Welcome to Good Hurts!

Good Hurts is dedicated to the best hurts on Earth: spicy foods.
I'm Russell. I teach English, write poetry, but most importantly, I am a spice aficionado and I dedicate myself to categorizing, reviewing, and torturing myself with the spiciest foods and sauces this great world has to offer, all so you can know about the most brutal, benevolent, and best bangs for your buck. Email me at hotfreakrussell@gmail.com


Enjoy, and feel the burn.

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Tabasco Sauce: A special Christmas review of the All-American hot sauce

New Years is a time to reflect upon one's year; recognizing flaws you want to fix and new ground you want to cover often paints the landscape of the start of another all-too-short 365 days. 2009 was a good year for Good Hurts. It started! Sauces were eaten. (A) Reviewer(s) went to bed sore-stomached and smiley-faced after long nights of sampling. But Good Hurts has missions:
-To become the definitive hot sauce review site.
-To develop our own special blend of 10/10 sauces.
-To sign a hit TV show deal (hopefully right before Jersey Shore comes on...can't miss a second of Snooki's foppish antics).
Most important of all:
-To remain completist, never elitist.

In keeping with the spirit of America's favorite holiday, Christmas (besides, perhaps, the Superbowl, or Thirsty Thursday), Good Hurts prepares for a great 2010 with the hot sauce that defines a nation: Tabasco.

Tabasco sauce is a watery, light red Louisiana style sauce. That means big vinegar, Tabasco/cayanne peppers, and salt, salt, salt. And after vowing many times not to review sauces like this, why do they keep showing up on Good Hurts? Here's why: Tabasco has transcended the pantheon of excellent hot sauces; it's traversed the hierarchy hall of hottness. Tabasco has become an iconic hot sauce clearly symbolic of the American dream, intertwined more with our values, history, and  consumer culture than it is a regular ol' hot sauce from Lo'sianna.

Let's Look at the Facts: I can't rewrite their mind-blowing history page...I just don't have the time or web design doller$. But you really should check it out. Long story short: The McIlhenny Company started making the hot sauce in 1886 to spice up the reconstruction South's bland food (haha, it's never too late to rise again. -Ed.) Edmund McIlhenny, a banker, aged his Avery Island, LA crushed red peppers in a "mash" with salt. After 30 days in crockery jars, the mash was mixed with French white wine vinegar (they use distilled white vinegar like most Louisiana sauces now) and aged for another 30 days. Boom! Tabasco sauce, the first major commercial hot sauce, was born. Please note the ties to the class-rising, multi-chance American dream of finding passion in unconventional places between the hardscrabble lines of life in our free-market democracy. Paul McIlhenny, the 6th in a line of McIlhenny company presidents and Avery Island residents, runs the company today. But beyond the mild heat and tangy flavor lies the secret of its success: unmatched longevity and drive to be the best...perhaps it isn't the hottest or best tasting, but it's everywhere and it worked hard to get there. It's the story of so many American business juggernauts: a website designed to look young, fresh, and like a vibrant concert also contains a long section about the antiquated tradition and steadfast adherence to unchanging recipes and business values. Like Coca Cola, Tabasco pioneered an entire food industry and has reinvented itself again and again to change with the times. They build their image in the long shadow of their own American mystique: a family with dreams, land to cultivate, and traditional beliefs. Most importantly, Tabasco is everywhere. Like any die-hard capitalist company, Tabasco slaps their name and product any and everywhere, as a great way to learn about something is repetition, repetition, repetition. If you're reading this site, you have probably eaten Tabasco sauce.


Good Hurts: It's actually spicier than you might assume. Even the most cynical and stone-hearted of pepper freaks can dump gallons of the sauce on a single bite of food and get a back-of-the-throat heat. This humble editor must admit that the main reason for this review is a Christmas with my girlfriend's mom, who doesn't keep any hot sauce in the house. Yet my heart grew three sizes when I poured a generous puddle onto a single corn chip and could feel the burn I've nursed in my mortal mouth since I founded this site. Is it as hot as the killer world of death running the hot sauce niche today? No way. But it is a hot sauce! There IS a heat.

Flavor: Tabasco is really tangy. I actually think that its flavor has a lot in common with its place in the legendary lore of American foods. The proud USA is still a tad over 230 years old, having split from the Brits who colonized our country. Notice that those Brits can't get enough of vinegar and salty foods...from Fish n' Chips to Marmite and Vegemite,  salt and vinegar go hand and hand. Here in the USA, McIlhenny developed a sauce down south with a comparable vinegar tang that pairs well with the mild sweetness of cayanne pepper and fresh Avery Island salt. While the image and ubiqitousness have huge hands in the Tabasco brand, flavor--and ties to down-home Louisiana, Southern spice, and stringent, painstaking hand-crafted tenderness--is just as important. This is America's loud answer to salty foods across the pond: tangy zings and spicy exclamation points, even if they aren't hot enough for true hot freaks.


Availability: This is probably the first and only time I'll ever say this: This sauce is available everywhere. Grocery stores. Gourmets. Gas Stations. Restaurants (I've even seen it in some dumpy Chinese joints). This sauce is literally everywhere. The hot sauce world's answer to Coca-Cola is cheap and easy. They even developed their own little hierarchy of various flavors and online-exclusive "special reserves." Because Tabasco is older than any person on Earth and has been successful for longer than most political regimes are in place, their name will always lend itself well to the masses. According to their website, "Tabasco" is a word of "Mexican Indian origin believed to mean 'place where the soil is humid' or 'place of the coral or oyster shell.'" For many, "Tabasco" means "hot sauce."


Good for: Tabasco originated something I think is a brilliant concept: it says that it's good on everything and actually lists all the foods it's good for. Pizza, salads, eggs, subs, steak, chili...the list goes on and on. You can even download recipes using the sauce onto your ipod. Topical! As a card-carrying spice beast, I have to say that this sauce is remarkably good for everything because of its generalist nature; not too hot, not too tangy, not too salty, not too sweet. I prefer to diversify, adding different hot sauces to different foods, but I would never turn down the salty zing of Tabasco on my eggs. This sauce is made for regular Americans by not-so-regular Americans working and living on Avery Island who'd probably like you to believe they're down-home folks just like yourself. They are actually factory workers and CEOs.

Review:
Heat: *3/4
Flavor: **3/4
My Review: 5.5

As a poet, I can compare Tabasco hot sauce to Walt Whitman. I hated him growing up! I hated him as a poet obsessed with the avant-garde! But as I matured as a man, I began to understand the significance of Whitman's place in poetry. His "collective consciousness" and lesson-like stream of realizations was instrumental in the development of the poet's creative, off-the-cuff comprehension and analytical approach to writing and the world. Tabasco's collective consciousness appeals to the little part of EVERYONE that loves spice, but some of our little parts are actually pretty big.

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