sriracha

I’m absolutely flooded with requests from burgeoning hot sauce companies to promote their fundraising campaigns such as Kickstarter. I get at least four or five requests per month from people and sauces I’ve never heard of asking me to plug their stuff.

Sorry, that ain’t happening. Unless I know your product(s) and your company, that is something I refuse to do.

In the case of Fix Hot Sauce, however, I am more than pleased to give them a shout-out with their Kickstarter campaign. Why? Because their regular red sriracha sauce is the best sriracha sauce I’ve ever eaten. The stuff is outstanding. And I want to give aid to any and all struggling businesses with products I belive in.

Now the fine folks at Fix Hot Sauce want to expand their product line to include a green-colored lemongrass sriracha sauce. This new condiment has a slightly more earthy and brighter tone, with a fresh lemongrass and citrus flavor. The sauce uses special organic green chile peppers that originated in Vietnam. This new lemongrass sriracha is slated to be released early in 2017.

Sound good? Do yourself a favor and visit Fix Hot Sauce’s Kickstarter page and consider helping out one of the most promising new sauce makers in the fiery foods biz…now!

Enough about how much sriracha is today’s big hot sauce trend. I know it is, you know it is, so enough gushing about how it’s taken the world by storm. Instead, let’s take a look at some of the artisan sauce makers and see what dazzling new directions they can take with the Thailand genre that goes by the name “sriracha”.

I was contacted by Alex Loukas of the Fix Hot Sauce Team based in Seattle, Washington, to cover their emerging sriracha product of the same name. According to their website, this is their story:

“Our Fix journey started in Vietnam, where we saw and tasted the difference of authentic, farm-fresh, and non-processed goodness. Our minds were blown. From then, we made it our mission to bottle the premium flavors of South Asia and bring it back home.

We used to be interested in average bowls of pho served with your average hot sauce. We want more. And you deserve more. Fix was born to bring the best damn hot sauce to America.”

Not only were they making the claim to have the best hot sauce, but I was also dying to know if I could ever truly love a sriracha sauce, so with my review of Fix Hot Sauce, it was a “double challenge accepted”. Read on to see what I thought…

There’s no doubt that Sriracha is the hottest trend in hot sauce nowadays. There is simply something incendiary about this style of spicy condiment that has garnered a ravenous following among foodies, chileheads and hipsters alike.

Sriracha, as a general type of sauce, is named after where is is believed to have originated in the coastal city of Si Racha, in the Chonburi Province of eastern Thailand. It is a thick, sweet, garlicky-pungent chile sauce that typically has a base of fermented red chile peppers, distilled vinegar, garlic, sugar, and salt. Although sales-wise it’s still not as popular as the more traditional, runny, Louisiana-style pepper sauces (typified by heavyweights McIlhenny Co.’s TABASCO Pepper Sauce, Frank’s RedHot Sauce, Texas Pete, Bruce Foods Corporation’s Louisiana Brand Sauce, and Baumer Foods’ Crystal Hot Sauce), Sriracha is rapidly picking up steam, and is in an estimated 9% of all U.S. households.

By far the most popular producer of Sriracha sauces is Huy Fong Foods, Inc., based in Irwindale, California, in a state-of-the-art 650,000 square-foot facility, which owner David Tran completely designed himself. And although there are numerous direct competitors, including scores of small, craft hot sauce makers all vying for their slice of the Sriracha pie, it is Tran’s “Rooster Sauce” (its informal nickname because of a picture of a rooster on each clear plastic bottle) gets almost all the attention and adoration in the fiery foods world.

Tran, an immigrant from communist Vietnam, started making his Huy Fong sauces in 1980 along Spring Street in Los Angeles’ Chinatown district. After a move to a 68,000-square-foot factory in Rosemead, California in 1987, sales for his signature product started to take off, growing steadily throughout the 1990s and ’00s. By 2010, Huy Fong Foods opened their Irwindale factory, and their Sriracha Sauce (which Tran pronounces “see-RAH-cha”) became a household name, all with zero advertising; quite a triumphant “word of mouth” American success story.

