If you are a fan of spicy food (jalapenos, hot sauce,
wasabi, horseradish, etc.) like we are, then you probably think of spicy
as just another slice of the flavor spectrum just like sweet, sour, salty,
bitter and savory. Some never quite acquire the “flavor”, but for many of the
rest of us… life would not be complete without spicy. Having absolutely
no spicy in our flavor spectrum would be like having a rainbow with no red. That
rainbow would totally suck, right??
Those of us who grown to love that classic
vinegar/tomato/hot pepper combination in one form or another… many of us start
putting it on everything. It doesn’t stop with our Mexican food and Buffalo
wings. We start putting it on our eggs, burgers, on Cajun and Creole foods,
potatoes, rice, oysters, cocktails (like Bloody Mary’s), sandwiches, soups,
stews, meatloaf… the list is endless!! Hot sauces are being used on everything
and on all kinds of foods!
Hot Sauce Makes Bad
Food Better!
OK, so have you found yourself in a situation where you
really needed to eat something, but the food really wasn’t great at all? Or
perhaps it was actually terrible? But for one reason or another (like you
didn’t want to offend “someone” by not eating it) you really needed to eat it? You need a secret weapon to help you get your
Mother-in-law’s cooking down? Well… enter hot sauce!! For we heat aficionados,
that secret weapon can absolutely be hot sauce!
Not only can hot sauce help you get through your
mother-in-law’s cooking (don’t worry, your secret is safe with us), it could
also save your life in a survival situation by helping make some pretty
unappetizing food sources (like semi-fresh road kill for example) a bit more
palatable. Hot sauces have the amazing ability to make even bad food taste at
least slightly better! Or… at least cover up the bad taste by setting your
mouth on fire.
Hot Sauce is Easy to
Store!
Because the vast majority of hot sauces have such a high
vinegar content, not only do they have a fairly long shelf life, they can also
be stored on a shelf unrefrigerated even after opened! This makes them an ideal
food storage item! Also, since usually a little hot sauce goes a long way
(depending on how spicy the sauce is and how much heat you enjoy), bottles of
hot sauce are typically very small and take up very little space compared to
other standard condiments like ketchup, mayo, mustard, etc. It’s hard to beat
your favorite hot sauce in terms of bang for your buck!
Did you know? - Tabasco
in MREs
- Individual serving-sized bottles of Tabasco sauce were first included in military MREs in the 1980s, but it wasn’t until 1993 that these now famous tiny Tabasco bottles found a home in almost every military MRE.
- Capsaicin (the heat producing chemical compound found in hot peppers like cayenne, the main ingredient in Tabasco) is a natural blocking agent of the chemical involved in the transmission of pain.
- Cayenne is also rich in natural aspirin-like chemical compounds making it a great substitute pain reliever for headaches!
- 10-20 drops of Tabasco in a glass of warm water is amazing improvised gargle for sore throats!
- Capsaicin can also dramatically reduce chronic nerve pain like arthritis, shingles, trigeminal neuralgia and diabetic neuropathy.
- Tabasco can also be used as an insect repellant
