When it comes to hot sauces, Louisiana doesn’t lack for variety. A tour of the condiment aisle in even the humblest grocery store reveals a range that far exceeds the selection of, say, ketchup brands. Golden mayonnaise. Calandro’s Government Street location had not just a shelf, but a full display of tapas with a galaxy of hot sauce offerings, with names ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Apparently, even in our highly corporatized food culture, the hot sauce segment remains a wild frontier, one in which the hearts and long-suffering taste buds of pepper sauce aficionados are still at stake. Why? Is it because hot sauce occupies a unique culinary niche, one that can be considered souvenir, pantry decoration, and manly rite of passage, as well as sustenance? Is it because the hot sauce department is the only section of the grocery store where teens feel at home? How else to explain a food segment that can attract customers with names like Ring of Fire or Bayou Butt Burner? Try marketing salad dressings or guacamole in those terms. Not; Hot sauce is unique, so this month I undertook a very subjective search to decide if one sauce could be considered superior to another; or yes, if you’ll excuse the expression, it’s all a lot of hot air. And here, I offer my findings.

The oyster speaks. With the help of a couple of asbestos tongue hot sauce snobs, I returned to Calandro’s to select a number of sauces. Necessity, not concern, required that we choose no more than eight candidates (it’s difficult to make sensible comparisons when trying to narrow down a field of forty contestants). So we restricted our options to just those sauces made in Louisiana (Texas and, interestingly, New Jersey, are other states that many hot sauces originate from); then we decided to eliminate all the sauces with really silly names. In other words, while I suppose it is possible that the Sir Fartsalot brand sauce actually offers a superior seasoning experience, it was omitted from this survey.

Thus supplied, the tasting team went to The Chimes and ordered four dozen fresh Louisiana oysters, and not a few beers. Each sauce was then applied to six oysters for the careful consideration of the tasting team, who approached the task with enough enthusiasm to convince casual listeners that we were trying 1982 Bordeaux, not pepper sauce, and it wasn’t long before. that adjectives like “vibrant,” “caldoso”, “citric” and “with body” were spinning. Evangeline’s Louisiana Hot Sauce was praised for its stickiness, but disparaged as “a close cousin to hot ketchup” because of its spicy and buffalo wing flavors. “Where is he going?” the panel complained about the Slap Ya Mama sauce, which was pronounced as “run and run”, without providing that satisfying hit of hot pepper at the end. Reppeaux’s hot sauce from Sterlington, Louisiana featured rich smoked pepper flavor on the front and was described as “biblical”, both for its raging late heat and the fact that Joshua 24:15 is quoted on the label. The iconic Crystal Hot Sauce, which I had long accepted as one of my favorites, turned out to be all salt and vinegar, a lurid orange color and a little peppery when considered alongside tastier sauces like salsa. Justin Wilson pepper from Baton Rouge, which had a lot of heat and a nice citrus note. You could also taste the oyster, which was nice. Southern Cajun Hot Sauce, a fermented sauce ‘cooked’ rather than cold with onions and sugar among its ingredients, was flavorful and not too spicy, but it overwhelmed the delicate oyster and seemed more suitable for barbecue. In the end, opinions converged in favor of Louisiana Gold Hot Sauce. The cadillac in Bruce Foods hot sauce garage, Louisiana Gold, wowed us with an explosion of fruity pepper flavors at first, not enough salt to hide the sea breeze from the oyster. It was also the spiciest of the eight, but in a flavorful way that brought us to the accompanying lagers with renewed appreciation. Unfortunately, we couldn’t come to the same conclusion about Bruce Foods’ Louisiana Gold Horseradish Sauce, which initially looked promising due to the presence of horseradish, but tasted primarily of mustard and wine in the end. We could shake it over a Bloody Mary, but not an oyster, another time.

Peppers, vinegar, salt, a spice or two. Since most hot sauce recipes don’t stray too far from these few ingredients, it’s amazing how much they differ from one another. So the next time you’re feeling sucked into oysters, remember you’re at the heart of the hot sauce. It’s another thing we should be proud of.