The Great Sriracha Feud | If You Can't Stand the Heat | 3

0:07I'm David Brown and this is Business Wars.

0:30These days, hot sauce is a hot topic. One prime example, that mega-popular YouTube series Hot Ones, where host Sean Evans sits down with celebrities as they try hotter and hotter sauces on their wings. I'm fine. I'm perfectly f***ing fine. I'm not questioning that. One way it had any effect on Conan. And it seems like everyone's launching their own hot sauce lines, too. Reality TV stars, musicians, actors. I hear Motley Crue has its own batch. The new insane hot sauce collection from the Crue. Livewire hot sauce. Pramble Scream scorpion pepper hot sauce. This condiment craze is in full swing and the numbers seem to back it up.

1:14In 2023, global sales for hot sauce and condiments hit nearly$200 billion, up from$150 billion in 2019. There are many factors contributing to this boom, and Weifong, with its category-defining sriracha, is definitely one of them. In the 2010s, the company's garlicky chili-based sauce had foodies hooked. You'd find it on avocado toast, deviled eggs, even pasta. But sriracha was just the beginning. Now that the hot sauce floodgates have been opened, you'll find ingredients like hot honey, gochujang, and chili crisp popping up everywhere. Joseph Hernandez is the Associate Director of Drinks and Lifestyle at Bon Appetit.

1:53he'll explain how he uses some of these popular condiments and how they became so hot in our culture. Later on, chef and best-selling author Nick Sharma breaks down the science of spice and why some folks can handle their heat without breaking a sweat while others squirm. In fact, Nick is literally going to put me in the hot seat, guiding me through a taste test of some spicy ingredients, including a Thai chili pepper, and he's going to be giving us the science behind each flavor and reaction. Hope I can handle it. Getting spicy in here, y 'all. Stick around.

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4:36Joseph Hernandez, welcome to Business Wars. Thank you for having me. Tell me a little bit about how you found yourself at Bon Appetit. Were you a reader when you were younger or what? Oh, yeah, for sure. I went to journalism school and one day I realized that food writing was a potential career to my mother's chagrin and just did everything I could to kind of get into the world. Shortly after college, I started working in a wine shop and it was the advent of blogging. And using my newfangled journalism degree, I started writing for the wine shop while also learning about wine and flavor and all the good things that wine goes with.

5:18And slowly developed my palate and somehow, some way, carved a career out for myself in this crazy food world. Is there an intersection between what you know about wine, I'm thinking flavor notes and that kind of thing, and condiments? Oh, yeah. I think if we're being honest, I was a condiment sommelier long before I got into wine. Really? Really? Yes. Really. What's your number one? What's your go-to? Oh, gosh. Back in the day, it might have been crystal hot sauce on fried chicken. That was an early foray. I loved ketchup growing up. I'm Filipino. So in my home, we had banana ketchup, which may not be familiar to most people.

6:01No, it's not familiar to me. What is banana ketchup? Banana ketchup actually has its origins in World War II when the United States partnered with the Philippines. Army men brought over ketchup and tomatoes don't grow in the Philippines. Too humid, but the condiment really caught on quickly. And so it was adapted to the local palate. Oh, that is fascinating. And we use it in spaghetti, which is a delight. Wow. It pisses Italians off. So I am sorry to all of your Italian listeners, but banana ketchup is a real delight and joy for me and my Filipino heart. That is so wonderful. Now you got me curious.

6:43I'm going to have to check it out for sure. It makes a really great barbecue sauce. Really? Well, I guess it would, right? You have a little bit of that sweetness. Exactly. I love that. I love that. You know, since you know a thing or two about condiments, I can remember a moment. The first time I heard about Sriracha, it seemed like I had missed out until everyone was wearing T-shirts and you saw all the, you know, all the bric-a-brac that went along and everyone wanted Sriracha, right? Yeah. Sriracha really did have a cultural moment around 2010. There's kind of a wave that crashes around cultural exchange where suddenly it's the thing that we talk about.

7:21And I think hot sauce has always made, and specifically condiments, has always been an easy entry point for people to kind of try and experiment with new flavors. There was a time when some of these items would be in the international aisle or the formerly known ethnic aisle of grocery stores. Now, a lot of these things are just classified with all the other like items. So I see sriracha more in the hot sauce category rather than all on its own in some nondescript international aisle. Where do you think we are with sriracha? Is its popularity? Has it been sustained? I think it's very much now firmly ensconced in the American diet.

