Sriracha sauce is a concoction of vinegar, red chillies, garlic, sugar, and spices. This hot sauce has found its way into an array of cuisines ranging from roadside stalls to Michelin star restaurants. Today we are going to take a look at some interesting facts about this hot sauce which can send your taste buds into a frenzy.
11 Fun Facts about Sriracha
- The sauce derives its name from the Si Racha village in Thailand where a woman Thanom Chakkapak invented it in 1930. The lady wished to curate a sauce that would go with the seafood from her home village.
- However, the taste of this sauce is considerably different from the one popular amongst Americans which is thicker and spicier. While the original version uses Thai peppers, the American variant uses red jalapenos cultivated near Sriracha’s U.S. factory.
- Huy Fong Foods manufactures both the sauce and the bottles it comes in. They produce 18000 bottles of the sauce hourly. David Tran, the owner of Huy Fong Foods once personally delivered each bottle in Chinatown out of his van after spoon-filling the bottles with the sauce.
- Huy Fong Foods also manufactures chili garlic sauce and sambal oelek sauce using the same chilies with each having different means of preparation.
- Sauce lovers around the globe panicked as a dispute arose between Huy Fong Foods, the owner of Sriracha, and Irwindale, Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles. A lawsuit was filed by the city which threatened to declare the Sriracha factory hazardous to public health due to odor issues. However, the lawsuit was dismissed subsequently after the odor concerns were addressed by the company.
- Sriracha sauce has gained popularity as ‘rooster sauce’ given the picture of a rooster on the bottle. The Chinese zodiac sign of David Tran, the producer of American Sriracha sauce is the rooster. Tran asked a street artist to come up with the bottle logo. However, Tran doesn’t have any contact with the artist and doesn’t even remember his name.
- David Tran is a Vietnam immigrant who started the business of packing and distributing Sriracha sauce in a downtown Los Angeles warehouse around 1980. He named the company Huy Fong after the ship that carried Tran to the United States.
- The market is filled with a variety of Sriracha sauces. Tabasco, a Louisiana-based Hot Sauce company introduced its variant termed Thai Chili sauce in May. The company sells its 15-ounce bottle through its online store and at its Avery Island, La., factory.
- Huy Fong sells around 20 million bottles of Sriracha sauce yearly. Though they do not market or advertise their sauce, the yearly revenue undergoes a 20% increase consistently. It seems that the sauce aficionados spread the word about the delicious sauce which finds new takers with every passing day.
- Contrary to popular belief, Sriracha sauce is significantly less hot compared to jalapeno. The Scoville scale sets the benchmark of spicy where Sriracha scored just 2200 points. Most of the spiciness of the red jalapeno peppers is lost during the processing making Sriracha similar to Anaheim and Fresno peppers in terms of its spiciness.
- Sriracha sauce was given the green signal by NASA as the perfect spicy condiment for space which could bring back tongues deadened by space altitudes to their original form.
Conclusion
Every product in the world has a background story to tell and the Sriracha hot sauce is no different. The fun and informative facts listed above can come in handy while engaging in a trivia night at a sports bar. Often people have doubts regarding does sriracha go bad over time. Capsaicin present in chilli peppers alongside garlic, vinegar, and salt help in enhancing the shelf life of Sriracha sauce by acting as strong preservatives. This is why you might not find an expiration date in most of the sauce bottles.
