Don’t Buy Cheap, Generic Hot Sauce Gift Sets, Give Quality Sauces Instead

by paulswhite

10 Comments

  1. SquidThistle

    I don’t think I’ve received one of these that has been good yet. You generally get:

    * vinegary sauce
    * vinegary sauce but with garlic
    * this one has pineapple/blueberry/etc. in it!
    * watch out! this one’s spicy! (it’s not)
    * lol, this one has a funny name and says “ass”

  2. t-o-m-u-s-a

    People who dont eat much hotsauce see gift boxes and go “oh look, so and so loves hot sauce this has variety. Lets grab it and knock them off the list”. The boxes are usually $15-$40 and ready for wrap with no second thought. As a recipient of these they are almost always the same flavor with indistinguishable amounts of heats.

    If you are buying for a pepper head take some time to search for local hot sauce sellers first, then shop online from an actual hot sauce retailer and purchase there. A single bottle of hand picked sauce (in my opinion) is better than one of these boxes that can be bought at a majority of big box stores.

  3. BassweightVibes

    The Torchbearer 8 pack and Hot Ones 5 pack look pretty good though.

  4. heathotsauce

    I went to a friend’s house the other day and he had one of the generic “hot sauces of the world” gift sets and we had fun trying all of them as (open minded) hot sauce snobs. Sometimes you do get lucky and they accidentally make a good sauce, but that one was pretty much all identical bland sauces. They had a sriracha without any sweetness and an Egyptian sauce that was just tabasco!

    Hope I’m not tooting my own horn too much, but I have a variety of [high quality gift sets](https://heathotsauce.com/pages/gift-sets) here (I’m actually photoshopping the newest editions of some of them right now). If you’re a chilehead expecting to get some spicy gifts this holiday season, it couldn’t hurt to forward something like this to family members. It’s easy for non-enthusiasts to get fooled by the nice packaging of the generic ones. You can also make a wishlist and share a link directly to that so people can pick and choose.

  5. guitarnoodleluv

    Can confirm. I had gotten three sets last year that im still begrudgingly going through. Only good part is I can reuse the bottles to give out my homemade stuff to friends.

  6. GoBackToLeddit

    i always buy these when i see them if the price is decent. always disappointed. they all taste pretty much the same. hardly any are hot at all. not even the ghost pepper or scorpion pepper ones are much to rave about heat-wise. still, i can’t help but grab them whenever they pop up at aldi or some outlet store

  7. YearsofJoy

    We got one of these last year and they were all so bad. We actually ended up giving some of them away in our Halloween candy. The kids, mostly older kids, we’re so pumped.

  8. Rainier_Imbiber

    I received one of the hot sauces around the world packs as a gift. There were a couple that were decent, but nothing special. Some were okay enough to use in a marinade or something. The rest were trash. One in particular was supposed to be a “New Orleans Bourbon” or something along those lines. It tasted like burnt plastic or worse, and was the most disgusting sauce I’ve ever tasted. So I guess it was memorable at least…

  9. astro_plane

    My mom got me a generic hot sauce pack last year and they all tasted like chemicals. I looked at the labels and they were made in china. Go figure. Some of the grocest shit I’ve ever eaten and I’ve eaten Meecrob

  10. my dad is really good at finding good ones for me. he goes to a lot of farmer’s markets and the ones he gifts me all have some really basic printed label.

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