Tabasco Sauce

Tabasco Sauce

 

A mass produced culinary additive made from the tabasco pepper, also known as Capiscum frutescens, vinegar and salt which is later aged in oak barrels for over three years to create this special brand of hot sauce.

 

Tabasco is the trademarked and branded name for this hot sauce produced by one of the largest hot sauce producers in the United States, McIlhenny Company of Avery, Lousiana, which is a family owned company in the fifth generation, all 145 shareholders of the company has either inherited or been given their shares by another family member.

 

This hot sauce was first invented and then distributed in old cologne bottles by the founder of the company, Edmund McIlhenny in 1868. Since then, the company has gone from only producing Tabasco sauce to also producing popcorn, nuts, olives, mayonnaise, mustard, soy sauce, barbecue sauce and chili sauce, all with special pepper seasoning.

 

The Scoville scale measures hotness of a chili pepper by the amount of the capsaicin it contains, this scale goes from 0 to 16 million. The original, classic red Tabasco sauce measures to around 2500 – 5000 SCU on the scale, the sauce made from habanero is almost double as spicy with 7000 – 8000 SCU while the green pepper, or Jalapeño, based sauce is very weak with only 600 – 800 SCU.

 

The McIlhenny Company made Tabasco is sold in over 160 different countries and packaged in 122 different languages and dialects, with over 700 000 bottles each containing 57mL of Tabasco each is manufactured every day around the globe.

 

Tabasco is on the menu of the NASA space program and has, with shuttles, gone into orbit, it has also been used on Skyland and on the International Space Station (ISS). On the internet, Tabasco has become a symbol, or meme, for manliness and is often used by the popular internet satirist known as Maddox.