The Twin Cities' best "under-the-radar" hot sauces: You recommended them; we tried them
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
The Twin Cities team tasting hot sauces. For you. For journalism. Photo: Torey Van Oot/Axios
We put out the call for Axios readers' favorite under-the-radar hot sauces in the Twin Cities and, lordy, did you deliver.
Torey, Nick and I got together at Malcolm Yards in Minneapolis to taste test a few of your picks. We bought some tortilla chips and a palate cleanser: some pickled ginger. (Uffda, we needed it.)
How it works: We picked a handful of the sauces to rate using our "five-flame" rating system.
- The rating is our review of the sauce's spice level, not quality. The more flames, the hotter it is.
The taste test entries
Saint City Chili, Gigi's Ghost: 🔥🔥🔥🔥
- "It starts out kind of sweet, and then it brings the heat into that sweet," our poet, Nick, says of the pineapple-based sauce.
Mr. Fuzz's, Nuclear Nectar: 🔥
- "Vegetal," was Torey's description for it. (I had to look that word up in the dictionary.) If you're not into super-spicy sauces, this might be your best bet: fresh, green, with a pickled quality.
Miss Jenny's Hot Sauce, 7-Pot Scorn: 🔥🔥🔥🔥
- Your brain sees its thickness and thinks pizza sauce. Then, the engines kick in.
Sembo's Sauce, Mushroom Umami: 🔥🔥
- "A little funky," says Torey, who suggests it on veggie tacos. I think this one brings out the best in a fried egg.
Lovejoy's, Burn Yo Face: 🔥🔥🔥
- Like bloody mary mix in a sauce — which makes sense, because Lovejoy's makes that, too. Smoky black-pepper taste. Late-arriving kick.
Nuanced Hot Sauce, The Original: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
- "It has balance with some brightness to it," Torey says, with a good "habanero-ey-ness." Definitely a word.
Firebox Barbecue, Mama's Heat: 🔥🔥🔥🔥
- We closed our taste test with Vang's pepper paste. Like me, Nick and Torey found it hot — and complex. "It's almost herbal," Torey says. (Vang called that "minty-ness.")
The fine print: We couldn't test all of the two dozen different Twin Cities sauces readers recommended, so we picked those seven based mainly on availability and access.
You also recommended…
- Cry Baby Craig's Gourmet Hot Sauce. (Nine different readers sent us this one, but I didn't put it in the taste test because — as Brian W. put it — I'm "not sure [it] counts as under the radar anymore.")
- Off Type Sauce & Spice
- Mean Green Hot Sauce
- Lost Capital Foods
- Lucky's Sauces (Cherry Bomb, says Jennifer H.)
- Afric Sauce
- K-Mama Sauce
- Black Roots Sauces & Seasonings (Tequila Sunrise, says Elizabeth P.)
- Facepunch Foods
Restaurant recommendations
We also heard from people sharing their favorite restaurants with hot condiments.
- Dahlia, which reader Megan M. recommends for its Thai chili hot sauce.
- Hai Hai, for its box set of coconut chili crisps and Hola Arepa's nut-and-seed salsa macha.
- Harry Singh's Original Caribbean Restaurant, for its proprietary sauce. "The challenge is getting a bottle," writes Mitch V.
- Union Hmong Kitchen, for its Tiger Bite and Mama Vang's sauces.
- Modern Times Cafe, which sells bottles of its hot sauce.
- La Cucaracha Restaurante, which J.M. recommended for its "VERY tasty red table sauce to go with their chips."
- Colossal Cafe, for its habanero-pineapple hot sauce.
- Victor's 1959 Cafe, for what Antonio B. called its "incredibly versatile" tamarillo hot sauce.