Tapatío Hot Sauce (3-pack)

I like hot things, but I want to still be able to taste my food through the heat. Tapatío is my favorite hot sauce because of how it balances flavor with heat. When my wife and I go out for Mexican, I usually ask for a side of the house hot sauce as well as a bottle of Tapatío. About half of the time, I actually prefer the Tapatío.

Apart from putting it on Mexican food, burgers, and pizza, I like to add a little to my clam chowder.

I discovered Tapatío when a fellow Marine received a bottle in a care package while we were deployed to Iraq. Lunch was usually an MRE. Some were better than others, however there weren’t any entrees that couldn’t be saved with the addition of some good hot sauce. Some MREs contained miniature plastic bottles (about an inch high) of Tabasco sauce in the plastic-wrapped cutlerty kit, but oddly enough they had usually already evaporated.

Everyone perceives spicy flavors differently, but I would describe the taste as moderately spicy with very little vinegar taste. Most “boutique” hot sauces I’ve tried use far almost always go overboard on the heat and also add too much vinegar, which in my opinion, results in a bitter finished product with flavor that you can’t actually taste.

If you live in a medium-size town to a large city, you shouldn’t have any problem finding it somewhere, but you can save quite a bit buying the multi-packs on Amazon. If you really go through it, you can order a 12-pack of the larger 10-oz. bottles (these are double the normal size that are included in the 3-pack or when you buy individual bottles) and pay about $2 a bottle. Hot sauce keeps far longer than its printed expiration date.