20 Hot Sauces around the world

The core of any hot sauce is a selection of chilies (packed with a range of levels of the chemical, capsaicin, which is what makes for spicy hotness), which are liquefied, pureed and combined with vinegar, fat, water or other liquid. After that, you can go wild.

Aji (South America)

You can find variations on this sauce made of aji amarillo peppers throughout South America. It is a lovely pale green, thanks to fresh green peppers and coriander and lime juice.

Acuka (Turkey)

Also known as muhammara (in its Syrian variant), this sauce features Aleppo peppers, as well as some wonderfully exotic ingredients, including pomegranate molasses, breadcrumbs and walnuts, giving it a strong texture, as well as flavour.

Awaze (Ethiopia)

On the list of things impossible to get in Slovenia, this is right up there. It’s a shame, because it sounds amazing. Berbere spice mix (covered in a previous article) plus Tej (a sweet honey wine popular in Eritrea and Ethiopia) plus garlic and black pepper. The berbere spice mix has red chilli, but not a lot, so this is less about heat and more about deep flavour. I suppose you could swap in something for the missing Tej (Slovene medica, honey schnapps, perhaps) – or you could start your own Tej vineyard in the Julian Alps.

Bhut Jolokia (India)

The legendary ‘Ghost Pepper’, one of the hottest chilies in the world, stars in this blazing hot sauce. Try a little dab of this pungent sauce to relish its smoky smoothness and raw heat. At a lip-scorching 75000 scoville heat units, it’s over 30 times hotter than most chilli sauces. Its intense pungency and heat make it perfect for a Hot Sauce Challenge!

Sprig Bhut Jolokia hot sauce is balanced well with vinegar, salt, sugar and other spices and condiments. This brings down the level of hotness of the Bhut Jolokia chilli to 75000 scoville units. It lends heat to your food without compromising on the flavour that makes you sit up and take notice.

Buffalo Sauce (Buffalo, New York, USA)

Scotch Bonnet Pepper Sauce (Jamaica): the most prevalent pepper in the Caribbean is best-known for this Jamaican staple, found on plastic tabletops all over the island and a key component of any jerk dishes.

Chilli Oil (Asian)

The simplest of all hot sauces, which requires no preparation to speak of and is found throughout Asia, is simply heated vegetable oil into which dried red chilies are poured. As the mixture cools, the spice infuses the oil, and the oil can then be used for cooking or for dressing, with or without the chilies themselves.
Cholula (Mexico)

It’s made with water, peppers, salt, vinegar, garlic powder, spices, and xanthan gum. Six varieties of Cholula are widely marketed in North America, including Original, Chipotle, Chili Garlic, Chili Lime, Green Pepper, and Sweet Habanero.

Original Cholula sauce blends piquin peppers, arbol peppers and spices.

Gochujang (Korea)

For a good three centuries, this has been Korea’s preferred spicy injection, with a flavour drawn from fermented soy beans and sticky rice (it tastes better than it sounds), and is best known as the topping for bibimbap.

Harissa (North Africa)

The ubiquitous red sauce across North Africa and now in the Levant, draws its distinctive flavour from cumin and coriander.
Jamaican Jerk (Jamaica)

Africans who were brought there. To this end, Jamaican jerk sauce uses many quintessential West African ingredients, like Scotch bonnet peppers, thyme, and ginger. It’s a complexly flavored sauce, perfect for marinating and grilling meats, like the famed jerk chicken.

Nam Phrik (Malaysia)

Consists of bird’s eye chilly, shrimp or fish paste, garlic and shallots, which form the core of this and many hot sauces from Southeast-Asia, particularly northern Thailand and Malaysia. There are of course many variants and brands

Molho de Pimenta (Brazil)

Tomato, chilli and some vinegar, plus anything else you can imagine, can be found throughout South and Central America. The Brazilian version uses malagueta peppers, and is a popular mix-in for fejoida black bean stew.

Miso (Japan)

The Japanese Miso Fermented Sauce represents a combination of fermented chilies and red fava bean miso. With a strong umami flavor, the sauce offers a galaxy of tastes as it is hot, salty, sour, and earthy at the same time. Alongside bird's eye chilies and red fava bean miso, the sauce is made with carrots, daikon, ginger, garlic, mirin, champagne, and rice wine vinegar. It goes well with any Japanese dish but is also very good with simple rice. This is truly a unique sauce that combines tastes belonging to very different culinary traditions.

Sambal (Indonesia)

Originates from Indonesia, where the sauce ("sambal") is made from crushing fresh red hot chiles into a paste using a mortar and pestle (an "ulek"). In essence, it's nothing more, or nothing less, often serving as a foundation to build other sauces.

Shito (Ghana)

The fishy variant on hot sauces, it is made with fish oil, ground dried fish or shrimp, ginger and chilies (usually cayenne). It features in kenkey, a dumpling steamed in a corn husk or banana leaf), and best compliments fish dishes.

Zhug (Yemen): invented in Yemen, but now best-known as a feature of Israeli food, this bright green hot sauce includes loads of coriander to set off fresh green chillies.
Shatta (Egypt)

Red chilli, olive oil, parsley and tomato. It’s basically spicy tomato sauce, not far off from Italian arrabiata, most famously topping Egypt’s national dish, koshari.

Sriracha (Thailand)

Jalapenos, garlic and a bit of sugar. That’s all it takes to make the world’s most beloved hot sauce. While the original hails from Thailand, the famous one, with the rooster on the label is the fruit of a single immigrant who worked his way up from a one-man operation to a multi-million-dollar international monster business that has become a big part of pop culture.

Tabasco (Louisiana, USA)

To learn that Tabasco sauce is 95% water might make you think that it is weak. No way, Jose. This style of sauce has a relatively small percentage of chili peppers, so as not to blow our ears off. It is firmly in the liquid category, whereas most of the others on this list are more of a paste. But this is probably America’s most ubiquitous hot sauce. And if you think it’s simple, think again – there’s a three-year aging process to bring out just the right flavours.

Ti-Malice (Haiti)

Shallots, tomato, garlic and scotch bonnets. It’s named after a Haitian folklore Loki-like trickster who defended his food against hungry friends by smothering it in hot sauce.

Peri Peri (Portugal)

A true hybrid of South American, Portuguese and African cultures (with ingredients brought by the colonial Portuguese originally from South America to the African coast), this can be a dry rub or a sauce, with serrano chilies, vinegar and lemon.