What number of 150-year-old American manufacturers are you able to title? In all probability not too many. Coca-Cola? Necco? Pepsi? However there’s one model that has all of them beat, and that’s McIlhenny, makers of Tabasco. That little green-labeled bottle with the brilliant pink scorching sauce is an American establishment, however the firm has expanded past its flagship product into extra worldwide types lately and has simply introduced one other addition to its portfolio: Tabasco Salsa Picante, a Mexican-style scorching sauce meant to be paired with Tex-Mex meals. 

“Innovation has all the time been a precedence for us, and we’ve been experimenting with this fashion of sauce for some time now,” Lee Susen, chief gross sales and advertising officer at McIlhenny Firm, mentioned in a press release. Representatives from the corporate level to knowledge indicating that Latin and Tex-Mex meals are dominating eating tendencies in 2024, with millennials and Gen Z now outright preferring these cuisines over Italian meals for the primary time.

In different phrases, it’s the right second for a longstanding scorching sauce model to enterprise into Mexican-style merchandise, and firm reps verify that Salsa Picante can be a part of McIlhenny’s everlasting lineup. 

The spice-averse amongst you is likely to be considering, “Scorching sauce is scorching sauce, proper?” However the truth that that is McIlhenny’s first “Mexican-style” condiment illustrates simply how huge the recent sauce panorama has change into — or how huge it all the time was, its international selection now mirrored a bit extra in American grocery retailer aisles.

McIlhenny, based in 1868 in Louisiana, has been producing Unique Pink Tabasco Sauce for greater than 150 years; that small bottle’s presence on diner tables worldwide is mainly a given. The easy recipe consists of solely tabasco peppers, vinegar, and salt. Due to this, its consistency is almost as skinny as water, and only a small dribble onto no matter you’re consuming will lend a concentrated hit of acid and a puckery taste. It’s highly effective stuff, although some scorching sauce connoisseurs may contemplate it just a little one-note.

In subsequent a long time, McIlhenny has expanded its pepper sauce portfolio to incorporate Habañero, Jalapeño, and Chipotle varieties, every providing completely different traits from the completely different pepper vegetation. 

These vinegar-based pepper sauces, nevertheless, account for less than a small fraction of the world’s scorching sauces. In recent times McIlhenny additionally started producing its personal model of Sriracha sauce, a condiment developed in Thailand within the Nineteen Forties and most generally bought within the U.S. underneath the Huy Fong label (the one with the rooster on the bottle). Sriracha, like Tabasco, is made with peppers, vinegar, and salt, however with the addition of garlic and sugar, the latter of which ferments the peppers and creates a thick paste. That is strained, blended with vinegar, and boiled down to scale back the general combination right into a thicker consistency than Tabasco. Sriracha is McIlhenny’s second best-selling product behind Unique Pink. 

After which there’s Mexican-style scorching sauce, aka salsa picante. This class encompasses such beloved manufacturers as Cholula, Tapatio, El Yucateco, Valentina, and others, and it too primarily consists of pepper, salt, vinegar, and garlic.

But whereas vinegar is a main contributor to each the flavour and consistency of McIlhenny Tabasco, Mexican scorching sauces showcase the peppers’ taste most of all, utilizing solely as a lot vinegar as mandatory within the mix; this lends the sauce a bit extra heft. In line with that fashion, McIlhenny’s new Salsa Picante is described within the press launch as a “wealthy and thick” sauce, one which’s milder than Tabasco with a “vibrant” mix of paprika, oregano and cumin.

Past these scorching sauce types, there’s a complete vast world of spicy condiments to discover, from Korean gochujang to Indonesian sambal oelek to Szechuan chili crisp to Peruvian aji verde. And if McIlhenny’s newest foray into Mexican-style scorching sauce is any indication, People have by no means been extra interested in all of the completely different ways in which worldwide cuisines carry the warmth. 

The brand new Tabasco Salsa Picante can be bought at Walmart and by way of Amazon, with a steered retail worth of $3.56.