Tabasco Pepper Sauce

As a devoted hot sauce enthusiast I strive to be honest and up front in my product reviews. Therefore I believe the time has come for me to address the elephant in the room.

I’m not a fan of Tabasco. 

There, I said it. Let’s move on.

I have a lot of respect for the resilience and marketing ingenuity of the Tabasco brand. Its name recognition is so deeply ingrained in the American condiment culture that for many consumers Tabasco is synonymous with hot sauce itself. Likewise, due to its ubiquitous presence at restaurants, food stands, and on corner market condiment shelves it may also be the only hot sauce that many have ever tasted (for better or worse). This was certainly the case for me. My aversion to the vinegar-heavy bitterness of Tabasco turned me off of exploring hot sauce any further for a long time, wrongly assuming it to be a fair representation of hot sauce in general. But given the long-standing loyalty of many die-hard Tabasco consumers this intense vinegar pungency is exactly what its devotees are looking for.

Though named for the Mexican state of Tabasco at the southern tip of the Gulf of Mexico where the tabasco pepper was originally cultivated, Tabasco Pepper Sauce is actually an American condiment, produced in Avery Island, Louisiana. Established in 1868 by the Mcilhenny Company, Tabasco comprises a formula of both product and packaging that has survived largely unchanged for nearly a century and a half: A distinguished cologne-style bottle containing a simple but distinctive mix of vinegar, red tabasco chile peppers, and salt - making it easy to identify on the shelf but hard to forget on the tongue.

Company founder Edmund Mcilhenny’s strategic management of operations, production resources, and aggressive marketing (particularly through the food service industry) quickly brought the Tabasco brand to market dominance, making it the go-to standard for American hot sauce consumers for most of the company’s history. 

While certainly other sauces preceded it, Tabasco was the earliest known commercially mass-produced pepper sauce in the United States, firmly establishing what has come to be known as “American-style” or “Louisiana-style” hot sauce (U.S. produced pepper sauces particularly notable for a prominent vinegar infusion). 

The incomparably pungent characteristics of Tabasco, while certainly appealing to a sizable and devoted fan base, is simply not what I look for in a pepper sauce, nor what I feel to be an effective method of enhancing the inherent flavor characteristics of a given dish. The vinegar component of Tabasco is, in a word, overwhelming.

There's more vinegar here than anything else.

But flavor acidity is not the only draw for Tabasco lovers. It is a pepper sauce after all, and though it is considered among the most mild in this condiment category, there is a secondary minor heat factor that arises after the initial vinegar kick dissipates, and it lingers on the tongue as a satisfying but mild capsaicin sting, but so does a sour aftertaste. Whether or not this is considered pleasant may depend upon whatever other flavor components of the dish with which the sauce is tempered. In my experience however, the dishes I attempted to enhance with Tabasco just ended up tasting like Tabasco, and it was only the Tabasco aftertaste that remained. To me this is not so much a flavor enhancement as a “flavor coup”. 

I don’t have anything against vinegar, per se. It is an important ingredient in some of my favorite hot sauces, though generally featured somewhat more discreetly than with Tabasco. The vinegar ratio of this pepper sauce (the highest of all major market Louisiana-style sauces) is such that I hardly consider it a pepper sauce at all, but rather more of a pepper infused vinegar.

Of course, vinegar does have a welcome place alongside many popular American dishes, and perhaps some such pairings reveal why Tabasco enjoys its particular appeal. Some Tabasco fans claim to put it on everything. But it has proven especially popular on eggs, pizza, ranch-style home fries, Cajun seafood, and practically anything battered and deep fried. Which brings me to a couple of reasons I believe this sauce most appeals to its fanbase:

1.) Some of its most popular pairings are with heavily spiced foods, or with dishes that already boast a distinctively bold flavor on their own, and therefore manage to hold up well under the one-two punch of the vinegar-pepper combination that Tabasco brings. This might account for Tabasco’s popularity with Cajun and southern seafood cuisine.

2.) Fatty acids in foods such as eggs, cheese-laden pizza, or battered and deep-fried dishes can be quite effective in diffusing the pungency of Tabasco while absorbing the savoriness of the sauce, and allowing some of the inherent flavor aspects of the food to blend with the piquant fruitiness of the tabasco pepper, otherwise often obscured by the vinegar prominence.

Whatever the case, A LOT of people simply love the distinctive extremely sour taste of Tabasco. It is impossible to argue against Tabasco’s almost 150 years of market dominance. Perhaps they are more adept at measuring their condiment service to suit their palette. The product packaging acknowledges that this sauce is often used by the drop (for which the cologne-style bottle is especially suited), but also notes, as with most hot sauces, a ”Serving Size” consists of one teaspoon. There is quite a difference between a drop and a teaspoon, so what works best for any given dish can likely be anywhere in between, suited to taste as tolerance allows.

There are those in other review columns or online forums who have stated a preference for Tabasco over such competitors as Louisiana or Crystal hot sauce, claiming the vinegar pungency was too strong in the other sauces, and they instead favored the more mild vinegar presence of Tabasco. I can only speculate that what they are tasting is simply a more sodium-laden amplified acidic savoriness of the salt and vinegar combination that is common to those other sauces. Changing the ratio between these two components can certainly affect the perception of pungency on the palette. Though Tabasco’s competitors feature a lower ratio of vinegar in their products, they often more than make up for it by adding as much as 5 or 6 times the sodium over what is a relatively low amount found in Tabasco. By this measure, health conscious consumers looking for a Louisiana-style sauce while trying to minimize their sodium intake should consider Tabasco, even if not so much for the heat, but as a pepper infused vinegar that still gets the job done,…if that job requires a whole lot of sour and a little bit of sting. I prefer to look elsewhere for both in varied measure, but those reviews are for another time, and another blog post.

If you want to learn more about the Tabasco company and their products check out their website at: www.tabasco.com. There you’ll find a wealth of information about their fascinating company history, an excellent list of recipes to pair with their products, and their growing line of sauces ”from mild to wild” with several stops in between. Even though their traditional red pepper sauce doesn’t strike a chord with me, I’m all for giving a sauce a fair shake, and Tabasco offers several sauce variations I’m looking forward to sample. You can also follow Tabasco on Twitter at twitter.com/tabasco and stay up to date about product information or recipe ideas.

If you’re among the few who have yet to sample Tabasco Pepper Sauce and want to check it out for yourself, or are already a devoted fan looking to restock your cupboard, you can find it via our Amazon Affiliate links below;