In honor of Huy Fong Foods launching the brand new redesign of their website (just within a day of this writing), David Tran was kind enough to let me ask him some questions…

Here is a short but sweet video of the process Huy Fong Foods, the most popular maker of Sriracha-style condiments, goes through to create their spicy “Rooster Sauce”, courtesy of Hypebeast. Here is their explanation of it:

“In our latest edition of Hypebeast Process, CEO and founder of Huy Fong Foods, David Tran, walks us through the whole process of the iconic condiment’s lifespan, from inception of idea to execution of product. David started the company in 1980 by hand packing the infamous sauce by hand with a miniature spoon, sourcing only the freshest ingredients to be sure that the element of spice was just right. Now, 35 years later, the only thing that has changed is the process of manufacture, with the quality and origin of Sriracha chillies remaining the same. Quality control is of utmost importance to David with an idealistic business projection to make the sauce spicier in the future. Every detail is painstakingly monitored, even down to the ingenious packaging whereby the color of the lid serves a significant purpose. David Tran says Sriracha can be used on any food so squeeze some onto your breakfast/lunch/dinner and enjoy the video…”

Whenever there is a new king resting atop the “World’s Hottest Chile Pepper” throne, you can bet that there will – for better or worse – be hoards of hot sauces that flood the market that contain that particular capsicum. Of course, unless you’ve been living under a rock the past year, you’ll know that the current record holder chile is Smokin’ Ed’s Carolina Reaper, with an average of 1,569,383 Scoville Heat Units and measured peak levels of over 2,200,000 SHU. It’s expected that sauce makers will scramble to concoct a condiment containing the Carolina Reaper pepper; and whether or not the Reaper is a main ingredient or only available in trace amounts within the actual product, you can count on these companies veritably featuring the pepper as a headliner attraction on the bottle’s label. Additionally, many of these folks are looking mainly to quickly capitalize on the world’s hottest pepper craze and will do a less-than-stellar job at creating a good product, and focus on the heat of the sauce.

What I am personally interested in is the flavor instead of pure fire. I ask, what can you do to utilize the taste of the Carolina Reaper chile pepper in a cohesive flavor harmonization? Can you sculpt a product formula that isn’t a copycat of 500 other sauces that have come before it? Can it “wow” my taste buds in addition to “burning” them?

So I looked to a trio of proven fiery foods flavor master masters who have developed a Carolina Reaper-based hot sauce within the past year – Johnny McLaughlin of Heartbreaking Dawns, Steve Seabury of High River Sauces, and Ed Bucholtz of Born to Hula Sauces – to see if it can be done, and done well.

The Reaper-filled offerings I will cover from these gentlemen are as follows: Heartbreaking Dawns’ Fervor Reaper Chile Hot Sauce, High River Sauces’ Foo Foo Mama Choo Smokin’ Ed’s Carolina Reaper Sauce, and Born to Hula’s Reaper of Sorrow Carolina Reaper Sauce.

What I will do in this extended review of first go over each sauce individually, and look at the ingredients, the bottle label, the texture and appearance, the aroma, and the initial tastes of each hot sauce. Then, I will perform a battery of culinary tests and see how these three stack up against each other with meals. I will then crown one of them the sultan of sauce when it comes to employing the super-hot Carolina Reaper.

So let’s get burnin’!

Rudy Reviews is back with a Sriracha sauce for you!  Today’s offering comes to you from Organicville Foods located in Yanceyville, NC. Organicville Foods started almost ten years ago by Rachel Kruse and they pride themselves on producing a ton of products that range from dressings, salsa, pasta sauce as well as a host of others – all of which are certified gluten-free as well as certified vegan.

Sriracha sauce was first made in Thailand and it gets it’s name from a coastal city in the Chonburi Province on the eastern coast.

People often mispronounce Sriracha sauce calling it “SIRacha” or SREracha”, but it’s actually pronounced “SEEracha”.

The ingredients used to produce Sriracha is comprised mostly of the same ingredients and vary with the presence of elements used.  Let’s take a glimpse at Organicville’s contribution, Sky Valley Sriracha Sauce.

“Sriracha” is certainly the big buzzword in the chilehead industry (and perhaps the whole condiment industry as well) this year. The Asian-style sauce has taken foodies by storm, and I predict that it’s going to get even more ubiquitous next year.

One sure sign of any trend’s popularity is the off-shoots from what is considered to be the “mainstream” genre.  Case in point…green sriracha. This one comes from the Musashi Foods, and is billed to be “a unique Japanese interpretation of the classic sauce”.  Hmmm…what does that mean exactly? Well, for starters, it uses green serrano chiles instead of the classic red chiles in more traditional srirachas. Also, it aims to be a bit more complex with brown sugar, red cabbage juice and turmeric. 

Also up for review is Musashi Japanese Spicy Mayo, an orange blend of fiery, far Eastern-style ingredients and a regular mayonnaise spread. But first, the Musashi Midori Green Sriracha…

Going on now through July 12, 2014, there is an art exhibition at the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles, California titled LA Heat: Taste Changing Condiments.

It was created to pay tribute to the backstories and contributions of two sauces in particular: Huy Fong Foods Sriracha and Tapatio hot sauces.

According to the museum’s website:

Sriracha and Tapatio hot sauces are two examples of the recent homegrown all-American condiments that have dramatically impacted American cuisine.  The rise in popularity of these condiments signifies an increase in Asian and Latino populations living in the US and especially in Los Angeles after the passing of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965…