Oh, Boy! Fetch the Condiment Sommelier!

We live in a time of bizarre and unpredictable shortages. A week or two ago, a new one popped up: sriracha sauce.

When I was young, sriracha was just something you expected to see on the table during rare visits to Thai restaurants. No one was excited about it. It went well with Thai food, but it wasn’t that great with most other things.

At some point, hipsters discovered it, and for no good reason at all, they developed a sriracha obsession. They use it inappropriately on all kinds of things, including tacos and something called avocado toast.

Don’t get me started on avocados. They shouldn’t even be called fruit. They’re okay in guacamole, but you could just as easily make it from something like zucchini or yellow squash, because avocados have nearly no flavor. When I was a kid, there were two avocado trees in my yard, and I can’t recall eating a single one. I let them rot on the ground.

It’s bizarre to me that women love avocados so much. It’s like eating thick green water. And mashed avocado looks exactly like baby poop.

The web says a lot of implausible Paltrowesque things about avocados. It claims it gives women shinier hair, clearer skin, better vision, lower blood pressure, smaller waists, bigger bustlines, more hits on Instagram, and a higher chance of landing rich boyfriends.

I made some of those up.

In my defense, the ones I made up are probably just as valid as the others.

I guess I’ll take heat for this, but fooling women is just about the easiest way there is to get rich. My mother once paid $18 for a bar of soap. She had it for years. I think she was afraid to use it.

If it weren’t for female gullibility, the Mormon church would still be meeting in people’s living rooms in upstate New York.

I don’t know why pretentious millennials got so excited about sriracha, but they seem to have very empty lives. I guess they’ll jump at anything that gives them a reason to celebrate.

Anyway, there is a big ol’ American company that makes what is probably the best-known sriracha. The familiar one with the rooster on the bottle. The company is called Huy Fong Foods, Inc. It’s in California. I don’t know too much about what hipsters like, but it appears they think Huy Fong has no equal. An article I saw said Huy Fong used to buy peppers in the US, but they started buying in Mexico.

Hmm. Things are going so well in California. I wonder why anyone would decide not to buy California produce and to outsource to Mexico. Yes, it’s a real puzzle. We should assemble a think tank.

Mexico’s pepper fields are doing poorly due to drought, which is caused by global warming, Donald Trump, and misgendering. As a result, Huy Fong has cut production back. People have started putting Huy Fong sriracha on Ebay, and some have paid $70 for a single bottle. Right now, Amazon’s cheapest bottle is $25. The next-best deal is about $43. That’s a big bottle, though; 28 ounces. Normal bottles are not available from Amazon.

When I saw the story, I wondered how stupid millennials were, so I looked around the web to see if anyone was selling Huy Fong sriracha at the regular low price, and I didn’t see any. I didn’t want it, because I still have about 7/8 of a bottle I bought years ago. This stuff lasts forever. I was just curious, and I thought it would be funny to find a $5 bottle on the web while men who were allergic to testosterone were paying 14 times that much.

While I was thinking about this, I remembered a long-abandoned quest. The quest for Shark brand sriracha.

I used to live in Miami, and Miami has lots of Thais. It has great Thai restaurants. While I was there, I learned to love sriracha, but it was not Huy Fong. It was Shark brand. A local joint served it.

Shark sriracha is sweet and has a complex taste. You can literally pour it on white rice and enjoy it. I like dumping it on Thai food in restaurants, but I can’t do that where I am now, because they don’t have it.

While I was thinking about Huy Fong, Shark came to mind, and I decided to make another effort to find it. I succeeded.

I found an Asian grocery site, and I ordered two bottles. I got two because they had both medium and hot sauce. I didn’t know which one I liked. I was giddy to find there were different grades. They sell for about $13 and $16, respectively, and the bottles are huge: 25 ounces.

I spent a little, it’s true, but I wasn’t buying something I can ordinarily find at Publix. I have never been able to buy Shark locally. I would have had to pay a lot to get Shark even without a shortage.

My sauce arrived today. I just tried it.

This stuff is wonderful. Both grades. I would not buy the hot version again, however, because it tastes almost exactly like medium, and it costs three dollars more.

I guess this will irk any hipster who reads this, but Huy Fong is American, and Shark is made in Thailand. Hipsters are all about being authentic and original, while aping each other’s tattoos and wearing old people’s discarded clothing, so you would think they’d be all over Shark.

Googling around, I see some people agree with me. Serious Eats had a sriracha contest, and Huy Fong was beaten by Polar brand and Shark. Huy Fong is very good, and I’m not knocking it, but Shark is better.

Interesting note: sriracha is easy to make at home, so anyone who blew $70 on a bottle is either rich or foolish.

Huy Fong makes one pepper product I can’t live without: chili garlic sauce. This is a thick sauce made from vinegar, chilies, salt, and garlic. It doesn’t scream “ORIENTAL” when you use it, so it’s versatile. I love it in hummus, and you can use it to heat up nearly anything.

I wonder what it costs right now. I used to go through a lot of it back when I was hitting the hummus hard.

The Asian site I went to for sauce had a lot of other interesting stuff. I popped for some red curry sauce. I have a tendency to assume Asians make everything from scratch, but on the web, I’ve seen them pouring all kinds of stuff out of cans and bottles. I want to see if I can make a decent red chicken curry with packaged sauce as a base ingredient.

It’s very hard to stop collecting hot sauces. I have Crystal, Frank’s, two kinds of Huy Fong, three kinds of El Yucateco, two kinds of Shark, and sometimes I also keep two kinds of Matouk’s.

I hope this blog post is useful to you. Maybe someone whose handlebar moustache is drooping from sriracha deprivation will see this, try Shark, and never look back.