How Tabasco Accidentally On Purpose Became the World's Hot Sauce

The pepper fields on Avery Island are thick with Louisiana’s notorious humidity, even at 6 in the morning on a Thursday in August. The sun is barely over the trees, and armed with bug spray and sunscreen, I’m walking among the rows of vividly colored peppers in different stages of ripeness — first pale yellow, then orange, then fiery red — as I pluck one of these prized chiles from a bush and prepare for a jolt. Though most Americans have tried a dash or two of Tabasco, they’ve likely never eaten one of the chiles fresh, and that's exactly what I'm about to do. Every Tabasco pepper technically starts right here, from seeds grown on Avery Island, though many are now farmed in Africa and South America in an effort to diversify and protect against crop collapse. They're highly perishable, and must be pulverized into mash and stored in enormous plastic bladders within hours of being picked to preserve freshness. And from the first sniff of that little capsicum, I can tell that it's going to be much hotter than what actually ends up inside the bottle. Perhaps sensing my hesitation to just haul off and take a bite, Christian Brown, Tabasco’s sales operations manager who's showing us around the fields, suggests I roll the tiny pepper between my fingers, gently dislodging the seeds and flavor from the interior membrane, then flip it over and dot a drop of its bright-red essence on the back of my hand. It’s weird to be slamming pure capsaicin this early in the day, but the flavor jolts me out of my sweaty drowsiness. It’s floral and bright, and at as high as 50,000 Scoville units per pepper, spicy as hell. My tongue tingles, but I’m in much better shape than the Canadian fitness influencer who joined me in the fields, his mouth ablaze and guts churning after several video takes. It’s immediately clear how these chiles built an empire. With a little salt, time, and vinegar, that big floral heat is transformed into something special. Immediately recognizable in its cologne-inspired bottle, Tabasco sauce is so commonplace that its physical presence almost fades into the background. I’ve seen it in Riviera Maya restaurants, served alongside freshly made salsas, and protruding from an ice bed holding locally-caught oysters in Belfast. It even thrives in the ranch-obsessed Midwest, which often looked down upon heat until the 1980s. I can’t speak for you, but Tabasco has been a ubiquitous presence throughout my entire life. I am sure there was a bottle of the sauce in the refrigerator of the Northwest Louisiana home that I came home from the hospital to, and there was certainly one on the kitchen table I ate at every night growing up. Even as someone who was born “north of I-10,” the interstate that spiritually separates North and South Louisiana, Tabasco’s always been there. I can immediately clock its spicy, snappy flavor in a dish, bringing brightness and spice in equal measure to my gumbo or fried chicken. If I am eating it, I probably think it is better with a little bit of Tabasco on it. And the company insists that it is the most widely distributed hot sauce in the world, giving it a culinary influence that few other condiments can dream of. So when Tabasco asked if I’d like to come to Avery Island, about 130 miles west of New Orleans, to see how the secret sauce is made — literally — I jumped at the chance to better understand this most pervasive of ingredients. And to see how we got to a place where a Louisiana pepper sauce became a global phenomenon.Tabasco can be a touchy topic among hot sauce enthusiasts, because McIlhenny did not invent hot sauces made with tabasco (lowercase) peppers. With its trees draped in Spanish moss, its delicious accents, and yes, that notorious humidity, there is no place on earth like South Louisiana, what locals might call “Acadiana” or “Cajun country.” Avery Island — yes, the one from that Neutral Milk Hotel album — sits near the bottom of the state, a short drive away from New Iberia or Lafayette. It isn’t actually an island, though, but a natural salt dome that has served as the base of operations for the family-owned McIlhenny Company, which produces Tabasco’s classic red pepper sauce, as well as a slew of other spicy condiments added throughout the years, since the mid-1800s. Tabasco peppers in the fields on Avery Island, from ripest to least ripe. Amy McCarthy/RavenousThere are scant details about the man who started it all, though it seems that’s how the company likes it. In trying to hunt down details, it became clear that obfuscation has been highly effective in marketing Tabasco. But everyone can agree that the complicated story begins with Edmund McIlhenny, who invented Tabasco sauce in the mid-1800s. A Maryland native who found his way to Louisiana, it is said that McIlhenny did not even mention his invention in his own obituary, and did not believe it to be an important part of his legacy. The company is pretty thin on publicly sharing