8:07There are big companies that are now behind their own brands. I can think of like Heinz having their version, Tabasco having its own version of Sriracha. Irony of ironies. My goodness gracious. Yeah, there's artisanal brands and even more Thai brands are coming in. So it's interesting now that you can go to the grocery store and go to the hot sauce aisle. And now there are, you know, options rather than just the one fire red green topped bottle that we all know and love. There are now just a wide range of styles even. I sort of wonder if in a way Sriracha may be opening up our senses to the next incredible thing, you know, coming down the pike.

8:50And I guess you've picked up on Gochujang, clearly a different flavor altogether. But at the same time, a lot of, shall we say hype? I know the internet's been buzzing about gochujang. I think for a lot of folks, it's still considered very exotic. And I think there will be listeners who have never tried it. Where would you find gochujang? And do you use it in your own recipes? Yes. Fun fact, growing up, my childhood best friends were Korean. And so I would attend Bible study and Sunday school with my Korean friends and the aunties at the Sunday school would feed us. And it was my first exposure to Korean food and gochujang was one of them.

9:30And they would teach me how to cook. So when gochujang hit the scene, I was already familiar with it. For your audience who is unfamiliar, it's a Korean fermented chili paste. It's deeply flavored. It comes in these little tubs. They're really thick when you kind of dig into the gochujang, kind of like tomato paste out of a can. Same thickness, depending on your brand. And you can kind of use it in the same way. It's really great if you mix it into tomato sauce, mix it into a soup. It's not hot in the same way that sriracha is hot and sharp. The heat is a little bit more subdued. It's a little earthier.

10:09There's a sweetness to it that comes from how the peppers are fermented and aged. So you're not getting so much blistering hot heat. You're getting something a little bit warmer, kind of like a buzz of heat instead. Yeah. Speaking of buzz, it seems like it's in everything. They got cookies now, pasta. I mean, everyone loves to make fun of this stuff. It seems like it's in every recipe. What do you think that's going to mean for Gochujang? Do you think it's a flash in the pan, so to speak? No pun intended. Or do you think that we're talking about a long-term relationship here? I think it's more the latter.

10:46I think it's more long-term. It's so everyday to Korean cooking. And as grocery stores like H Mart, which is kind of the leading Korean grocery store that has made it stateside and has been growing in major cities around the country and opening up in rural places, as that becomes more widespread, people will become more familiar with gochujang and everyday American adaptations. It's quite versatile. It's quite easy to use. I mentioned barbecue sauce earlier. I love adding goshijang to store-bought barbecue sauce to add a little bit more of that kind of sweet heat. Oh, that is really interesting.

11:23Yeah, you can just riff on it very easily in the same way that you can riff on sriracha. Yeah, you know, when hot sauce really sort of seemed to grab the imagination of so many Americans, I think of that as in the early, maybe late 80s, early 90s, when we started to see people coming out with all kinds of different specialty hot sauces. And soon you had stores that would just sell all these, you know, odd brands. And now look where we are. Hot ones, right? For listeners who haven't seen Hot Ones, it's on YouTube. It's all over the place. It's one of the top performers on YouTube, something like 15 million subscribers.

12:00A terrific host of this program, Sean Evans. And basically what he does is he gets celebrities to come on. And as the conversation goes, he sort of ups the ante with every new set of wings, hotter and hotter wings over the course of an episode. You put on more and more different types of hotter and hotter sauce. In fact, I think we've got a clip where the host, Sean Evans, is sitting down with Chef Gordon Ramsay. I think this video has something like 133 million views. This is Gordon eating one of the spicier wings. Check it out. That's like sticking your tongue in a plate of acid. Jesus Christ.

12:39Yes. What the fuck's going to happen tomorrow when I'm back behind the line, tasting and perfecting? Where the fuck are you going to be tomorrow? Because I don't even have to call you. Oh, that is just, why do we put ourselves through this? What is, of course, it's funny, but I think we've all kind of experienced that moment where, you know, when we least expect it or we think we can take more of the hot sauce. What do you think the appeal of Hot Ones is? I love Hot Ones. And it's crazy that it's been around for 10 years already. Has it been 10 years already? Yeah, it's been 10 years. Yeah, we actually had the pleasure of interviewing Sean Evans for Bon Appetit in celebration of 10 years back in March.

