An Ode to Tabasco Sauce

A quick one today. I'd like to celebrate one of my favorite non-alcoholic liquids: Tabasco Sauce.

In our home, we add Tabasco to almost everything: fried eggs, pefectly boiled eggs, pasta, fried rice and all of the cajun recipes we like to make (I'll share our recipes and a great cookbook recommendation for cajun food in a later post). I season beef and chicken with it, I sometimes add a few generous shakes to a vegetarian soup dish, etc. Oh, and of course let's not forget Tabasco is the second most critical ingredient in a Bloody Mary.

I encourage you to take a couple of minutes and look around the Tabasco website. Did you know you can buy glorious Tabasco by the GALLON now?

Also check out some of the recipes in the site. I'll cite two that really caught my eye: the Cowboy Chili with Beans and the Caribbean Black Bean Salsa (which for some reason is listed under "Mexican," but we won't hold that against them). Both are clearly recipes worth cooking.

I remember as a kid once reading one of the magazines sitting around the house--I think it was either Good Housekeeping or Reader's Digest (okay, I was a little hard up for reading material that day...)--and in one of the humor sections there was a blurb that said something along the lines of "You know you've had a long healthy marriage when you finish your first bottle of Tabasco."

Oh. My. And back then you could only buy the teensy 2-ounce size bottle!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I enjoy various hot sauces on occasion: www.hotsauce.com.

But this brings to light the question, is Tobasco Sauce merely another hot sauce, or a different type of sauce altogether?

Or is Tobasco sauce merely a brand name, like Xeroxing something is to copy something on a copy machine? Hmmmm.....

Anonymous said...

I knew you would sneak that salt back in there somehow...

Daniel said...

oh OUCH. But you have a point. There is salt in Tabasco Sauce. For that I am deeply sorry. :) I still like the stuff though....

And now that I think about it, the Cowboy Chili with Beans recipe calls for 3/4 of a teaspoon of salt. I'd leave that out if I were you.

Anonymous said...

Have you ever tried thai chilly sauce? I think the taste is really more complex then Tabasco.
Diana.

Daniel said...

Hi Diana! Thanks for posting. I LOVE thai hot sauce, although I haven't been able to find it anywhere in a store near me. Probably could find it in an Asian food store though.

Dan

Anonymous said...

John McNulty wrote a wonderful piece, "A Dash of Tobasco," for the New Yorker in the 1950s. The author travelled to New Iberia and wrote about the area, the family, and the sauce.

Anonymous said...

I LOVE Tabasco sauce! I put it on anything that goes good with it.

I find that food tastes worse if you try it again without tabasco sauce. heehee it also clears your sinuses if you dare try a drop plain...

Daniel said...

Hi Sean:
Oh YEAH, Tabasco works great on the sinuses. Classic! I should have noted that in the post. One of its key medicinal uses!

Thanks for reading!
DK