Professional hot sauce maker Smokin’ Ed Currie, the founder and president of PuckerButt Pepper Company, returns to Epicurious to taste 10 of the absolute hottest hot sauces on the market. From Ed's own Reaper Squeezin's and Extra Mean Green to Mikey V's E.A.F.O. and the Hot Ones The Last Dab Xperience, see what Ed has to say about ten of the hottest of the hot. 🔥
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00:00I'm Smokin' Ed Curry.
00:01I'm a professional hot sauce maker and pepper breeder,
00:04and we're here today to try 10 sauces
00:08that will melt your face off.
00:10But we're looking for flavor and balance, not just heat.
00:14Pull up a stool, put on your big curl pants,
00:17and buckle up for this wild ride.
00:19♪♪
00:24Spicy Shark, Hamagata Six Fin Series.
00:28Looking at the label, a hammerhead shark
00:31on top of a gator with blood and fire coming out of it.
00:36That pretty much tells me they think this is very, very hot.
00:39So the very first ingredient is scorpion peppers,
00:42which give you a really good burn,
00:43but they're not that hot.
00:45Pineapple juice, banana, tomato, almond flour.
00:48That's a unique thickener.
00:50There's a lot of things going on in here.
00:53With all sauce that is small batch,
00:55I always recommend shaking.
00:57The ingredients are gonna separate
00:59as it sits on the shelf at the store.
01:02When you open the bottle,
01:04immediately you get aroma of that spice mixture.
01:08And the molasses, I think, is coming through
01:10because you can smell the sweetness.
01:13It's dripping pretty fast,
01:15but it's leaving a lot of chunks.
01:17That means they're using a lot more pepper
01:20and a lot more of, like, say, the fruits
01:23than they are vinegar and a thickener.
01:28The start of this is all spices.
01:32What's happened in my throat,
01:34that pepper has now overcome the sweetness,
01:37and now I'm getting that pepper flavor
01:40starting down here in my throat, and it's moving up.
01:43I don't really taste the pineapple juice or the banana.
01:47Made me think of ice cream or something,
01:49and it made me happy and joyous inside,
01:51thinking, oh, this is gonna be really good.
01:53But I was disappointed that those two flavors
01:55didn't really come out.
01:57His old hottest sauce had a six on it.
01:59This is supposed to be hotter.
02:01But as far as flavor, this is an absolute winner.
02:06Pugger Butt Reaper Squeezins.
02:09It's one of my favorite sauces.
02:11We decided to make it a little hotter.
02:13If you look at the label,
02:14Reaper peppers, vinegar, and Reaper powder.
02:17Three ingredients in it,
02:19two of which are different forms of the same thing.
02:21Tabasco, those kind of sauces, 1% pepper, 99% vinegar.
02:27This is like 90% pepper, 10% vinegar.
02:31We had a complaint that it was too thick
02:34to come out of the bottle.
02:35So we put down a little more vinegar
02:38just to make it a little less viscous.
02:41Unlike other sauces that might separate,
02:44it's leaving nice, thick line all the way behind it
02:48instead of separate chunks.
02:50So you know this is gonna be a consistent hot sauce.
02:53Frankly, one of the hottest sauces out there.
02:56For me, it is one of the tastiest sauces.
03:01Makes my nose run right away.
03:03I'm kind of tingly.
03:05All you have is pepper flavor.
03:06You can't even taste the vinegar.
03:08A lot of that pepper powder has been reconstituted
03:11with the vinegar.
03:12So it adds to the thickness.
03:14The heat on the Reaper when you eat raw peppers
03:16comes on immediately.
03:18It's like a punch in the face.
03:19When you cook them down, you get the chance
03:21to taste the flavor of the pepper
03:23before the heat builds up.
03:25This is more like a volcano coming up and then erupting
03:29as opposed to putting a charcoal briquette in your mouth.
03:33Pepper Palace, the end flat line.
03:36I wanna tell you the difference
03:37between a natural pepper sauce
03:40and a pepper sauce people think is really hot.
03:42We've got our good friends at Pepper Palace.
03:45Their product called Flatline.
03:47It comes in this little bottle.
03:48When you go there, if you wanna try it,
03:50you gotta sign a waiver.
03:52It says Carolina Reapers, Oleo Resin Capsicum.
03:56Oleo Resin Capsicum means it is a chemical.
04:00Can either be extracted from actual peppers,
04:04which is a very expensive process,
04:06or it can be a chemical.
04:08I don't wanna get any of this on my hands.
04:10This is essentially a chemical oil
04:13with a little pepper added to it.
04:16Some people like doing this.
04:18Most people use it for a dare,
04:20and I don't judge anybody who makes it.
