Ingredient Information

Hot Sauce

Hot sauce is a catchall term for whatever you happen to have in your pantry. For most of us this is Tabasco but there are hundreds of sauces on the market. One website offers over a thousand different types. The type that you use is entirely dependent on your ability to stand the heat in the kitchen.

The heat of a sauce is measured in Scoville units, a scale that was invented by Wilbur L. Scoville in 1912. His based this on the number of parts of sugar water that it would take to dilute the extract of chilies to the point that there is a barely detectable burn. While this seems a bit obsessive for, pretty much anything over 5,000 scoville units is hot (let alone the sauces that advertise themselves as being 10, 20 or 100 times that hot).

The recipes here use Tabasco because this is the most widely available sauce. Tabasco sauce is rated at 5,000 S.U.  This is equivalent to the heat of a jalapeno pepper.