Sriracha sauce (Huy Fong Foods) facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Tương Ớt Sriracha
A bottle of Huy Fong sriracha sauce (with trademarked rooster logo pixelated)
Heat	Medium
Scoville scale	1,000-2,500 SHU

Huy Fong's sriracha sauce is a very popular chili sauce. It's often just called sriracha or rooster sauce because of the rooster picture on its label. This sauce is made by a company called Huy Fong Foods in California, USA. It was created in 1980 by David Tran, who came to the US from Vietnam. Many cookbooks even feature recipes that use this sauce as a main ingredient.

You can easily spot this sauce by its bright red color. It comes in a clear plastic bottle with a green cap. The label has text in Vietnamese, English, Chinese, and Spanish. The famous rooster logo is also on the bottle. David Tran was born in 1945, which was the Year of the Rooster in the Chinese zodiac. The green cap and the rooster logo are special trademarks. However, the word "sriracha" itself is a general term, so other companies can use it.

How Sriracha Sauce is Made

The recipe for Huy Fong's sriracha sauce has stayed mostly the same since 1983. The bottle lists the ingredients: chili, sugar, salt, garlic, distilled vinegar, potassium sorbate, sodium bisulfite, and xanthan gum.

Ingredients and Production

Huy Fong Foods makes its chili sauces from fresh, red jalapeño chili peppers. They do not add any water or artificial colors to the sauce. Instead of fresh garlic, they use Garlic powder. The company used to use serrano chilis, but they were hard to harvest.

To make sure the sauce is always spicy, the company only produces a certain amount each month. This way, they can use only peppers from trusted farms. The sauce is also certified as kosher, which means it follows special food rules.

The journey of sriracha sauce starts with growing the chilis. Until 2016, the chilis were grown on Underwood Ranch. Now, David Tran works with farms that cover about 1,700 acres (688 hectares) in California. The chili peppers are planted in March.

Tran uses special machines that help reduce waste. These machines mix things like rocks, twigs, and unusable chilis back into the soil. The chilis are picked from mid-July through October. Then, they are driven from the farm to the Huy Fong Foods factory in Irwindale, California.

Because no food coloring is added, the color of each bottle of sauce can be a little different. At the start of the harvest season, the chilis are greener. This makes the sauce a more muted red color. Later in the season, the chilis are brighter red, and so is the sauce.

After the chilis are harvested, they are washed and crushed. Then, they are mixed with the other ingredients. These include sugar, salt, garlic, vinegar, and preservatives like potassium sorbate and sodium bisulfite. Xanthan gum is also added. The finished sauce is put into large drums. From there, it is poured into bottles. All the drums and bottles are made right at the factory. This helps reduce waste and pollution.

Nutritional Information

Here's what you get in one teaspoon (1 tsp) of Huy Fong's sriracha sauce:

• Calories: 5
• Calories from fat: 0
• Total fat: 0g
• Sodium: 75 mg
• Total carbohydrate: 1g
• Sugars: 1g
• Protein: 0g
• Vitamin A: 0%
• Vitamin C: 0%
• Calcium: 0%
• Iron: 0%

How Spicy is Sriracha?

Huy Fong Foods' sriracha sauce has a heat rating of 1,000–2,500 units on the Scoville scale. This scale measures how spicy a chili pepper is. This means sriracha is spicier than a banana pepper but less spicy than a jalapeño pepper.

History of Huy Fong Sriracha

Huy Fong Foods sriracha sauce

David Tran started making chili sauces in 1975 in his home country, Vietnam. His brother grew chili peppers on a farm near Saigon. In 1978, the new government in Vietnam began to treat ethnic Chinese people in south Vietnam harshly. Tran and about three thousand other people left on a ship called the Huey Fong. They sailed to Hong Kong. After a month, they were allowed to leave the ship on January 19, 1979.

Tran was later given permission to live in the United States. He started Huy Fong Foods in 1980. He named his company after the ship that brought him to safety from Vietnam. At first, the sauce was sold to Asian restaurants near his base in Chinatown, Los Angeles. But people loved it, and sales grew steadily by word of mouth.

In December 2009, Bon Appétit magazine called sriracha sauce the "Ingredient of the Year" for 2010.

In 2012, Huy Fong Foods sold over 20 million bottles of sriracha sauce. The company says that people want more sauce than they can make. Because of this, the company does not advertise. Advertising would make the demand even higher. Huy Fong has increased how much sauce they make since 2013.

Sriracha sauce has become very popular. It's now used in many different foods, like burgers, sushi, snacks, candy, and even drinks. David Tran decided not to trademark the word "sriracha." This is because it's hard to trademark a name that comes from a real place. This choice has allowed other companies to make their own versions of sriracha. Big companies like Heinz, Starbucks, Frito-Lay, Applebee's, P.F. Chang's, Pizza Hut, Subway, and Jack in the Box use the name without needing a special license. In 2016, Lexus even worked with Huy Fong Foods to create a special "Sriracha IS" sports car for promotion.

Sriracha Documentary Film

Filmmaker Griffin Hammond made a 33-minute movie about sriracha sauce. He got money for the film through a Kickstarter campaign. He raised $21,009, which was more than four times his goal. The movie was released online on December 11, 2013. It was also shown at film festivals.