04:22What I do know is that I do not want to eat it
04:26because I don't know what's really in there,
04:29and it's kind of adhering to the plastic.
04:32What is that?
04:34It follows none of the rules
04:36that I would personally use to put in my mouth.
04:40Tommy, I'm not gonna eat this.
04:42Mikey V's, E-A-F-O.
04:45Can Mikey V make a super hot sauce with flavor and heat?
04:49Yes, he can.
04:50I have known Mikey.
04:51I love Mikey.
04:52This, I think he put out as a Chili Head collector item.
04:56It's got a lot of really nice ingredients in it.
04:59Carolina Reaper peppers, fresh peppers,
05:01fresh garlic, black Hawaiian sea salt,
05:04ghost pepper powder.
05:06I don't like salt.
05:07It overpowers the sweetness of peppers.
05:10It gives it more of almost a charcoal tone.
05:13Those fresh Carolina Reapers that he used
05:16are gonna have a different burn
05:17than the ghost pepper powder,
05:19which is gonna give you an all-around,
05:21for the Chili Head, an all-around burn.
05:23For the normal person, it's just gonna hurt.
05:27It came out in full drops instead of pouring.
05:30Kind of viscous.
05:31It's moving a little quick,
05:33but as you can see,
05:35it's leaving just chunks of Reaper pepper.
05:38You can also see the specks of powder in there.
05:41But I'm interested to see what the lime juice
05:44and the sea salt do to accelerate the heat.
05:47If you want something to be hotter
05:49and you're not using a lot of pepper,
05:51you add salt or citric acid.
05:56Heat-wise, right now I'm not getting any heat.
05:59I know he uses a lot of pepper,
06:01but when water is the fifth ingredient,
06:04by taking the water out and replacing that volume
06:07with either the lime juice or the vinegar,
06:10you would've had a much more pepper-forward experience.
06:13But this 11 out of 10 claim, this ain't happening.
06:17And I've waited for it to build.
06:20Buckerbutt Pepper Company Unique Garlic Pepper X Edition.
06:24With this Unique Garlic, I wanted to do different versions.
06:28I wanted to make it a little hotter,
06:30even though it was hot, hot, hot to begin with.
06:33So this one we made with Pepper X.
06:35And it's got five flames,
06:36which most of my sauces do,
06:38because I'm an idiot.
06:40It's got chili pepper, which are Pepper X,
06:42vinegar, onion powder, garlic powder.
06:45The powders that are in it absorb the liquid in the vinegar,
06:50so it adds to the thickness.
06:52This isn't going anywhere.
06:54It's a pretty thick sauce,
06:55which lets you know that it's full of ingredients,
06:58not full of liquid.
07:00It's a Pepper X sauce.
07:01I'm not gonna do a full spoon.
07:06So the very first thing you get,
07:09the very first hint you get
07:10is the very little bit of black pepper that's in there.
07:12Black pepper tends to come on first
07:15when you have garlic and onion.
07:17The garlic is just overpowering.
07:18The onion's just for sweetness.
07:20But that Pepper X builds up.
07:23It is a very, very hot sauce.
07:26This is not for the faint of heart.
07:28I'm feeling a fire in my chest
07:30that makes me wanna go get that donut
07:32that I stashed a little while ago.
07:35Scale of one to 10 for normal people,
07:37this is probably a seven or an eight.
07:39It's kind of like a plug-and-play hot sauce
07:41that'll work well with any super hot pepper.
07:44It went from the Reaper to Pepper X.
07:47It'll probably go to Pepper Y and Pepper Z.
07:49I just think it's one of the best sauces I've ever made.
07:53Jersey Bonfire, the original black garlic.
07:56For any of you out there
07:58who don't know what black garlic is,
07:59it became one of those things
08:01that everybody was like, ooh, black garlic.
08:03And it's got a unique flavor.
08:05It's kind of unani.
08:06And there's a lot of horrible black garlic sauces out there.
08:10Unless you're mixing it in with other things,
08:12you would never eat on its own.
08:14But some people, like the good chefs at Jersey Bonfire,
08:18know how to mix it in.
08:20It's got seven pot primo peppers and vinegar,
08:22water, Jersey fresh canned tomatoes,
08:25sugar, garlic, raw garlic.
08:28Just excites the palate.
08:30Whereas black garlic, to me, is a deeper base flavor.
08:35The one thing is they use xanthan gum to thicken it up.
08:39And why sauce companies use it
08:42is because their ingredients that they're using
08:45make for a very thin sauce.
08:47And thin sauces aren't appealing to the customer.
08:51If you look at Tabasco, it just looks like red water.
