Using Hot Sauce Bottles In Your Cooking

I've always found hot pepper sauce to be a delicious condiment, but I've never thought about cooking with it.  I keep a few hot sauce bottles by my table at all times, of course, and add them to all manner of foods.  I'll pour the spicy sauce over chili, steak, French fries, and other sorts of foods, but only after they are done cooking.  It is only recently that my friend taught me what you can do with hot sauce bottle.

I always thought that the hot sauce bottle was the very last thing that you add, but I found out that this isn't always the case.  Sometimes, if you add a hot bottled sauce early on in the food preparation, it has more time to mellow and soak in.  With many hot sauces, it does not make much of a difference, but with some of them it is absolutely crucial.  Too late, and you will have a vinegary taste that doesn't penetrate.  Too early, however, and the sauce will lose all of its flavor.  Of course, some hot sauces taste best when they are done at the last minute, but many times putting in the hot peppers at the right moment is the key to good cooking.

I also didn't know the difference between one hot sauce bottle and the next.  I thought the key was to find a hot sauce bottle that you liked and use it on everything.  I figured that spicy was spicy just like salty was salty.  It turns out that this is not the case at all.

For example, Indian cuisine is some of the spiciest on earth, but you can't just use any normal hot sauce bottle on it.  If you don't prepare the right mixture of chili paste, it will never taste right.  I tried cooking Indian food with Tabasco sauce once as an experiment.  It was absolutely awful!  I will never try that again.

Of course, the best foods are the ones where you can use any hot sauce bottle that you want.  If you're making chili, for example, you have plenty of room to experiment.  Just about any spice will give chili its own unique flavor, so the choice is yours to make.  This is why I like to experiment with cooking rather than trying to make one particular ethnic food.  It is so much more fun to cook when you do not have to follow a recipe!