Why you should (almost) always shake your hot sauce bottle before use

In our years since we started Heatsupply we have seen from upclose that hot sauce is rising in popularity in Europe. Also, people know better and better how to use the best condiment on Earth. But we also still see some room for improvement. Something we regularly see is someone getting a bottle of hot sauce out of the fridge and directly pour it on their food without shaking it first. That’s a shame, because it’s essential if you want to creat the full ‘hot sauce experience’.

Why you should shake hot sauce before use

Hot sauce is almost always based on vinegar and peppers. Some other ingredients are added to increase the flavor and those ingredients, just like the peppers, are heavier than vinegar. This causes the ingredients to seperate in the bottle and heavier ingredients sink to the bottom. Especially when the bottle is a little older and the ingredients had more time to seperate. The consequence is a layer of vinegar on top of the hot sauce.

That top layer of vinegar is probably not what you had in mind when you wanted to pour hot sauce on your food, because it ruins the flavor. By shaking the bottle first you make sure that all the ingredients mix well and that the hot sauce will taste like the producer wanted it to taste. There are also hot sauces that barely show any form of seperation in the bottle (often based on water and vinegar and cooked for a long time), but we still advise to shake that bottle before use. This is also almost always printed on the bottle.

Has the sauce gone bad?

When a hot sauce shows extreme seperation of ingredients it can seem like the sauce has gone bad. This is actually not the case (if the best before date hasn’t been reached yet). An example where that may seem the case is the Torchbearer Garlic Reaper hot sauce. This sauce is made with vinegar and oil, where the oil is heavier than the rest. This causes it to sink down (see picture below). Once you receive the bottle like that you may think it’s gone bad, but that’s not the case.

So don’t throw that bottle out, just give it a good shake before you use it. Make this a habbit and you will enjoy the perfect hot sauce experience every time!