08:54Cholula has a little bit more consistency,
08:58even though they've got the same percentage of pepper in them.
09:01And that's the xanthan gum.
09:03The Tabasco just goes all over the plate.
09:06The Cholula stays in place.
09:08And that's really all people use it for.
09:10Even though it has the xanthan gum in it,
09:13it's pouring down the plate a little faster than I expected.
09:17But what I like is it's leaving a lot of chunks
09:20of what looks like pepper and garlic.
09:23I thought I'd smell more garlic to begin with,
09:26but it just kind of smells salty.
09:29And strangely enough, when I tasted it,
09:31the salt did not come through.
09:33I'm getting more of a spicy tomato vibe,
09:35almost an Italian vibe with it.
09:37I'm very pleasantly surprised that it did not taste salty.
09:41Pucker Butt Pepper Company Gator Sauce.
09:44I named this after my best buddy, Brett Rogers,
09:48who likes to call himself Gator.
09:49Very first hot sauce ever made with PepperX in it.
09:53It's got PepperX mash and Reaper powder.
09:56You're just gonna get a very simple taste, pepper.
09:59But this is a brutal sauce.
10:01Nothing on this label warns you what's gonna happen
10:04when you try this hot sauce.
10:06It's very, very thick.
10:08The only thing that slid down is a big chunk of pepper
10:12that came out of it.
10:13There's really not much liquid in it.
10:16It's a really delicious-tasting pepper.
10:18But the brutal heat that comes on
10:20very slowly after you eat it,
10:22it's almost not worth doing without food.
10:25But they don't like me here.
10:27They just wanna hurt me.
10:31Wow.
10:35That sweet taste from the pepper is just, it's beautiful.
10:40It tastes great.
10:42But the heat that comes on,
10:43it feels like someone just opened my chest,
10:47put flames inside, and then sewed me back up.
10:50And those flames are trying to come up and get out.
10:53But this pepper is very unique and very versatile.
10:56It has a great flavor.
10:58This would go awesome on some chocolate ice cream.
11:01It's just brutally hot.
11:02On a scale of one to 10,
11:04I'd say this is an eight or a nine.
11:06High River Hot Sauces, peppers up.
11:10It's from my good friend, Steve Seabury at High River.
11:13All of his sauces have combinations of different fruits
11:16that people don't normally use in a sauce.
11:19It says right on the front,
11:20a blackberry and blueberry Apollo pepper sauce,
11:24which is gonna be maybe the next Guinness World Record.
11:28When you look at the ingredients,
11:31Apollo pepper mash, Apollo pepper distillate,
11:34blackberries, blueberries, yuzu juice.
11:37Steve's known for making some really complex sauces
11:40taste really good.
11:41For the amount of liquid in there, surprisingly thick sauce.
11:45You can see chunks of the fruit, chunks of the pepper.
11:49And even though it's going to surpass PepperX,
11:51I went for a big spoonful
11:53because I really want to see how that fruit comes out.
11:56Mm.
11:58The flavor that hit me first
12:00kind of tasted like one of those natural fruit popsicles.
12:05You didn't even taste the pepper.
12:06I don't know if that's the yuzu
12:09actually overpowering the pepper
12:11because of all the citric in it.
12:13It just tasted delicious.
12:15It's getting very hot very quickly.
12:18Not a comfortable heat either.
12:20It went from zero to 10 in about 1.2 seconds,
12:25but I still have that aroma of berry in my nose.
12:28This is an ice cream sauce.
12:30This is a chocolate cake sauce.
12:33This is probably the second hottest
12:35or the third hottest sauce I've tried,
12:37but it's the only one I want to go back to
12:39out of all of them.
12:42That really is a 10 out of 10 on the heat.
12:45But I'd also give this one a 10 out of 10 on flavor.
12:48Wow, you guys should try that.
12:50That's a really good sauce.
12:51Mindset's good.
12:52I know you have to work.
12:53I get to go home.
12:55Good job.
13:00Did you get all that fruity and citrus?
13:02I think so.
13:03You notice how Tommy is turning red
13:05and I did not turn red.
13:07Professional, amateur.
13:10Alchemy Peppers Watermelon Ghost Hop Sauce.
13:14Extreme heat it says on the front.
13:17The ingredients, watermelon puree, ghost pepper,
13:20peach puree, mango puree, citric acid and hops.
13:24I like watermelon puree to eat and drink,
13:27but in a hot sauce, it might be really good.
13:30The citric acid's in there just to pH the sauce.
13:33When we're making hot sauce, we want it to be shelf-stable,
13:36so you have to get things below a pH of 4.3.
