I have a low tolerance for spicy foods, so I use Sriracha judiciously. It can be used to dress up almost anything you can imagine.
In recent memory I added a quick swirl to the insides of a grilled cheese sandwich before cooking it, squeezed a little bit into a bowl of instant ramen soup to give it a little kick, and put a quick dash on a few slices of pizza.
This iconic clear plastic squeeze bottle, emblazoned with a rooster, is familiar to Americans everywhere. A New York Times article went in-depth into the Sriracha phenomenon last year, blowing the cover on this mysterious yet beloved sauce.
Sriracha is part of a category of hot sauces which are popular throughout Asia. These hot sauces are intensely regional, with each city - sometimes each neighborhood - specializing in a particular blend. It's difficult to appreciate the regional variety as an American, with so much of our food culture being so commercialized and nationalized.
Ketchup used to be like this, before Heinz and other corporations stepped in to nationalize the scene. Back in the day there were dozens, maybe hundreds of brands of ketchup. For the most part, you bought the ketchup that was made and bottled locally, because that is what your local grocery store carried. In the days before a nationalized food distribution system, a lot of things were like this.
In this scene, then, a single family can make its own special brand of sauce and become famous. Such is the case with Sriracha, which is named after a particular town in Thailand where this sort of sauce is popular. There are a few other brands of sriracha sauce, but for the most part, Sriracha is synonymous with Huy Fong Foods.
Huy Fong Foods began in 1980 in Rosemead, California with one man and a dream: to bottle and sell his family's famous hot sauce. Founder David Tran was born in Vietnam around 1945, and emigrated to the United States in the late 1970s following the Vietnam War.
Tran named his company after the freighter that took him to America, and used the rooster as his symbol because he was born in the Year of the Rooster. The rooster symbol is so iconic that some people - true fans - have immortalized it on their bodies as tattoos.
I recently learned that Sriracha has been the subject of a surprisingly vast counterfeit conspiracy. These counterfeit bottles are almost identical to the original, but they taste far worse (being made of inferior ingredients).
According to the company, there are three ways to tell you have the real thing:
1. Green plastic ring securing the cap to the bottle is the same size as the cap. (on the counterfeit bottles, the ring is smaller than the cap.)
2. The batch number and expiration date are laser etched into the plastic. (In counterfeit bottles these two lines are missing, or inked on with a stamp.)
3. "Huy Fong USA" is embossed in the bottom of the bottle.
Photo credit: Flickr/ilovememphis