El Yucateco Salsa Picante

In the early days, Amelia and I used to have what we called "Margarita Meetings" at a local Mexican restaurant across the border in New Hampshire. While not much work ended up getting done, I did fall in love with this one unique hot sauce from Mexico that they carried. Fast forward 5 years to when a friend and I traveled throughout the Yucatan, and lo and behold there was my 'ol hot sauce love—El Yucateco! And it was everywhere—from little food shops on the corner to very traditional cafes. As soon as I got back to Vermont I contacted the US distributor and it's been a staple on our hot sauce shelf ever since. Their secret? Habanero peppers grown in that region are some the sweetest in world. Plus the secret blend of spices and garlic make this one of the more tasty hot sauces we've tried.

Green: The green habanero (it's actually a kind of crazy shade of blue-green) is extremely hot—just a few drops will do you at 8,910 scoville units (a scoville unit is a measurement of heat—anything over 5,000 is pretty darn hot.).

Red: At 5,790 SU, the El Yucateco's Red Habanero is a little more forgiving, but still quite hot.

Size: 4oz

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Scoville Heat Scale

In 1912 Wilbur Scoville, while working for Park-Davis, developed a method to measure the heat of a chili pepper. In his original test, Wilbur blended pure ground chilies with a sugar water solution and a panel of testers then sipped the concoctions, in increasingly diluted concentrations, until they reached the point at which the liquid no longer burned the mouth. A number was then assigned to each chili based on how much it needed to be diluted before you could taste no heat. Pretty cool.

While there is much debate in the scientific community over whether Mr. Scoville is accurate, the scale remains, for the most part, though it has been tinkered with by the scientific community over the years. Here is scale as it appears now.

0-100 SU: sweet bell peppers
500-1,000 SU: includes New Mexican peppers; pepperocinis.
1,000-2,500 SU: includes Ancho, Passilla, Pablano, Cascabel and Cherry Peppers.
2,500-5,000 SU: includes Jalapeno, Mirasol, Chipotle.
5,000-20,000 SU: includes Serrano.
15,000-30,000 SU: includes de Arbol.
30,000-50,000 SU: includes Cayenne, Piquin, Aji, Tabasco peppers.
80,000-300,000 SU: includes Habanero, Scotch Bonnet, Thai peppers.

What makes peppers hot is Capsaicin oils, which are not soluble in water. For putting out the fire, try tequila, milk, yogurt or ice cream!