the tongue this is a really very hot sauce can I yell cut that water made it worse yeah flavor was leaves a lot to be desired it's kind of what I would call a prank sauce is what you used to pull it trick on a buddy you're in college not really food nobody would buy this for nutrition or sustenance or flavor got a little tear going so that's fun it's a level of heat in there flavor telling me that's not a lot of joeys tell me there's extracts in there extracts are a chemical distillation of the capsaicin compound so it's normally a clear substance that you can use to add to a sauce to add a lot of heat without adding any flavor I'm not a big fan if you couldn't tell let's check out the other sauce whoa that is very sweet not sugary at all but sweet on the tip of the tongue like a tropical fruit almost keeping in mind that peppers are fruits so confirming what I thought that this is a really pepper dead sauce this particular sweetness and the level of heat that I'm getting from it if heat that starts in the center the tongue is spreading outwards spreading backwards down the shoulders the sweetness and the heat profile make me suspect pretty strongly that this is a Carolina Reaper based sauce Carolina Reaper was made the hottest pepper in the world and in the Guinness Book of Records in 2013 developed by a pepper breeder named smokey Ned curry down in South Carolina he named it the Carolina Reaper and oftentimes it will have this very sweet fruity profile to it nice flavor but lingering burning heat I'm still feeling it quite hot on the tongue not in a way that feels like I regret my decisions if I had to guess which one of these is more expensive I would definitely say it's the sauce that's full of natural peppers peppers cost money and this sauce is full of them so knowing what I know about peppers in the way that sauces are made if this sauce is primarily peppers with the density that it looks like I'd say there's at least 20 whole peppers in here over here is definitely extract and with that stuff a little goes a long way they used a little bit more than a little so I don't think this stuff is going to be free either yeah that makes sense high-quality delicious Chili Peppers with tons of heat are gonna have a certain cost whatever this was it's gonna have a different cost in my opinion hot sauce should always be thought of as food we like to say food that goes on food and food has to have good flavor so I'm never gonna approach a sauce that doesn't have good flavor as the first check mark on my list because otherwise I'm not gonna want to put it on my food so when you're at the grocery store looking for a super hot sauce though to be honest you're not gonna find anything like either of these two at a normal grocery store when you're at a specialty hot sauce shop looking for a super hot sauce read the ingredients list you're super hot pepper should absolutely be the number one thing on that ingredients list so some super hot peppers to look for will be things like Carolina Reaper that I think's in here the ghost pepper is a popular one the Moruga scorpion pepper pepper X there's a good variety of them things you want to avoid in my opinion are gonna be extracts so on labels you'll see those listed as something like Oh Lee Rosen extract capsaicin extract things like that something that suggests that it's not whole nice peppers that are going into that bottle when you're thinking about hot sauce and thinking about spending a little more 10 or 12 dollars on a bottle of hot sauce think about how much value you're gonna get out of that and if it's gonna sit in your fridge for two or three months and you might get 20 or 30 or 40 meals out of it so it's worth investing in some better ingredients of fresher higher quality product

Channel: Epicurious

Views: 2,358,789

Rating: 4.8550034 out of 5

Keywords: cheap, cheap vs expensive, cheap vs expensive food, expert, hot sauce, price points, price, taste test, hot sauce expert, cheap hot sauce, expensive hot sauce, hot sauce taste test, most expensive hot sauce, hot sauce reviews, cheap vs expensive hot sauce, recipe, how to make hot sauce, best hot sauce, ghost pepper, ghost pepper hot sauce, make hot sauce, spicy, hottest hot sauce, spiciest, spiciest hot sauce, food expert, vinegar, hottest sauce, epicurious

Id: dVRl8VzQMQM

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 13 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/npaladin2000]

This guy is great, I need to visit his store one of these days. He's another guy who believes in flavor rather than just heat.

This is the same guy The Hot Ones uses.

[u/USBacon]

I wish they had revealed what the sauces were that he was trying. It would have been nice to be able to compare the sauces without actually being able to taste them like the guy in the video.

[u/fuegobox]

Love seeing this kind of focus on quality getting out there. Nice job by Noah at Heatonist!

[u/basement-thug]

Just reinforces what I've always held true. Stop buying those extract sauces man... they're junk. Go for all natural small batch hot sauces from respectable companies who make good tasting sauces hot. Not heat that is barely edible.

[u/Cleffer]

While it was important to talk about the difference between extracts and mashes, it really looked like they trolled the shit out of him with that extract sauce.