In researching hot sauces, I've found a great number of them that gleefully wish to capitalize on the fact that a certain percentage of the population experiences intestinal distress and bowel issues after having eaten spicy foods.  In other words, there are an inordinate number of sauces named after asses and fire-shits.

I mean, ha ha, I get it.  Butts are funny.  Poop is funny.  Someone's butthole burning while they shit spicy diarrhea is funny.  Sure, we all agree.  But is it particularly appetizing?  I guess that's subjective.

Here follows a randomly collected list of hot sauces with ass- or shit-related names.  Most links are Amazon affiliate links, so I get a tiny speck of money if you click on them and then shop Amazon as you normally would.


Queen of Farts


Kneel!  Kneel in the presence of royalty!  Seated upon a throne of her own wind, she rules over all with a howling rectum.  Okay, you can groan and shake your head all you want, but that was arguably better than the 'clever' copy they came up with:  "Cut the cheese and kick it up with this famous state of the fart hot sauce.  God shave the Queen."  See what I mean?


Ring Of Fire Original Habañero Hot Sauce



If you thought the name of this sauce perhaps referred to the earthquake- and volcano-prone zone of the Pacific Ocean's basin, let me direct your attention to this bit of ad copy:  "So hot it'll burn ya' twice."  So what they're saying is, when you first ingest the sauce, it will cause a burning sensation in your mouth.  Later, when you go to expel digested food from your body, the ring of your anal sphincter will experience a burning as though in the presence of fire, thus accounting for the second time you'll be burned.  I don't know why I have to explain this one to you.


Butt Twister Hot Sauce 


Speaking of unyielding forces of nature, this sauce promises that a swirl of tornado-force wind will form a perfect funnel that will make landfall in your butthole.  This will be visually impressive as hell, but the property damage will be brutal, plus those storm chasers can be a nuisance.  When you see a cow fly by, you'll know it's working.


Ass in Space Hot Sauce


Now we're talking real fire.  Do you know how great a jet of flame you'd have to expel from your ass to propel you skyward with enough force to achieve escape velocity and break the bonds of earth's gravity?  Neither do I.  Luckily we don't have to because NASA and the makers of this hot sauce have done those calculations for you.  Now if you could just remember where you put your space helmet...


Bunster's Shit the Bed Hot Sauce


This Australian sauce eschews threats of rectally generated flames in favor of a less painful but not necessarily more pleasant promise:  That you'll lose control of your bowels in your sleep.  I haven't been able to find an official connection between Bunster's and the adult diaper industry, but whoever proves the link exists will either save us all or never be heard from again.


Ass Kickin Hot sauce - Flavor: Ghost Pepper


Who doesn't enjoy a good old-fashioned ass kickin'?  But does this sauce put on a boot and lodge its foot in your posterior with force?  No!  The image on the label tells us the sauce is an ass with a propensity for kicking.  But it also proclaims that it's "Kick Yo' Ass Hot".  So it is an ass and it kicks your ass.  Ass.


Smack My Ass and Call Me Sally Habañero Hot Sauce


As far as violence towards asses goes, this instance is at least consensual.  "But it looks like the sign was put on his back as a prank!  That's clearly not consensual," I pretend to hear you object.  Don't be fooled by Carl's shit.  The sympathy thing is part of it for him.  He put the sign on his own back and then walked around with his pants around his knees for forty-five minutes before finding someone at the party interested in indulging him.  Carl is selfish and not very situationally aware, and he's not invited to my nephew's birthday parties anymore.


Rectum Ripper XXX 1/2 Hot Sauce

 
The mere kicking and smacking you so bemoaned;
You'd now freely exchange for all you owned;
The consumption of this sauce was a fearful blunder;
For now your poor tender rectum lies torn asunder!  
Woe!  WOE! 


Ass Reaper Hot Sauce


The recent trend of anti-ass violence appears to have escalated to its ghastliest possible conclusion.  This one went all out and decorated the bottle to look like a skeletal robed figure that...harvests your ass?  "Is it my time?" you ask the ghoulish specter before you.  It silently shakes its head and points one bony digit toward your rump.


Ass Blaster Sauce with Outhouse


Oh, it comes in a cute little outhouse-shaped box so you can imagine having burning diarrhea before indoor plumbing was popular!  Adorable!  I want to put it in my mouth!  "We call it Ass Blaster hot sauce for a reason."  Was that reason your advanced level of maturity and keen marketing acumen?


Professor Phardtpounders Colon Cleaner Hot Sauce


I feel like this one's trying too hard with the fake Germanic name. They should have gone whole hog and called it "Herr Kommandant FeuerScheiss's Final Ass Solution".  Also, what is he a professor of?  What does his syllabus look like?  I fear for the future of the education system.


Professor Payne Indeass's Sphincter Shrinker XXX Hot Sauce


Another professor?  Did they attend the same scatological university or are they bitter rivals in the war for your ass?  "Phardtpounder, you cad, you will not best me this time!  I will shrink these sphincters, making them almost impossible for you to clean!"


