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Photo: Andrewdouglasdawson/Getty Images
The hot sauce you choose to complete your pizza is, I’d argue, even more important than where you got the pizza or even what toppings you select. Adding your hot sauce is the last step before you take that first perfect bite, an intimate moment you share with your meal, something I like to call “A Prelude to an Om-Nom-Nom.”
So how do you select your sauce? Yes, it’s a personal decision based largely on taste, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be informed.
I’m going to start with spoilers: Frank’s Red Hot is going to be my ultimate recommendation here, because that’s the flavor I prefer. But while I explain how I arrived at that decision, I hope to share enough about how hot sauce works to let you make your own decision.
To start with, let’s look at what pizza is. Its core ingredients are bread, tomato sauce, and cheese -- before you get to the toppings, you have a lot of fat, very little acid, and a good amount of sugar in both the bread and the tomato.
That means with your hot sauce, you’re going be looking for some acid and tanginess to compliment the heat, which means vinegar-based sauces like Tabasco, Crystal’s, or the aforementioned Frank’s (if you’re wondering if the hot sauce you’re buying is vinegar-based, just look at the ingredients. If there’s more vinegar than water, then there’s your answer). Vinegar is, of course, very acidic, and these hot sauces tend to have a bright flavor that provides the perfect counterpoint to pizza’s heaviness.
Next, you look at the chillis involved. Frank’s uses the capsicum pepper cayenne, an extremely flavorful pepper, while Tabasco uses, unsurprisingly, the tabasco pepper -- also a kind of capsicum pepper that has more of a clean, less flavorful heat. Other peppers you’ll see are habanero (significantly hotter than any capsicum), ghost peppers (also terrifyingly hot) and anaheims. While most of us think of jalapenos as a really hot pepper, any of the breeds I just mentioned are 10 to 100 times hotter than the hottest jalapeno you’ll ever find -- which is why you normally find them in hot sauces, and not as toppings.
Back to my preference: Since I usually order my pizza with jalapenos as a topping, I don’t need to add a lot of heat with my hot sauce, so tabasco is sort of an overkill for my palate. What I’m looking for in pizza is a lot of acidic flavor, and a tangy sensation -- which makes Frank’s the “what’s missing” in every piece of pizza I’ve eaten in the past, oh, let’s say 10 years.
While most people will tell you there’s no “wrong way” to put hot sauce on pizza, there very much is, and three of them involve using Cholula, Tapatio, or Sriracha. Don’t get me wrong, those are all great sauces, but Cholula and Tapatio are both so full-bodied, and with so much emphasis on the pepper, that their flavor profiles get lost among the cheese and meats. Sriracha, on the other hand, is what’s called a “fermented” hot sauce, and while it has a tanginess to it, it’s less the kind of tanginess you want in pizza and more the kind of tanginess you want in a stir fry or noodles.
Again: This is only my preference, and since flavor is subjective, it’s very possible you disagree. I just want you to realize that if you do disagree it's because you’re wrong.
Hearst Newspapers participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.
Joshua Sargent is an editor for Hearst Newspapers. Email him at josh.sargent@hearst.com.
"Sauce" - Google News
April 04, 2020 at 03:53AM
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What’s the best hot sauce for pizza? - SFGate
"Sauce" - Google News
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