Spice up your life with hot sauces from around the world

Shining a spotlight on hot sauces from around the world.

Adam Liaw's chilli sauce. Source: Adam Liaw

— The Cook Up with Adam Liaw's sixth season airs weeknights on SBS Food(Ch.33) at 7.00pm. All episodes available anytime on SBS On Demand. —

Everyone's handle on hot sauce is different. You might be the type to crave chilli at every meal, or the type to dab some mild hot sauce on your Tex Mex from time to time. Whichever category you fit into, there are a lot of you out there. According to research published in 2020, close to 70% of Australian adults ate hot sauce during the year before.

Red chillies. Source: Getty Images

So what is hot sauce?

Hot sauce is a sauce whose defining feature is chilli. It's something that you can splash on food to amp up the heat and flavour. 

The spiciness level of spicy food can be measured with the Scoville scale, which takes into account the capsaicin content (basically the thing that makes anything spicy). Scoville heat units (SHU) are the number of times the capsaicin content must be diluted before the spiciness can't be tasted. The spiciness of crowd favourite Sriracha sauce, which commonly consists of red jalapeno peppers, is considered to be on the lower end of the scale and ranges from 1,000 to 2,500 SHU.

Adam Liaw, the host of SBS Food's The Cook Up, suggests including rock sugar in hot sauce to balance out the flavour. "You can add it to sweeten the sauce," he says.

Hot sauce across the world

Richard Nelson, owner of Australian hot sauce brand, Melbourne Hot Sauce, tells SBS Food, "When we started Melbourne Hot Sauce 10 years ago, there wasn't really much of an Australian hot sauce scene.

"We loosely based our original creations around my favourite regions and chef experience in certain cuisines, being Louisiana, Texas, Mexico and the Caribbean, all of which have a ripe history of unique chilli-infused cuisine and hot sauce usage."

When we started Melbourne Hot Sauce 10 years ago, there wasn't really much of an Australian hot sauce scene.

The US is responsible for hot sauces like Frank's RedHot, whose buffalo hot sauce works beautifully on chicken wings, and the vinegary likes of Tabasco as well as many Cajun-inspired hot sauces. While we can thank Mexico for salsa picante, otherwise known as picante hot sauces (including the hot and zesty Valentina), the wildly popular El Yucateco range is also synonymous with Mexican cuisine.

For those in the market for raging hot Scotch Bonnets and habaneros, Caribbean-style hot sauces, which are a staple condiment in many Caribbean countries, including the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Trinidad, add heat and sweetness.

Peri-peri, which we know to go hand-in-hand with Portuguese chicken, originates from Mozambique, and many of the myriad sambals and oils we enjoy stem from Asian countries including China, Vietnam and Indonesia.