Garden & Gun: a hot sauce tour of Houston

after cutting down on salt, i'm a recent hot sauce convert.

--
Texas Heat: A Hot Sauce Tour


Peden + Munk
BY ROBB WALSH - TEXAS - APRIL/MAY 2013
A spicy tour of Houston restaurants proves hot sauce in the South has never been, well, hotter

>See photos from this story

Southerners take hot sauce for granted—until one day we find ourselves in front of a plate of fried eggs in an airport coffee shop in the Maple Syrup Belt with no Tabasco, Texas Pete, or picante sauce to be had. And then we act like junkies going cold turkey.

Don’t be alarmed, but some scientists believe that hot sauce is actually addictive—something to do with the endorphin rush you get when you eat hot peppers. After you get accustomed to the natural painkillers coursing through your brain, eating just isn’t as enjoyable without the burn and buzz.

Thankfully, Southerners have more choices than ever these days to satisfy our hot sauce cravings. Salsa overtook ketchup as the country’s condiment of choice some twenty years ago, and since then the shelves at the supermarket have expanded to include a United Nations of piquant enhancements. I don’t know about you, but my refrigerator door is loaded to capacity with salsa, sambal, Sriracha, gochujang, piri-piri sauce. When we say hot sauce, we aren’t just talking about Tabasco anymore.

There’s no better place to explore this brave new world than in my hometown of Houston. Known for having one of the most multicultural dining scenes in the South, it also has one of the spiciest. A hot sauce tour of H-town restaurants turns up sauces that go back centuries, inter-national flavors, as well as brand-new multiethnic mashups. And thanks to the seemingly endless sprawl of diverse neighborhoods, chileheads never run out of hot new places to discover.

http://gardenandgun.com/article/tex...=socialmedia&utm_campaign=october2016_twitter