DailyDirt: Sriracha In Everything

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The hot sauce that has gotten insanely popular over the past few years is getting into everything. Several fast food chains -- Pizza Hut, Dominoes, Taco Bell, Subway, Jack In The Box, Panda Express, Wendy's -- have added Sriracha to their menu in some way. There's no trademark on Sriracha, so there's no legal friction to using the name/product. Maybe some products aren't using the real sauce, but it's still free advertising for the authentic Sriracha. (And do you really want to risk alienating the rabid fans of Sriracha just to save a few bucks using a knock-off hot sauce?)

• Rogue Sriracha Hot Stout Beer has a little bit of rooster sauce in it. Spicy beer isn't the only way to get drunk on Sriracha -- there's also Sriracha vodka (but that vodka doesn't actually use real Sriracha sauce). [url]
• Sriracha-flavored popcorn made with authentic rooster sauce is available. "Every kernel is infused with the most amazing condiment on the planet." [url]
• Sriracha has been in space -- consumed by astronauts on the International Space Station. Sure, Tabasco is also available in space, but a liquid sphere of Tabasco is probably a bit messier than Sriracha in microgravity. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: astronaut, beer, fad, flavor, food, popcorn, rooster sauce, spicy, sriracha, tabasco, trademark, vodka

DailyDirt: No Accounting For Taste?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Quantifying how our taste buds react to different ingredients isn't an easy task. It's hard enough to get 4 out of 5 dentists to agree on a toothpaste, so it's understandably difficult to get untrained taste testers to agree on what kind of flavors they prefer. The assumption that there is a single "best-tasting" formula for a particular food is unrealistic in many cases, anyway, as Malcolm Gladwell's popular TED talk on spaghetti sauces discusses. Still, food science has to take some kind of measurements, and here are just a few examples.

• If you want to hone your tasting skills, you have to practice, practice, practice. And maybe buy a bushel of different apples and try to describe each variety in as much detail as possible.... [url]
• A fascinating study of Asian and Western food recipes shows that Western dishes tend to pair ingredients with similar flavors, whereas Asian recipes don't. So the "sweet and sour" sauce is only on an Asian menu, but this study goes into far more depth than that. (And there's a free article on taste, sponsored by Ajinomoto.) [url]
• The hottest pepper on the planet goes to the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion with an average Scoville Heat Unit value of 1.2 million. Some individual peppers from this plant have hit 2 million Scoville heat units, and this research will allow hot sauce companies to scientifically claim to use the hottest known peppers. [url]

If you have some more free time, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: flavors, food, palate, recipes, scoville heat unit, senses, spicy, taste
Companies: ajinomoto