Saucy hot!

 

So, where do you think Tabasco comes from? If you guessed Mexico, you’re wrong! It’s Avery Island in Louisiana, about an hour and a half drive southwest of Baton Rouge. We stopped to tour the production facility, and learned everything we ever wanted to know (and maybe some things we didn’t) about Tabasco.

Here’s some of what we learned:

• Edmund McIlhenny started making Tabasco in 1868 in response to a growing demand for flavourful sauces
• the company is still owned by the McIlhenny family
• Tabasco sauce is made from tabasco peppers - a type of chile pepper
• tabasco peppers are named after the Mexican state they are grown in, not the sauce
• the pepper mash is aged for 3 years in white oak barrels before being made into sauce 
• the mash has a distinctive, somewhat unpleasant, aroma that you can smell throughout the property - yes, it stinks
• it takes 28 days for the blending process, where the pepper mash is mixed with vinegar and salt, and other ingredients (depending on the blend)
• the original Tabasco sauce is made with just three ingredients- aged tabasco peppers, salt, and distilled vinegar
• the salt used in Tabasco sauce comes from the salt mines on Avery Island
• Tabasco is sold in 195 countries around the world
• more than 700,000 bottles of Tabasco are produced EVERY day
• the methods for making Tabasco have not changed much in over 150 years, nor has the recipe

The historic buildings of the Tabasco facility

Pepper mash is aged for three years in oak barrels covered in salt

The mash is transferred to large steel tanks for mixing and further aging

Bottling

It was early in the day - not at 700,000 yet!