READ NEXT: Best tonic water The best hot sauce you can buy in 2023 1. James Cochran’s Scotch Bonnet Jam: Best all-rounder hot sauce for any meal On the other side, unfermented hot sauces forgo fermentation and are usually cooked out instead. These are more common in supermarkets, as they are faster and easier to make, while often having higher Scoville levels since the chillies are not broken down. Hot sauces have never been more popular, with supermarket shelves filled with the best hot sauce from around the world. There are even TV series such as Hot Ones dedicated to sampling some of the hottest sauces around. There are many varieties of hot sauce, with different countries tending to centre in on particular spices and techniques. However, the one thing that ties them together is the use of chillies and peppers. While great variety exists, the broad church of hot sauce can still be split into two main branches: fermented and unfermented. Fermented hot sauces, as the name implies, are created by fermenting hot chillies and other ingredients in a container. Hot sauce ingredients get decomposed by healthy bacteria and enzymes – often by submerging the mixture in salt brine or by letting healthy bacteria break down other ingredients over time. This produces a more tangy, sour-tasting hot sauce and can help to bring out the flavours of other ingredients. They usually taste a little fresher too and have the added health benefit of containing probiotic bacteria (like yoghurt or kombucha), because of the fermentation process. This is thought to help the body break down food and better absorb nutrients.

Below, we’ve gathered together our favourite sauces for all occasions, in a range of spicy styles. There are sauces for everyday dips and others for specific meals; some are sweet sensations while others are deep, tangy delights. All the way from Thailand’s renowned sriracha sauce to culinary creations closer to home, we’ve tried to cover the whole gambit of worldly flavours, so scroll on down or stop by our guide if you’re a hot sauce newbie. As well as killing pain, endorphins are also known to contribute feelings of pleasure. So, in the same way some people love the pain of long-distance running, many people can grow to associate the peppery pain of capsaicin with a pleasant, endorphin-based rush. This all depends on your tolerance to spice, which you can slowly build up with more exposure to capsaicin-filled foods and products like hot sauce. How are spiciness levels measured? Some of the best hot sauces blend both spiciness with rich flavour, which is certainly no mean heat. This versatility can be a real boon and save you forking out on one sauce for marinade and another for daily dipping. From there, testing hot sauces goes down just as you might expect: getting that spicy goodness into our mouths. We would taste each sauce individually before then trying it together with its intended use case. If no particular foodstuff was suggested, then we would opt for a meat or vegan meat substitute as the default tasting dish to avoid clouding and potentially mischaracterising a sauce’s flavour with the ingredients and spices of a regular meal.

LOVERS OF THE HEAT

Levels of heat are measured as Scoville Heat Units (SHU). This is the level of capsaicin in a product, where a higher Scoville rating means a greater level of spiciness. Some companies may disclose the Scoville scale of its product, especially if it’s above average in heat, though many don’t. Instead, you might see a brand using its own scale, which includes words such as “moderate”, “hot” or “mild” for the sake of convenience. How hot can it get? Common sauces start at around 400, with the absolute maximum we would recommend – for your internals’ sake – being around 9 million. However, regular hot sauces will stay well below this mark, usually registering in the thousands and hundreds of thousands, rather than millions. For example, a classic hot sauce from Tabasco typically comes in at around 2,500 to 5,000 on the Scoville scale. What types of hot sauce are there?

READ NEXT: Enjoy the refreshing taste of our favourite ciders How to choose the best hot sauce for you Why do people like spicy food? Simply put, it’s endorphins. We can’t actually taste spice as a flavour, but we do feel pain from it through receptors in our mouths – the ones that are normally responsible for sensing heat. The majority of spicy peppers, such as jalapenos and naga chillies, contain the chemical capsaicin which, when consumed, combines with these pain receptors to cause a reaction not unlike scalding your mouth with a hot drink. Scientists believe that, just like when the body is hurting on other occasions, this chilli pain causes endorphins to be released – the body’s natural pain-killing compounds.