Tabasco

Reaches most chili pots as Tabasco sauce: the peppers fermented with salt, then cut with vinegar.

Scoville heat units

30,000 to 50,000 SHU, per Fiery Foods (DeWitt). The same scale puts Tabasco sauce at 5,000 to 15,000. Log scale against the hottest chile in this guide.

The tabasco is a small, upright, juicy red chile of the species Capsicum frutescens, and the pepper in Tabasco sauce. The sauce has been made on Avery Island, Louisiana, since the late 1860s. Most ICS Traditional Red world champions have kept a bottle by the pot.

Paul Bosland of NMSU names tabasco as the most common cultivar of Capsicum frutescens and its red fruit as the ingredient in Tabasco sauce. Fiery Foods' glossary traces the pods brought to Louisiana to a progenitor called amash, and lists Brazil’s malagueta as a relative.

Edmund McIlhenny, a New Orleans banker who had married into the Avery family, grew his first pepper crop on Avery Island in 1868, from seed he believed came from a soldier returned from Mexico, according to the company historian Shane K. Bernard. He sold 658 bottles in 1869 and patented his process in 1870. Maunsel White of New Orleans had sold a tabasco pepper sauce since at least 1864. Bernard finds no contemporary evidence for the story that McIlhenny took White’s peppers or recipe.

The ripe peppers are crushed into a mash with salt from the island’s mine and aged, then mixed with white wine vinegar and strained of skins and seeds. The company says the mash is now aged up to three years in white oak barrels.

Tabasco

Sources