13:23My staff writer, Sam Stone, sat down with him and talked to him about Hot Ones and the format. I think one of the really astute things that Sean had told Sam was that the wings serve two purposes and the hot sauces serve two purposes in the interview. One of them is, you know, just having an activity for the celebrity who is so media trained to like focus on outside of the interview kind of drops the wall a little bit. Yeah, the fourth wall just kind of falls apart when they're trying to struggle to get their words out, right? Right. And then you get the second part, which is that as soon as that heat hits, they're now just a human in an extreme situation and having to react to it as opposed to being a celebrity with something to sell.

14:11You know, I, for one, am not really a risk taker or a daredevil when it comes to heat. So, you know, you'll never catch me on Hot Ones for that reason. But Hot Ones is really one of my favorite interview shows because it's not about the hot sauce. The hot sauce is a vehicle to a human moment. You know, boy, that really does nail it. It's that human moment. And yet one of the things that I think is fascinating is how they've parlayed this into their own hot sauce business. I love that. Right? They've got a brand. I guess Hot Ones is the brand of their hot sauce. And each year they add new flavors.

14:50The Last Dab, I guess that's the famous one, right? Has a Scoville rating of something like more than 2 million SHU. Hard to believe. Hard to believe. Like what are we doing? What are we doing? I mean, as a serious question, what is going on there? I think Ed Sheeran has a hot sauce line. Motley Crue. You're kidding. Really? Yeah. Shout at the devil. So who else has hot sauces out there? I wasn't aware of Motley Crue's. Yeah, Motley Crue has one. Ed Sheeran. Danny Trejo. That lines up. Beloved character actor. With these celebrity sauces, are any of them any good? It's hard to tell. I can't speak to all of the brands because I haven't had them all.

15:33I am a fan of the Hot Ones Heatness brand because they offer a range of hot sauces. So you don't have to go totally crazy with what you're getting. Last Dab is honestly last resort. You get to have that experience as both the viewer and fan of the celeb and also like try it alongside with them. So I think that they've created an experience for their audience. They are a media company that also found a way to create a product that exists in the world that can be experienced outside of their show. So that is really unique thinking. You've been really generous with your time, but I'm just curious, are there any trends, perhaps condiments, that we should be on the lookout for that haven't quite hit that hype moment just yet?

16:21Hot Honey has been kind of making slow growth into the area. It's not so hot. I think it's a lot milder than the branding has pushed forward. It's just nice to have a little bit of sweet and a little bit of heat on like a slice of pizza, on a chicken nugget or a chicken tender. So you're going to be seeing that a lot more. I think you're going to see a lot more cultural flavors kind of hit the market. There's the Fancy Food Show that takes place in New York and the West Coast. The Fancy Food Show? Yeah, it's kind of like the Comic Con of grocery stores. Basically, it's a huge convention of just the latest food trends that are coming out for grocery buyers.

17:04And you see a lot more cultural flavors coming out. Sriracha and gochujang have like paved the way to kind of capture this global mindset for what flavors will hit the market. I think we're going to see more South American flavors. So like milder hot sauces that are still kind of pepper forward. I think you're going to see more spice driven stuff, maybe from Africa and India that kind of are closer to gochujang than sriracha in terms of being something that you cook with as opposed to something that you finish a meal with. Yeah. And I look to the Fancy Food Show every year for what's kind of coming down the market because it means that these grocery store execs are also aware of these new explorations into the palate.

17:49Joseph, thanks so much for joining us. Great to talk to you. Thanks for having me, David. This was so fun. Joseph Hernandez is the Associate Director of Drinks and Lifestyle for Bon Appetit. You can find his reporting at bonappetit.com. Coming up... Take a tiny bite. Let's start small. What do you think? I admit I took more than a tiny bite. Milk! Milk! Uh-oh. Author and chef Nick Sharma guides me through a taste test of some of the hottest condiments out there and explains the science behind the spice. Stick around.

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21:07Hey, welcome back to Business Wars. Have you ever wondered why some people can scarf down a spicy curry without thinking twice, while others are sweating over their plate? Well, the science of how our taste buds handle spice is quite complex, with many physical and psychological factors playing into that tolerance that each of us have. Well, Chef Nick Sharma knows all about this. He studied molecular biology before pivoting to food, and nowadays he's an editor-in-residence at America's Test Kitchen and the author of three best-selling cookbooks, each revealing new ways to innovate with classic ingredients and flavor.

