What is Tabasco® Sauce?

Tabasco® sauce is a kind of hot sauce that is made, as is to be expected given its name, with tabasco peppers. The other key ingredients in this spicy sauce are vinegar and salt. Before the sauce is bottled and sold, it is aged for three years in barrels made out of white oak wood.

Edmund McIlhenny invented the sauce in 1868. He gave it to family members and friends using discarded cologne bottles as containers. In fact, when the sauce was first distributed commercially, it was packaged in cologne bottles that were purchased from a glassworks company in New Orleans. The company that manufactures and sells tabasco® sauce is still primarily made up of McIlhenny descendants.

Many people have chosen tabasco® sauce as their favorite condiment. In some households, tabasco® sauce is on the dinner table as often — if not more often — than standard condiments such as ketchup and mustard. In fact, there are some bottles of tabasco® sauce that are small and are intended to be carried in a purse or briefcase so that devotees of the sauce can use it to season their food when they are traveling or when they are at a restaurant that does not offer the sauce.

There are a number of types of foods that can be dressed with tabasco® sauce. Some foods that are commonly seasoned with the sauce include stews, chili, hamburgers, burritos, fajitas, eggs, fried chicken, chicken wings, and fish sandwiches to name just a few. The sauce is often used as a condiment for cuisines common in the South and the Southwest in the United States. It is commonly associated with Cajun cuisine and soul food. There are some recipes that call specifically for certain amounts of tabasco® sauce in the ingredients as well as recipes that call for the sauce as a seasoning for the completed dish.

In addition to the original recipe, there are now a number of other kinds of tabasco® sauce distributed by the same company. There is one sauce that blends tabasco peppers with habanero peppers and other that blends tabsaco peppers with garlic. There is a jalapeño sauce distributed by the company that does not include tabasco peppers in the recipe. Other sauces distributed by the company include a sauce made with chipotle peppers and another that is both sweet and spicy. Unlike the original recipe, these additional flavors are not aged for three years in a white oak barrel before they are bottled and sold.