information about his life, and few photos of him exist, but its official story is that Edmund wanted his sauce to bring the spicy, flavorful foods that he ate in Louisiana to the entire Reconstruction South, which he said ate a “bland and monotonous diet.” His son, Edmund Avery “E.A.” McIlhenny, would bring the company to even greater heights; He is credited both with major innovations in the production process and with introducing the characteristic green top that still crowns every one of the one-million-plus bottles of Tabasco that are produced on Avery Island every day. Whatever their intentions, Edmund McIlhenny and E.A. transformed peppers, vinegar, and salt into a global icon, that much we know for sure. But there’s a whole lot more in there that feels incredibly murky, with competing accounts offered by McIlhenny family members, historians, and hot sauce fans. Tabasco can be a touchy topic among hot sauce enthusiasts, because McIlhenny did not invent hot sauces made with tabasco (lowercase) peppers. They’re native to the Tabasco, a southeast region of Mexico along the Gulf of Mexico, and part of the genus capsicum frutescens, similar to a Thai or bird’s eye chile used to make piri-piri chicken so fiery. There were plenty of people making vinegar-and-pepper sauces decades before McIlhenny tried his own hand at the craft, but McIlhenny’s experimentation came at a time when many moneyed and educated white men were becoming enticed by the bold chiles, spices, and other flavors they encountered in their colonialist adventures across Asia and Africa. Most agree McIlhenny was given the pepper seeds by a friend in New Orleans and began developing the recipe for his sauce sometime in the 1860s. The company’s official origin story insists that he came up with the recipe on his own, while others believe that it was given to McIlhenny by a plantation owner named Maunsel White, who also made his own “tobasco” pepper sauce in the 1840s and 1850s. Regardless of who came up with the recipe first, McIlhenny's Tabasco sauce was in production by 1868, and it wasn’t long before it began to spread far beyond the great state of Louisiana. In 1872, the company hired a traveling salesman named John C. Henshaw to travel up and down the east coast touting Tabasco. Henshaw, a former Union soldier who served as the company’s first sales rep, peddled the sauce to restaurants and oyster houses in an effort to drum up demand. “This sauce is the special want of the poorer and more numerous classes, and a thorough canvassing of the oyster houses, saloons, restaurants, etc. by the party who has taken hold of it will, it is hoped, create such a general demand as to compel the grocers to apply for it,” Henshaw wrote to McIlhenny in 1872. A ledger book uncovered by Tabasco historian and archivist Shane K. Bernard indicates that the company first began shipping the sauce overseas two years later, with exports to France and England. A ledger showing Tabasco's first exports to Europe in 1872. Courtesy TABASCO Brand.Today, Tabasco sauce is made in largely the same way as it was back then, with the help of a number of mechanical innovations that make the process a bit easier. Peppers are crushed and mixed with salt to make a “mash,” which is aged in oak barrels repurposed from the production of whiskey. The sauce remains in those barrels for up to three years, concentrating in flavor as it ages. When the mash goes into the barrel, it’s bright and viciously spicy, taking over the front of my nose as I take a tiny bite. It mellows, darkens, and concentrates as it ages, the fermentation bringing distinct complexity and funk. From there, it’s mixed with vinegar and blended for two weeks to create the glossy, emulsified sauce before being decanted into bottles, packaged into boxes, and shipped all over the world. There’s just something fun about believing that the guy who invented your favorite hot sauce was kind of a wacky tinkerer.More than 150 years after it was invented on Avery Island, the mystery in Tabasco’s origin story feels intentional. It lends a unique mythology to the sauce, one that most bottled condiments just don’t have, and there’s just something fun about believing that the guy who invented your favorite hot sauce was kind of a wacky tinkerer, a man so invested in making your food taste better that he spent years fiddling with peppers and vinegar to create something that improves your dinner. There's romance in that, and romance sells! But for decades, the hard work that went into building Tabasco into a global brand was downplayed, either by the company itself or in the press. When Barnard started at the company in 1993, he says that there were outright falsehoods in the company’s history that had made their way to print, though he wasn’t clear about who was responsible for those misconceptions. It was claimed that the sauce was such a success that it had to open up a London office to handle European trade by 1872. But as the ledgers he uncovered showed,