Dr. Assburn's Fire Roasted Habanero Pepper Sauce


Speaking of higher education, what this bottle doesn't tell you is that Dr. Assburn is not actually a medical doctor.  His doctorate is in music appreciation.  Don't take medical or ass-related advice from Dr. Assburn.


Hemorrhoid Helper Habañero Hot Sauce


It seems like I shouldn't even have to say this, but with all of these phony ass doctors advertising their services, someone has to speak up.  If this hot sauce affects your hemorrhoids in any way, positively or negatively, then I assure you unequivocally that you're using it wrong.

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Inspired by this video in which a young lad ate a hot pepper and then proceeded to panic and seize to the point of rubbing habañero-tinged saliva all over his own face, my wife decided to photograph me eating a fresh, raw habañero pepper.  This was way back in 2007, apparently during an era when it was impossible to photograph me at home with a shirt on.

This photo was the result:

I intelligently prepared a paper towel with which to rub habañero saliva into my eyes.
She was actually quite disappointed with the results.  At this point in time, I was by no means a super-powered capsaicin warrior, but I was clearly already habituated enough to eating hot, spicy foods to not have a full-on meltdown at the heat level of this pepper.  The pepper was very hot, for sure.  And I was clearly suffering.  In the photo, my face is noticeably red and I'm sweaty and panting.  But her desire to see me absolutely lose my shit was clearly thwarted.  I didn't scream.  I didn't roll around on the floor.  I didn't run in circles with cartoon smoke coming out of my ears.  I barely drooled.

She told me, "I needed you to shit blood out your eyes."

My verdict:  Habañero challenge passed!

Her verdict:  Habañero challenge failed!
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I don't know if you've noticed that the heat ratings attributed to hot sauces tend to vary wildly depending on where you look.  I personally find it very frustrating, not because my mouth is finely tuned to exact Scoville levels and I disagree with the numbers, but because I'm not a Scoville detector and I find it useful to know whether a particular sauce I haven't tried is twice as hot or ten times as hot as a sauce I'm familiar with before buying.  They all say they're hot.  And above an arbitrary heat level, they just start saying things like "extra hot" or "super hot" or "insane", which is not a measure of heat at all, but rather of fitness for prosecution.

I think the issue mainly stems from the extremely weird, subjective, semi-scientific nature of the original Scoville scale.

Wilbur Scoville, whose Scoville Organoleptic Test outlasted his really excellent mustache as his enduring legacy.
Wilbur Scoville was a pharmacist who developed a test to assess how spicy things were by diluting them in sugar water to varying degrees and then having small panels of testers decide whether or not the test meant anything at all.  Five test subjects tasted the sugar water dilutions and reported whether they could detect any heat or pungency.  The amount of dilution required to make the spicy go away completely for three out of the five became the Scoville score for that substance.
Very, very sciency...
As a scientific test, I suppose it was better than nothing.  For perspective, this was eight years before anyone discovered insulin.  But in the time since the olde-timey year of 1912 when this test was developed, we've invented other more reliable methods of figuring how much of a particular substance is in something.

The current preferred method is High Performance Liquid Chromatography, which yields more consistent, less subjective numbers, but there can still be some variation.  This test doesn't spit out results in the popular Scoville Heat Units, but rather in ASTA pungency units (named for the American Spice Trade Association).

But wait!  Everyone's so used to talking about the Scoville scale!  Maybe we should just keep referring to those units of measure even though they make little sense!  Or at least that's what I assume happened because now someone's figured out an approximate conversion for ASTA units into Scoville units so we can keep happily expressing heat levels in SHU, only now they're more accurately tested SHU, maybe.

So how the hell do you tell WHICH Scoville units you're being given, the old-timey, inaccurate, subjective ones or the newer, still-inaccurate-but-better ones?

As far as I can tell, you can't.

How hot is your favorite sauce, really?  Depends on who you ask.  Depending on the source, the numbers can range all over the place for the exact same sauce.  And I don't think there's a way to tell which numbers are closest to accurate.

You're on your own, everyone!
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I can't keep this sauce on my shelf.  I go through it so fast.  The savory, lightly smoky flavor and really excellent heat-per-dollar ratio make it a no-brainer favorite.  I put a little bit too much of it on pretty much everything.  And I can get it for under two bucks at just about any grocery store near me.

It's distinctly hotter than the other El Yucateco offerings, but not so hot that I ever hesitate to reach for it.  And the flavor is just miles above the brand's other variations.
A closeup to show off the beautiful texture - the ingredients don't list any food coloring.

I tried it for the first time just a few months ago and I've gone through several bottles.  I wish it came in a big-ass bottle like Sriracha does.  I'd sleep with it next to me.

Cheap.  Delicious.  Hot.  Favorite.

