I’ve Tried Dozens of Hot Sauces But This One Almost Killed Me

I have sipped a lot of hot sauce straight off a spoon over the course of my career as a food writer and professional taste tester. I’ve been to hot sauce expos where they have tables of milk because the spice is that intense. I’ve seen people throw up in the middle of the floor at said expos because of the spice levels. I’ve tasted and ranked Mexican hot sauces, Louisiana hot sauces, and more—but only one hot sauce has made me sweat and nearly hallucinate. 

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Here’s the biggest surprise: The hot sauce in question wasn’t some specialty hot sauce made with an obscure new chile pepper, bottled in a grenade. It doesn’t have a name like Mind Melter or Satan’s Outhouse Destroyer. It’s made by a company with a household name—and you can easily find it. You don’t have to know someone’s dad who makes hot sauce in the garage. 

Okay, okay, I’ll stop beating around the pepper bush: It’s Tabasco Extra Hot Scorpion Sauce. 

Scorpion peppers are gnarly little red peppers that kind of look like habanero peppers. At one point in time, the scorpion pepper was actually ranked as the hottest pepper in the world. And it’s still pretty high up there, coming in at 1.4 million Scoville heat units. (For reference, a habanero pepper is 100,000–350,000 SHU.) At present, the hottest pepper is called Pepper X and it’s 2.69 million SHU. If you ask me, that’s more of a weapon than a vegetable. 

Anyway, back to Tabasco’s Extra Hot Scorpion Sauce. It’s made with scorpion peppers (of course) along with guava and pineapple, presumably to balance out that heat a bit. The brand boasts that it is about 20 times hotter than regular Tabasco. 

I tasted this sauce as part of our upcoming ranking of all the Tabasco hot sauce flavors. By the time I got to it, I’d already tasted the other Tabasco hot sauces—and I was fine. Seriously, no panting, no desperate need for milk. I was fine. But then I dashed a bit on a spoon, popped it in mouth, and I saw stars. The spice hit instantly. I started sweating, I got dizzy, I felt lightheaded. “I’m dying,” I wrote in my notes. 

It’s been a long time since I’ve been so enveloped, so taken over by a hot sauce. Kudos to Tabasco. Ya got me. And while I think pretty much every Tabasco sauce tastes better than the sweet but super spicy Scorpion Sauce, I would recommend it to any true heatseekers who don’t want to spend craft hot sauce money (a 5oz bottle is just $5.99). 

Have you tasted Tabasco Scorpion Sauce (straight!) and lived to tell the tale? Let me know how weak you think I am in the comments.