Hot sauce facts for kids
Hot sauce is a super popular and spicy topping! It's also called chili sauce or pepper sauce. Hot sauce is a condiment (like ketchup or mustard) that gets its fiery kick from chili peppers.
The Story of Hot Sauce
People have loved chili peppers and other spicy foods for thousands of years. In places like Mexico, Central America, and South America, people were already using chili peppers over 6,000 years ago!
When explorers from Spain and Portugal arrived in the Americas in the 1500s, they took chili pepper plants back to Europe. From there, these plants quickly spread to Africa and Asia. Over time, people learned to grow different kinds of chili peppers to make them even better.
One of the very first hot sauces sold in bottles in America appeared in 1807 in Massachusetts. Not many of those early brands are still around today. However, Tabasco sauce is a very old and famous brand that started in 1868. By 2010, Tabasco was one of the top-selling seasonings in the United States. Another popular sauce, Frank's RedHot Sauce, was even more popular and was the first sauce used to make buffalo wings!
What's Inside Hot Sauce?
There are tons of different recipes for hot sauces, but they all have one thing in common: some kind of chili pepper!
Many hot sauces are made mostly from chili peppers. Sometimes, they are as simple as just chili peppers, salt, and vinegar. Other sauces might use fruits or vegetables as their main base, and then add chili peppers to make them spicy.
Hot sauce makers use different ways to create their sauces. Some let the ingredients age in containers, while others blend and cook them. This helps them get just the right taste and spiciness.
For really hot sauces, makers often use peppers like the Ghost pepper or Habanero peppers. These peppers are super spicy on the Scoville scale, which measures how hot peppers are. To make sauces even hotter, some companies add pure capsaicin extract (the chemical that makes peppers spicy) or even mustard oil.
Vinegar is another common ingredient. It helps keep the sauce fresh for a long time, acting as a natural preservative. Sometimes, flavored vinegars are used to give the sauce a special taste. Other spices are also often added to make the flavor even better!
Images for kids
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Original Tabasco red pepper sauce
See also
In Spanish: Salsa picante para niños
