The 10 Best Hot Sauces

Here is my list of the 10 best hot sauces! If you have seen ANY of my content on social media you know I absolutely LOVE spicy food (you’ll also notice that if you try to prepare some of my recipes). As a matter of fact, I don’t know anybody that has a higher spice tolerance than me! This has led me to try a wide variety of hot sauces, not only seeking extreme spice levels but also trying to find hot sauces that taste amazing and pair well with certain dishes.

Here I am going to share my current top 10 hot sauces organized by spice level, so that no matter what you current spice tolerance is you can hopefully find a hot sauce you really enjoy!

MILD HOT SAUCES

There are a bunch of companies that sell hot sauces at major grocery stores like Walmart. These are typically on the mild side but can be a great introduction to hot sauces and have awesome flavour profiles that pair really well with certain foods! Some of the common companies you will find are Valentina, El Yucateco, La Anita, Tapatio, and Cholula. Each of these companies bring something unique to the table, but if you want the most SIMPLE hot sauce, I would go for my honourable mention Valentina Extra Hot. This hot sauce is not very spicy at all but has a very generic hot sauce flavour so it’s still a hot sauces that I always have at home. As far as the BEST generic hot sauce company goes, for me this would absolutely be El Yucateco. Pretty much any of the El Yucateco hot sauces could be up here but I chose the XXXtra hot because I like how it’s spiced and think it can be used with a lot of dishes without having the generic hot sauce flavor. On niche end of hot sauces, I would recommend Mark’s Barbados Style Hot Sauce! This sauce is a great hot sauce that’s nice and fruity which I absolutely love! It’s also teetering on the medium side of things so if you are someone who has stuck to mild hot sauces and wants something a little spicier this is the perfect hot sauce for you!

MEDIUM HOT SAUCES

Now we’re getting to some hot sauces that are a little spicier. I should probably make it clear at this point that I would say this is medium for people who are used to eating moderately spicy food or enjoy hot sauce… if you have never eaten spicy foods these sauces could be really spicy for you.

In any case let me tell you about these three amazing hot sauces! Remember earlier when I said El Yucateco is the best grocery store hot sauce company? Well Grace is the only other one that I think gives them a run for their money. Grace’s Scotch Bonnet sauce is AWESOME and for me it is the perfect hot sauce that you should ditch your Tabasco for and add to your eggs and other breakfast foods for a delicious punch to start your day.

Side note: Scotch bonnets are PERFECT for sweet or fruity hot sauces so if you’re looking for a sweet/fruity hot sauce getting a scotch bonnet based one is a great option.

Next up is Arizona Pepper’s Organic Harvest Foods: Habanero Pepper Sauce which really surprised me. I came across this hot sauce while shopping at Winners and honestly didn’t really expect much but decided to pick it up anyways. Needless to say, I was shocked when I tried it, it’s honestly probably the hot sauce that exceeded my expectations the most. I would describe it as having a pure pepper flavour with no bitterness and mild acidity.

This is surprisingly kind of rare in my experience trying hot sauces and while it may sound simple its something I go to so often because you can simply put it on anything for an amazing pepper flavour.

My last pick is a hot sauce that those who watch Hot Ones on YouTube may be familiar with, it’s called Zombie Apocalypse. This hot sauce is definitely teetering on the spicy side of medium so proceed with caution, but man is it good! The flavour is complex, being both fruity and garlicy, which I think is really unique and sounds a bit strange but it works so well here! This is the hot sauce to reach for if you have food that isn’t heavily seasoned and want to add not just heat but another dimension of flavour.

SPICY HOT SAUCES

Now we are getting into the spice range that I like! If you don’t eat lots of spicy food you should definitely be careful when trying these because we are getting into the seriously spicy range! The first of these sauces is definitely the least spicy but still packs a nice punch, it is the Pepper Palace Tres Diablos.

Pepper Palace is a hot sauce store chain that you can find all across America, with a few locations in Canada as well which is awesome! I went to one of their locations in Boston and the workers were so nice and I got to try a bunch of different hot sauces. I ended up settling on Tres Diablos although there were lots of great options.

The reason is that similar to the Arizona Pepper’s Organic Harvest Foods: Habanero Pepper Sauce, Tres Diablos is the other sauce on this list that is able to provide a really pure pepper flavour (we’ll see one more like this too)! This is great because, again, I find you can really add this hot sauce to anything… it’s just simplicity done right.

If Tres Diablos wasn’t an intimidating enough name, the next hot sauce up is called Death Punch by Kenny Lamoureux. The name isn’t deceptive either, as this is where things really start ramping up and the spiciness really reaches another level, in fact this particular sauce is “boosted” with pure capsaicin (essentially pure spice).