13:39Most hot sauces are well below that
13:41because of the large amount of vinegar that you're using.
13:44This one even has a Scoville scale on it,
13:47which says 600,000 to 750,000 SHU.
13:51It's really not a valuable measurement.
13:55Can we measure the Scoville heat unit
13:58that the sauce actually is?
14:00Yes.
14:01Does it accurately describe what's going to happen
14:04when you eat it?
14:05No.
14:06Peppers in it might be 600,000 to 750,000,
14:10but this sauce is definitely not that hot.
14:12There's a dilution factor that comes along
14:15with adding any ingredient to that.
14:18Also, when you cook it, it breaks down the capsinoids.
14:22When I open it, what I'm smelling,
14:23just like with one of the other sauces,
14:25I'm smelling salt mesh.
14:27Even though it's got some body,
14:28it's going down that pretty quick.
14:30I can't imagine watermelon puree
14:33is too thick of an ingredient.
14:36In smelling this, honestly,
14:37even though the label makes it sound good,
14:40the odor is not very good,
14:42and I hope I'm pleasantly surprised when I eat it.
14:48You taste watermelon right up front,
14:50but then when you eat salt,
14:52it's right on the front of your tongue.
14:54After that salt attack,
14:56I did get that, like, the peach mango flavor.
15:00The hops flavor didn't come on
15:02until way after I got the sweetness.
15:05It's kind of like an afterthought to it.
15:07It tastes good, and it's just not really hot.
15:11Puckerbuck Pepper Company, Extra Mean Green.
15:15Mean Green was one of the original sauces I made.
15:17We made it extra hot by only picking green pepper-ax,
15:21green boolas, and green reapers.
15:23It doesn't matter what the color of the pepper is.
15:26It matters what the insides look like,
15:29and even though these are not quite ripe,
15:31those glands that are inside are producing.
15:34It's got hot green pepper mash,
15:37distilled vinegar, onions, and garlic.
15:40The mash is very thick,
15:41and you can actually see giant chunks
15:43of the garlic still in there.
15:44We don't puree this one.
15:46We just mix it with the blender.
15:50Ooh, on this one, the predominant flavor is pepper-ax.
15:53The onion comes on second,
15:55and then you get a little bit of the garlic after.
15:58Probably one of the most unique sauces
16:01out there on the market for super hot sauces
16:04because it tastes delicious,
16:06and you really don't get the heat for about,
16:09oh, I would say 20 to 30 seconds into it
16:13because of the large amount of onion
16:15and garlic that's in there.
16:17It is versatile, green, and it is mean.
16:23Heatonist Hot One's Last Dab Experience.
16:27When I submitted pepper-ax for the Guinness World Record,
16:30we decided to make a hot sauce for everybody
16:33to give them the pepper-ax experience.
16:36If you look at the ingredients,
16:37pepper-ax, vinegar, powder, distilling.
16:41The smell of the pepper is overwhelming.
16:45Even the part that was liquidy that popped out on the front
16:48is not going down the plate.
16:51I made this sauce.
16:52I know what to expect, and right now I'm not happy.
16:55It is not the sauce that you just try,
16:57oh, I want to try some hot sauce.
16:59I do do that, but I only do that
17:01when people are filming in my farm
17:03and I want to hurt them and shut them up
17:04and send them on their way.
17:09People always ask, what else is in there?
17:11There's nothing, there is no,
17:16there is nothing else in there.
17:18It's just straight pepper,
17:19and that pepper has such a unique flavor
17:22and taste that people think it has different things in it,
17:26like spices and vegetables, but it doesn't.
17:29That's the pepper.
17:30A very little bit goes a long way.
17:33For like 12 wings at home,
17:34we'll take maybe a half a teaspoon
17:37and a half a stick of butter,
17:38and we'll make a coating out of that.
17:41And it's still extremely hot.
17:45Bang for the buck, this is the one.
17:47This is the hottest thing out there.
17:49If I'm going to go with uniqueness and flavor,
17:53I got to go with the peppers up.
17:54I wasn't expecting all that very yummy, citrusy experience.
17:59For versatility, this Mikey V's garlic.
18:02For the everyday person,
18:04that's probably the one that you can use the most.
18:07These three are the best of the ones I tried today.
18:10But man, eating that straight is not a good thing.
18:13I got the hiccups, I just burped real nasty,
18:15and my tum-tum hurts.
18:18It's one thing to make hot sauce for heat's sake,
18:21but it's another thing to make one
18:23that's well-balanced, flavorful,
18:25and still brings on the heat.
18:27This is Smokin' Edd Curry here at Epicurious.
18:30I look forward to seeing you again.
18:32Have a great day.