HOT SALSA : Tabasco: It Was Hot When Hot Wasn’t Cool

For its first 100 years or so, Tabasco sauce was the hottest thing most Americans ever tasted. The McIlhenny Co.’s big job was to get people over their fear of hotness. Official Tabasco recipes have always counseled subtlety and moderation.

But over the last 25 years, Americans have been eating hotter and hotter. First, Mexican food entered the mainstream. Then jalapeno-eating contests, Thai food and chili cook-offs showed up. In the late ‘80, a fringe of chile-loons began questing for ever hotter flavors, and slowly the public taste shifted with them.

As a result, the jalapeno no longer symbolized the ultimate threshold of pain; in some restaurants it became a pepper for stuffing, as if it were a poblano or a bell pepper. The super-hot Caribbean chiles known as habaneros or Scotch bonnets were now the names to conjure with. And today, in the ‘90s, you can get fresh habaneros right at the supermarket.

“Definitely, there’s an explosion in pepper use,” says McIlhenny Co. vice president Paul McIlhenny. “Look at all the books, posters, magazines, boutiques. It’s helpful to us. If people lose their fear of peppers, it helps us.”

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Tabasco sales are booming--Southern California is now Tabasco’s biggest market; Northern California is No.3--but in the current chile madness it wouldn’t do to rest on one’s laurels. Last year the McIlhenny Co. bought its long-time Louisiana rival Trappey’s and reworked a couple of Trappey’s products under the Tabasco name.

One is a jalapeno sauce (well balanced, good jalapeno flavor, more aromatic but less hot than Tabasco), the other is called New Orleans Style Steak Sauce (like A-1 sauce, but spicier, sweeter and with a pronounced orange-peel aroma). A Caribbean-Style Steak Sauce is being developed along the lines of a Jamaican jerk sauce, complete with mango, tamarind and allspice.

But McIlhenny’s is in an odd position. Despite all those years as the proverbial extreme of hotness, it is a supermarket brand and has to bear in mind the taste of the general public, not just that of the chile-loons.

For instance: To give the new steak sauce the genuine Tabasco stamp, some pureed pulp of barrel-aged Tabasco chiles is added. However, peppers naturally vary a little in hotness. In a sauce used by the drop, such as Tabasco, a little variation doesn’t matter much, but the first batch of the steak sauce turned out hotter than Paul McIlhenny figured the supermarkets could stand. “I didn’t want to throw away 400 cases of steak sauce,” he says genially, “so I just slapped an ‘extra spicy’ label on it. You can get it only on the Island (Avery Island, La., site of the Tabasco Co.), or by writing to me.”

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The original Tabasco sauce is basically unchanged, though it is no longer made with peppers grown on Avery Island. “In the late ‘60s, when I started with the company,” says McIlhenny, “we still farmed our own peppers. But then the local Louisiana labor market dried up. Instead of importing migrant workers, we tried farming in Mexico, but we had problems of plant disease and flooding down there. Now we raise 90% of our peppers in Central America.”

These days the ground fresh peppers come up to Louisiana in stainless-steel tanker trucks, each holding 100 barrels. The mash is still aged on Avery Island, spending three years in oak barrels. McIlhenny inspects every barrel before it’s mixed with vinegar to make the sauce. “We skim off a couple of inches of oxidized mash,” he says, “then take a fluorescent lamp and look at the color, smell the aroma.” He adds, with the faintest of winks, “We don’t taste it.”

Inevitably, in today’s hot chile climate, the McIlhenny Co. is working on a habanero sauce. “It won’t just be a straight chile and vinegar sauce like Tabasco,” says Paul McIlhenny. “It will have tomato and so on in it. The reason habanero sauces always have carrots and mangoes and stuff in them is to dilute the habaneros, they’re so hot.” Recognizing the different sauce-using tendencies of habanero fans, however, McIlhenny will not market it in the narrow-necked Tabasco bottle (which is actually a 19th-Century perfume bottle designed for dispensing drop by drop).

“But we do not plan a hotter version of Tabasco,” he says. “We consider that sacrosanct.”