Hot Sauce

Let's talk about hot sauce, and why it burns the way it burns.

Heat in a hot sauce comes from capsaicin, and capsaicin does not dissolve in water. That's the whole mechanism you need to remember in the kitchen. It dissolves in fat and in alcohol. So when your mouth is on fire and you reach for a glass of water, you are just moving the capsaicin around, not washing it away. Milk or yogurt eases the burn far better — a slow, cooling relief you can feel spreading across your tongue.

Choose hot sauce by smell first. A good one smells like the pepper itself, bright and sharp, not just like vinegar and salt. Taste it too — a sauce worth keeping tastes round and alive on the tongue, not flat or tired, whatever color it happens to be.

Some people say the seeds are where the heat lives. No! The heat concentrates in the white pith inside the pepper; the seeds just sit near it and pick some up. Believing the seed myth makes cooks scrape out seeds and leave the pith behind, and then they wonder why the dish is still fierce.