Writer's Grove

HAWT SAWCE!

If you don’t particularly enjoy spicy food, you may be unaware that there are vast swaths of people out there with fierce brand loyalty to their hot sauce. The partisanship can be as fierce as that between Republican and Democrat, Ford and Chevy, or even Yankees and Red Sox. I am not such a one. I rather subscribe to the ancient tautology, “Tasty shit is tasty shit,” which I think was first uttered by Geoffrey Chaucer, but spelled like “Taestye shyte is taestye shyte.”

So. Normally I’m a Tabasco kind of guy. I’ve tried Cholula and Arizona hot sauce, which are popular out here, but they just don’t do it for me the way Tabasco does. When I mentioned on Twitter that I used Tabasco on my eggs (because everybody CARES, I’m sure), one of my peeps in Louisiana, Kayla, suggested that I should try Louisiana Hot Sauce. I had never tried it or even seen it, so she kindly sent me some, and I promised to have a taste test on my blog. Here it is.

First, here’s a picture of breakfast before the hot sauce has been applied. I am showing this to make you jealous that I don’t cook for you.

I was a bad boy and drank most of my coffee before I snapped the picture, but I wanted to be fully awake before the taste test. This will prevent me from having a career in menu photography, alas! OK, so here’s the photo with the omelet halved and the hot sauce applied:

You will notice that the bottom half of the omelet looks mildly irritated while the top half looks afflicted by an angry pox of some kind. The Louisiana Hot Sauce is thicker and redder, no doubt. But will this rich consistency translate to a richer taste?

A side note: There are two ways to pronounce Louisiana. There’s the five-syllable way, which is “loo EE zee ANN uh,” and then there’s the four-syllable way, which is “LOO zee ANN uh.” I prefer the four-syllable pronunciation, because that’s the way Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown said it, and he was a badass who had his mojo workin’. Plus, I want there to be voodoo. Four-syllable Loozyanna has all kinds of voodoo going on. Five-syllable Louisiana is too prissy for things like voodoo.

I tried the Loozyanna Hot Sauce first, because I already know what Tabasco is like. Here is what I discovered: it’s not as hot as Tabasco. Its flavor is subtler, too, so you might need to pour a bit more on and make the angry pox rage like Zack de la Rocha does against the machine. It’s good!! I’m definitely going to experiment with it more, and I’m glad Kayla sent me some. Thanks, Kayla! Methinks I still prefer Tabasco, however, both in heat and taste. It gets my mojo workin’. Listen to Gatemouth tell you about it:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxUEMRqZ7uw[/youtube]