21:48And today he joins us to talk about heat, spice, and the science behind them. Nick Sharma, welcome to Business Wars. Thank you, David. What is this, a background in molecular biology? How did you make the jump to food? This was several years ago. I'm in grad school and just doing all these experiments, sitting for hours at end in a closed room. And this was in Cincinnati, Ohio. It's winter. You come outside and then suddenly it's dark by four o 'clock in the evening. And then all my friends who weren't in science were out having fun and, you know, going out to eat at restaurants. So I said to myself, oh, my gosh, I'm sitting here.

22:28I love the science. This is why I'm in a lab. But there's also a part of my life that is just not entertaining or exciting. I'm missing out on something. And don't get me wrong, it's all fun. But when you go outside and you're meeting people, you want to have conversations outside what you're doing in a lab. And for me, that became food because it was the same thing. Being in a kitchen and being in a lab, you're testing out new things all the time. You're trying to look for answers. You want to make your food better, your recipes better. You're trying to learn about new ingredients, new techniques.

23:00It's the same approach like cooking. So I saw so many parallels, which is why it became kind of second nature to me when I decided to leave science to move into the world of food because it gave me that creativity that I was missing. And I was excited. I was happy to wake up in the morning to do something different every day. And it seduced me. It just brought me in. I get a sense that maybe it's your background in the laboratory, but it sounds like you have fun experimenting with flavor. I do, because it teaches me so much. There are things that I'm familiar with because I grew up in India and then also my time spent in America.

23:39And I'm familiar with certain things. But when I learn things that I'm unfamiliar with, it helps me push the boundaries for myself. But also it gives me an opportunity to learn and then share that knowledge with people. And that's what makes me happy. Nick, a big part of flavor is spice and heat. What's your relationship with heat? So I did not like hot food growing up. And I get this a lot from people. They say, oh, you're Indian, so you love hot food. No, I couldn't handle hot food until I got older. I would say in the past two years is when I started to appreciate the heat from capsaicin and chilies, black pepper a lot more.

24:17It's more exciting now. And I think that's because I'm getting older. So interesting. When you get older, do you just develop a tolerance for heat? There's that. So you do develop a tolerance for heat. You're also your receptors. As you age, they start to get fewer and it makes you experience less of those flavors. But my brain has also started to create this wire loop of reward. Like, oh, this actually isn't so bad. It's exciting. I'm enjoying it. So I want to eat it again. And another thing that heat does, it makes us salivate more. It makes us excited about those tastes. They feel fuller. Yeah, yeah.

24:56I see, I'm so glad that you talk about the brain coming up with this loop because I feel like ever since I was a kid and I had that, you know, first taste of Tabasco sauce, I don't know. It was almost like addictive. I kept looking, sort of chasing down the next bit of heat. You know what I'm talking about? I was looking for something that was a little bit hotter, a little bit more pushing my own boundaries, like it was an adventure almost. Do you know what I mean? Oh, thrill-seeking. You were looking to seek like a little bit of adventure and danger. And that's not uncommon. A lot of people who love hot food, and I don't mean temperature by this, I mean the heat of chilies, they love it because you can experience danger in a very safe space.

25:43You know that usually, okay, there are some hot chili peppers where you're probably end up hospitalized, but you're experiencing danger in a safe environment where you feel comfortable enough to push the boundaries. And so you feel, wow, like, you know, I've done that. I can do it again. Maybe I'll try it a little bit harder the next time. And so that's exactly what a lot of this is. There's that, again, that reward loop mechanism, the danger in a safe space that's happening. So your brain is rewiring and making these connections and saying, hmm, you know what? I'm going to do that again. What's the spiciest thing you've ever eaten?

26:17The ghost pepper. The ghost pepper. All right. Yeah. You like it? Did you enjoy it? I wouldn't do it again. I wouldn't do it again. Really? Yeah. See, I'm kind of a fan. I have to be honest with you. We'll get there. But I had an experience once. and it's interesting that you should say I was chasing after this adventure because I could never psychologically put together what it was that I was chasing. I haven't consciously thought of it as looking for a safe space for adventure, but I did have this experience once. I was on a date with this young woman and this would have been the early 90s and I had never before seen, again, early 90s, I'd never before seen like, it was like one of these carts that they have set up where they're selling a lot of stuff.