The Hot Sauce Brand That's Too Boring For Our Taste

Hot sauces can be sweet, acidic, smoky, herbaceous, or all of the above — but the one thing they should never be is boring. Hot sauce exists to embody the opposite — to jazz up any meal with not just heat and spice but flavor. It doesn't matter if you prefer the hottest of hot or the mildest of mild, the reason you add hot sauce to a dish is to incorporate zing and complexity. So, when Tasting Table's Katherine Peach ranked the 20 best grocery store brands of hot sauce, she had to place Red Devil dead last. It breaks really the only rule in hot sauce: It's totally blah.

The reason for this comes down to Red Devil's ingredients. The sauce, made by Louisiana brand Trappey's, consists pretty simply of distilled vinegar, red cayenne peppers aged with salt, and ... that's it. It's thickened with guar gum and xantham gum, which don't add flavor of course but are supposed to be thickeners and fail even at that, and also has ascorbic acid for preserving its freshness. Impressively, Red Devil has been around since 1898. And, hey, maybe this pop of heat was enough to thrill diners at the end of the 19th century. But today, we have access to hot sauces made in the traditions of cuisines from around the world that incorporate various herbs and spices and achieve whole, individual flavor profiles. Simple cayenne that isn't even that spicy is dull, and not enough to balance the vinegar, leaving a thin, acidic condiment.

To understand why Red Devil falls short, compare it to other hot sauces and look at flavor profiles from around the world. American hot sauces tend to follow the Red Devil formula of vinegar and peppers, but many brands know that while you need that acidity to cut through foods and temper heat, you also need other elements in your sauce to balance that acidity. They add different peppers, herbs, and spices to provide sweetness, earthiness, and herbaceousness. African hot sauces are thicker like pastes, with olive oil, herbs, and spices. Middle Eastern hot sauces incorporate nuts, breadcrumbs, and fruits for texture, warmth, roundness, and sweetness. Asian sauces range from versatile chili oils to sweet, spice-packed mustards to gochujang funky with fermented soybeans. One of our top-ranked sauces was Nando's Peri-Peri Sauce; peri peri is Portuguese and rounds out its vinegar and cayenne with bright lemon and sweet-heat onions.

Our other favorites, like a yellow sriracha from Three Mountains Brand and a Caribbean-Tex-Mex hybrid sauce from Secret Aardvark, demonstrate complexity with habanero, serrano, apple cider vinegar, Thai chilis, and garlic — there are layers to the flavors of these condiments. From mild to scorching, a good hot sauce demonstrates the best flavor-to-spice ratio, and displays creativity — you can make a hot sauce smoky with bourbon, for instance, or combine vibrant mango with habanero. This is where Red Devil just doesn't succeed.