Goddamn, am I behind on these. Also I still have to buy the hot sauce for the banner tournament people, which will be featured in a future post. I swear I’ll get it to you guys eventually and will track you down for your respective addresses.

Welcome back to House of Pain, the occasional foray into hot sauces, most of them in the range of “Why would you do this to yourself? Do you hate yourself or something?” I’m Senor Weaselo, and to answer that question, only slightly!

Today we move slightly away from the ridiculous, to the more mainstream while still slightly ridiculous. The capsaicin arms race, after all, is big business! Big enough that you can find sauces made with superhot peppers (anything hotter than a habanero) at your local grocery. Or at least, I found them there. And that’s our topic for today:

Sauce #1: Tabasco Scorpion Hot Sauce

I’ve written about Tabasco before and I’m disappointed to say that this isn’t a big enough site for the McIlhenny Company to give me free shit. Because I am not averse to free shit. I mean, it’s free. It has to really suck for it to not be worth the zero money one paid for it. Though I didn’t pay zero money for this. I found it one Easter Sunday (again, way behind) as we went up to see Hermana Weaselo. We were bringing food. I was technically in charge of buying salad dressing, but I saw it and I bought it. And I can confirm, you can use it as a salad dressing!

(Hot sauce is a valid salad dressing.)

The thing about Tabasco, for better or worse, is that it’s a very vinegary sauce. It doesn’t have its own deep flavor notes other than that. The thing about the Scorpion sauce, then, once again, for better or worse, is it covers some of that vinegar flavor and replaces it with hot. Which is nice if you don’t like vinegar but you like something fairly straightforward and hot.

Does it work? Sure. Maybe not on its own, but as a compliment to a milder, more flavorful base sauce (or I guess ketchup) to give it extra heat. The vinegar flavor will (mostly) get covered by the base sauce and you’ll still have some sort of heat to it, including the aftertaste. I don’t know how it’ll work with mustard because I haven’t tried it, but I don’t normally get my mustards at the mustard gas level. I know, it sounds like crazy talk coming from me.

Sauce #2: Melinda’s Ghost Pepper Wing Sauce

Arguably the most popular of the craft hot sauces that you might actually find in a normal-ass grocery store is Melinda’s. There’s a long story that I just found out about now but: Melinda’s is apparently the original Marie Sharp’s sauce until her distributors screwed her by filing a trademark on the name in 1991. There was a court battle, and eventually she gave up the brand in exchange to be released from the contracts (which led to her second self-titled hot sauce brand). Which is probably why Melinda’s has wing sauces now, and probably less likely thirty years ago.

Controversy and Belizean and/or bird culture dick moves aside, I found the wing sauce while out shopping with Senorita Weaselo. “Of course, it’s Brooklyn,” the Commentists all said. But hey, it’s not that hipstery, she doesn’t live in Williamsburg or Park Slope or places where the deli is actually called the Hipster Deli.

Anyway, back to the hot sauce. Is it hot? Yes. Is it manageable? Well, define manageable and who’s talking, but by my standards, yes. It’s milder than my normal standby of wing sauces (that would be DEFCON Curbstomp) but due to the garlic and the lime juice (yeah, lime juice instead of what most wing sauces have, which I believe is lemon) you do get a good combination of flavor and heat. Controversy aside, I would imagine if you scaled down the sauce (as they do have multiple levels of heat) you’d find something your GI tract and taste buds can agree on.

After my infamous pepper spray steak incident, where I learned about the values of proper ventilation, I had one of the steaks leftover, which became a sandwich the next day with both of these sauces—the wing sauce on the meat, and the Tabasco on the lettuce. I can say that my cooking did not suck, and challenge Yeah Right to do it better in the offseason. (The spices I used: Salt, Reaper salt, pepper, Reaper powder, and garlic powder. This sandwich, seasoning, and the process, may be in an upcoming House of Pain!)

Bonus! Boar’s Head Chipotle Gourmaise

Everybody’s got an aioli these days. Doesn’t matter where you go out to eat. Hell, Heinz tried to make “mayochup” a thing. I imagine (and hope) it’s gone the same way as “fetch,” but I still see it in the aisles. But now that I’m shopping for myself (and Grandpa Weaselo, but he’s concerningly easy to shop for), if there are sauces I’m interested in, I can just pick them up.

But the “I can just pick them up” is what I decided to do with this last thing. I wanted to see if the Boar’s Head chipotle mayonnaise was any good, so I got it. I love their deli mustard, because at the levels I put mustard on things that I haven’t put hot sauce on the feeling of horseradish will travel entirely up one’s nose. (Do you think carrots are watery and bland? Cover them with a fuck-ton of mustard! Your nostrils will thank you!)

So… is it good? Yes, actually. I bit into my sandwich and immediately got impressed by it. Does it actually have some sort of kick? Yes, even if I was heavy-handed with the squirt bottle. Does it taste like fake smokiness? Maybe at higher concentrations, but if you get to that point it’s probably too much.

So what did we learn? Well, I’d say that you can find something acceptable no matter where you look, and that finding something spicy for your sandwich/burgers/wings/tacos/Maestro’s definition of a sandwich isn’t just about scouring the Internets for websites with flames on the banners. Though that would be a pretty metal grocery store.

Anyway, we’ll return with some more Houses of Pain coming up. Well, at least one or two.

House of Pain would like mention the passing of John Dilley, founder/CEO/Creator of DEFCON Sauces, who unfortunately got the ‘Rona and passed. A character in the hot sauce community, he’ll be missed, especially as the showrunner of the wing contests at the New York Expo. We’ll miss you, buddy.

House of Pain would also like to take this time to put on the Count Takeshi/Vic Romano outfit and remind everyone, “Don’t get Rod & Todded!”