While this may sound scary TRUST ME once you try this hot sauce you will be adding more through your tears. This is THE fruity hot sauce that I reach for, packing huge mango and papaya flavour. If you want to talk about a match made in heaven, try this hot sauce the next time you have shrimp tacos… you’ll thank me later.

Finally, rounding out the spicy hot sauces we have King’s Death, coming straight from a shop in Montreal where I am currently located! I discovered this hot sauce because I was looking for a hot sauce shop here in Montreal and found out about Boucherie Beau-Bien. This butcher shop doubles as a hot sauce store, and this is where you can find a young man (whose name I somehow forget even though I have talked to him multiple times now) who sells these hot sauces and makes his own! In fact, King’s Death is developed by him right here in Montreal!

Now I know I am not ordering this list from favourite to least favourite… and maybe this is a bit of local Montreal favouritism… but I must say King’s Death is possibly my FAVOURITE hot sauce I have tried to date. It’s spicy, smoky, and has an amazing black garlic flavour, truly PERFECT for beef dishes and barbecue. If you live in Montreal and there is one hot sauce you NEED to try it’s this one so go checkout Boucherie Beau-Bien.

I’d also like to point out here that he didn’t ask me to promote his hot sauce and the store didn’t ask me to promote their business, they don’t even know that I am writing this, this hot sauce is just really that good and I will promote small businesses any chance I get!

EXTRA SPICY HOT SAUCES

Now we are getting to stomach wrenching spice levels. For this first hot sauce, I am not sure if you can buy it in Canada but I got it in Budapest and oh man was it a shockingly good purchase, it’s called Outlaw Cocktail (translated) by Rosza Manufaktura. The reason I say shocking is because I got this hot sauce at a gift shop in the Central Market!

I asked the lady for her spiciest hot sauce and she gave me this, but naturally because it came from a gift shop I was skeptical. After I bought it one of my friends that also loves spicy food tried it and was like “wow… this is really spicy”. At first I didn’t believe them but then I tried it and I was like “WOW… this IS really spicy” but it was spicy in the best possible way! This is that final hot sauce I mentioned earlier when talking about Tres Diablos that again has that pure pepper flavour.

What I find particularly impressive about this hot sauce is that you get none of the bitterness that is common to extremely spicy hot sauces (like Dave’s Beyond Insanity… don’t buy it, it tastes terrible… Dave’s Ghost Pepper tastes good though and is almost as spicy so go for that if you’re getting a Dave’s hot sauce). So if you are reading this from Europe definitely try to snag this hot sauce if you are a chili head, I can’t wait to go back to Europe and particularly Budapest myself to try some more of their local hot sauces!

Finally, rounding out the top 10 we have thee famous, or perhaps infamous to some, Mad Dog 357. If you have seen any episodes from the first two seasons of Hot Ones you know this hot sauce as one of the top 2 spiciest hot sauces at that time. Let me assure you, it lives up to the extraordinary spice levels. In fact, remember when I mentioned stomach churning before?

Well, my friend actually got me this for Christmas and ended up trying it with me… they really enjoy spicy food and happened to put a bit too much on their food when trying it so the hot sauce ended up coming right back up. It was a pretty terrible sight so if you buy this hot sauce DO NOT put a lot at once, like it’s a really bad idea.

Now of course, I put just as much as they did and was completely fine because I am the queen of spicy food and was pleasantly surprised by the flavour as well! Although a bit of bitterness creeps in it actually has a really interesting flavour, perhaps owing to the evaporated cane juice. I would say it almost tastes like warm spices, which sounds weird but it works really well when paired with the right food.

That is all for my main list but I have one more special mention that I HAD to tell you guys about. When I was in Madrid I came across such an amazing market called Yatai Market that had SUCH good food. Seriously guys this food was unbelievable, if you are anywhere remotely close to Madrid you need to check it out. The first night I went (because of course I had to come back again) I got Korean food and it was great!

But… it wasn’t quite as spicy as I liked so I asked the people working if they had hot sauce and they said no not really but if you want something REALLY spicy we can give you some of this stuff.

So they gave me a tiny amount of this mystery sauce and I went back to my table and it knocked my socks off! It was really surprising how spicy it was but the flavour complimented the food so well! I did some research later and found out that it’s Korean capsaicin (pure spice) sauce which is so cool! It has a slightly bitter and slightly sweet flavour that I think it goes perfectly with the Samyang 2x Spicy Noodles (yes I am that insane) or other noodle dishes.

I didn’t include it because it’s not a conventional hot sauce but if you want to try something different that is about as spicy as the spiciest hot sauces around I would highly recommend it!

That’s all for this post, I hope you guys enjoyed it!

Stay tuned for an updated list in the near future though because I just brought some amazing hot sauces back from NYC that I think will crack my top 10 after I’m done trying them all.

Also make sure to checkout my other blog posts for more delicious content!