We are currently living in an era of hot sauce availability that rivals the availability of new and secret sauces for lifting success. We have plenty of threads about lifting methods and other secret sauces, but the only thread I found concerning hot sauce is nearly two decades old. I’ll go ahead and start a new one.
I would love to hear from hot sauce aficionados about new and interesting sauces to try. I’ll lead off by highly recommending hot sauce I now purchase by the gallon, available on Amazon. It keeps a LONG time in the fridge as long as you’re willing to reserve the space or just pour it out into smaller containers.
Marie Sharps has been my go-to for years, ever since my cousin recommended it to me. I feel somewhat bad for not sharing this outstanding product with t-nation before, but I just thought of it when I chimed in on the canned chicken thread.
The ingredients are what set this apart compared to every hot sauce I had tried before. There’s nothing in this stuff except very basic ingredients and a little bit of salt. Using carrot pulp as a thickener made it very unique to me, and you don’t taste the carrot at all. It doesn’t have a silky-smooth texture like hot sauces thickened with xanthan gum, but it still pours similar to something like Cholula.
I’ve tried most of her lineup and they are all good in their own way, but her various intensities of the flagship habanero hot sauces are all outstanding and unlike any other hot sauce I’ve tried. The flavor is extremely bright and basically pure habanero once you move up to the “hot” intensity.
She used to sell directly from her website and send swag with her orders like stickers and samples, but she only sells through distributors now and the last gallon I bought from Amazon had no Queen of Habanero stickers, sadly.
The Mild Habanero still packs a punch compared to the heat intensity of regular Cholula or Tabasco, and it is a good starting point to experiment with the heat levels. You basically get a bit more garlic and onion flavor, less heat, and less habanero flavor compared to the hotter versions. The “Hot” is my preferred version, which is a very bright habanero flavor without being ridiculously hot for my tolerance level.
Also available in regular-sized bottles.