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Instant ramen is a pretty amazing food.  It's cheap.  It's fast.  And if you're not stuck eating it for every single meal out of desperate financial necessity, it can be pretty tasty.  Thankfully, it's been about ten years since I've been on a largely ramen-based diet, so instant noodles from a plastic package have had time to go back to being a quick, steamy treat instead of a dreary, repetitive food slog.

So the last time the mood for ramen struck me, I spotted some Maruchan Sriracha Chicken Flavor ramen at the grocery store and snagged a couple. Maruchan's jumped on the popular Sriracha bandwagon, so I wanted to see how their effort stacked up.


First impression from a ramen point of view?  Fine.  It was the standard Maruchan ramen experience.  Noodly.  Salty.  No complaints.

First impression from a Sriracha perspective?  Disappointing.  The broth had a hint of orange tint to it, attempting to imply that some beautiful red Sriracha sauce had been waved near it.  Of course, I didn't expect it to come out looking like a broth when I'm done adding hot sauce to it, looking as though it's running red with the blood of my peppery enemies.  But I'd still largely categorize the color of this broth as "powdered chicken yellow".

And tasting the broth only yielded the faintest, most distant waft of Sriracha flavor and absolutely no heat that I could discern.  I could easily convince myself this was just a standard chicken broth with food coloring added and maybe a tiny pinch of extra garlic.  If I cared more, I'd arrange a blind taste test with some other chicken-based flavors and try to guess which broth was supposed to contain Sriracha flavoring.  But...I don't care that much.

Yep.  That's ramen.
What did I expect for $0.18?  

Honestly, brothy noodle soups are one of the best things to add actual Sriracha sauce to, so why try to skip that step by infusing the flavor packet with weak, nebulous Sriracha-like flavor?

Taste testing done, I dressed up the ramen with the best resources currently available in my kitchen.

Ahhh...much better.
You want delicious Sriracha flavor on your ramen?  This is how you do it.  Also added:  An egg, some peas, some thinly sliced onion and a few dashes of ghost pepper sauce on top of the Sriracha because I'm a savage.

The good:  Ramen.

The bad:  Disappointing lack of Sriracha flavor and no detectable heat.
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As an early Xmas gift, my wife and I received a really nice bundle of three Pain Is Good hot sauces from a friend (thanks, Jennifer!).  One was an old favorite, one was a sauce I'd tried before and didn't hate and the third was new to me and has now become a solid favorite.

I was introduced to this brand years ago at a Ross (Dress for Less!) of all places.  They usually have a tiny aisle full of weird "discounted" kitchen gadgets and such and the next aisle over is usually stocked with odds and ends of snacks and stuff like cocoa mixes, weird cookies and occasionally random hot sauces.  I was probably drawn to the sauces by the eye-catching label art, featuring various faces contorted in hot sauce-induced agony (ecstasy?).  But their respectable heat and good attention to flavor kept me coming back for more.


Pain Is Good Batch #37 Garlic Style Hot Sauce
This is one I'd had before and liked it well enough, but not enough to buy it over and over again.  It has decent heat and a very sharp flavor.  Not quite in that hated Tabasco range of vinegary garbage flavor, but enough to overpower the garlic just enough.  But a little on some potatoes or on pasta or in a soup is fine if you're in the mood for a more piquant flavor and some heat.  It's not my favorite, but I'm not kicking it out of my food-bed.


Pain Is Good Batch #114 Jamaican Style Hot Sauce
This one's definitely an old favorite.  I think this is the first one I ever bought from this brand and I've purchased it several times since.  It was my introduction to habañero-based sauces as well as to jerk spices in general.  I really like the flavor on this one.  It's sweet from the pineapple juice and the jerk spices give it an exotic kick.  I liberally use it on foods with existing flavor profiles that are probably not appropriate for the addition of jerk seasoning because I'm a goddamn savage.  Italian pasta?  Yep.  Now it's Jamaican jerk Italian marinara, motherfucker!  Chinese fried rice?  Yeah!  Welcome to Jamaica!  On a side note, Pain Is Good also makes a Jamaican Pineapple Salsa that's milder, but has the same flavor profile as the Batch #114 sauce.  It's really, really good.  I actually avoid getting it because we go through it too fast to justify the price tag.


Pain Is Good Habañero Pepper Sauce
I'd never tried this particular one before and it's such a new favorite that the bottle's already almost empty.  When I first got it, I swabbed some on my finger and tasted it and immediately let out the longest "Mmmmmm".  (This, by the way, is my usual method odf first tasting any hot sauce.)  It's mustard-based and tastes like a delicious barbecue sauce with a really nice level of habañero heat.  It's savory and smoky and tangy.  I'm still a savage, so I also throw it on pasta and soup and such, but because of the mustard and barbecue aspects, it's really perfect for slathering on burgers and sandwiches.  I'm definitely a fan of this one and need to pick up some more soon.  My bottle's woefully close to empty.

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