agreed. i use that technique. the fermented version being much better than the non. i ferment mine in the oven with the oven light on for a few days. i also have more garlic and i use honey instead of sugar and a bit more rice vinegar.
it’s really messing with my old stock sri-racha bottle. kinda deforming it. not sure why. it’s a bit spicier than off-the-shelf, because i left the seeds in, but not enough to deform a bottle!
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i view Tapatio as a completely different type of sauce. (tex)mex vs s.e. asian.
around PDX we have secret aardvark which is AMAZING and some local sri-racha, “Thai True”, i think, which is also fantastic. we have both those and my own sri-racha in our fridge right now
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oh yeah. sweetness from carrots. great stuff
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“tiny catering-sized sachets of Tobasco, which I import the UK by the grosslot. Best thing about these: the TSA doesn’t register them as liquids on their scanners, so you can go through airport security […]”
nice. way to enable the 'rists, Cory! no way they could have thought of this on their own. TSA is doing a bang-up job keeping us safe. (getting on a plane tomorrow, after i take off my shoes to make us all safer)
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Or as it’s known in our house, Hell’s Toothpaste.
I’m a big fan of Frank’s Xtra Hot sauce and Crystal Extra Hot sauce. These have the great flavor of Franks or Crystal, but with heat that’s more on the level of Tabasco or hotter. I’ve found the Franks Xtra hot at Walmart, but the Crystal extra hot is a little more difficult to find in stores.
How does it compare? Are you saying it sucks in comparison, or do you just not use it, etc…?
I saw that the other day in the store and wondered about it. We live in Southern CA and I doubt that Rooster Sauce is going to be gone from the millions of Asian markets any time soon…
Half of them display the stuff by the pallet…
Yes, it just sucks. I have yet to find a (culinary) use for it. It’s got an odd sweetness to it, and a smokey sort of taste. Which sounds much better than it actually is.
Your Heretical Snarkings have been duly noted, Citizen…
Good to know, thanks.
We’ve got two bottles of Sriracha here at home and I have a bottle at work. We’ll be good in case of the end times.
Someone will backwards engineer it soon enough if it comes to that. 
I’m from Buffalo and in general, it is a bland city. Food with spice or flavor in general is hard to come by. The local “Mexican” chain, the very popular Mighty Taco, is a joke.
I didn’t have a taste for hot and spicy until I moved to Southern California, because it just wasn’t really part of food in Buffalo. And then I spent a lot of time in Thailand, which really turned me on to spiciness.
So I came back to Buffalo, and a friend from California came to visit. So we went to one of the authentic buffalo wings places (which I hadn’t been to since high school, when I only ever went once or twice). We got a variety of sauces on the wings, but I made sure to get a couple with the hottest thing they offered. I could barely get it down and my mouth felt burned for a couple of days.
Who knew? Buffalo wings in Buffalo actually can be extremely spicy.
To that end, there are local hot sauces and wing sauces in Buffalo-area grocery stores that are exceedingly hot.
Personally, I am very sensitive to the taste of vinegar and while sometimes it isn’t an issue (like putting Sriracha in pho, which is essential, and you don’t taste the vinegar) I will always opt for vinegar-free hot sauces, which are relatively hard to find but not super uncommon. In California, Tapatio was my mainstay as it has no vinegar. There’s also a wonderful Hawaiian one but I never managed to find it to buy - a Hawaiian restaurant I frequented used to have it, but even they switched to Sriracha a couple years ago. Elsewhere, Tapatio is not always easy to obtain (it’s dirt-cheap in California) but I like to look for nice Caribbean-style hot sauces that don’t have vinegar.
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I enjoy both, and usually have one or the other in the pantry, but I don’t use them for the same things. 
Back around 2000 I was working in an office complex where the lunch place was your basic Chinese falafel hamburger joint. The guy who ran it made his own sriracha, which was a bit darker and sweeter than the real thing, and it was the absolute perfect thing to put on french fries.
My latest hot sauce acquisition has been a Louisiana-style fermented pepper vinegar sauce that a coworker’s husband has been making and selling at the local farmers’ market; for cooking I mostly use dried peppers, or some of the Chinese black bean hot pepper sauces.
Two more words:
Lan Chi
(This stuff is the devil. No way, never again.)
I’ve got a couple really big bottles bought before all this hullaballoo was announced. They live with the 10-15 other bottles of hot sauce on store at all times in our house. Note that these are all different sauces for different things.
Some stuff doesn’t go well with Mexican hot sauces like Cholula. Other stuff doesn’t work with Asian sauces like sriracha, chili garlic paste, etc. Sometimes I just want spicy vinegar like Franks or Tabasco. And sometimes when I want to crap bright green fire, I bust out the Yucateca habanero sauce.
If we run out of this before other factories catch up, then I’ll go back to the drawing board that is my Asian market and pray one of them is close enough in flavor.
I’m not freaking out like some people, but really, not all hot sauces are created equal. I treat them like different spices in my cabinet.
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What’s unfortunate is that Cholula is so high priced. It actually tastes really good but is now overrated. Used to be cheap like all the others.
I’m up to the teats with this bloody sauce.
it’s been around since forever and now there’s a world shortage… ?
just as the trend setting of ukeleles, octopi and cat photos that probably started here, there should be a new type of ‘court’ to dissuade ye and yer ilk from creating false reality obsessions.
seriously, you ‘blog’ it and the market changes?
\what a bunch of suckers the mainstream media are, turning your posts into trends.
runs to the kitchen, hides remaining cock sause in dresser drawer
Totally agree. Cholula is our son’s favorite hot sauce if we run out of homemade, but, yeah, it’s now in the land of luxury pricing so we don’t buy it anymore.
No snark intended.[quote=“Immutable_Mike, post:26, topic:17036, full:true”]
Or as it’s known in our house, Hell’s Toothpaste.
[/quote]
Or as it’s lovingly know in our house, Hell’s Toothpaste.
There. FTFM.
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