In the first quarter of this year, my Darleng Mary Ann and I got an invite to join a European media group to trace the history of the iconic little red-hot bottle with the diamond label — Tabasco Pepper Sauce. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that was just too hot to pass up. Tabasco is probably the world’s most popular brand, if not the most recognizable chili pepper sauce anywhere. We were to travel halfway around the globe just to get a whiff of this hot sauce at its source. This is our story.
1. This way to Tabasco: The McIlhenny Company of Avery Island, Louisiana, is one of the United States’ biggest makers of hot sauce. Marketed under the trade name Tabasco, it is named after the tabasco pepper, originally from the state of Tabasco in Mexico. Avery Island is actually not an island — it is a huge dome of rock salt, 5,000 meters long and 4,000 meters wide, surrounded by wet marsh and the Bayou Peiti Anse. Long before its namesake Avery family settled there in the 1830s, American Indians discovered that Avery Island’s verdant flora covered a precious natural resource — a massive salt dome. There the Indians boiled the Island’s briny spring water to extract salt, which they traded to other tribes as far away as central Texas, Arkansas, and Ohio.
2. Tabasco sauce has been produced by McIlhenny Company since 1868 and is presently in its fifth generation as a family-run business. The wholly family-owned company makes money from more than just Tabasco sauce, mining rock salt, pumping oil and natural gas, and operating jungle and botanical gardens. They also reuse many of the manufacturing byproducts, from selling their used oak barrels to selling the seed mash to a company for use in candles.
3. All of the seeds needed for planting the tabasco peppers are still grown on Avery Island, mainly to ensure the supply of quality seeds for the next pepper crop. Every autumn, selected seeds are planted in greenhouses, then by spring they are transplanted to the eastern slopes of the island. A member of the McIlhenny family personally selects the best plants in the field during harvest in late July, which now looks like a field with a riot of colors — peppers of varying degrees of ripeness, from green, yellow, orange, and when fully ripened, a bright vibrant red.
The bulk of the crop for the sauce production is presently grown in Honduras where the weather and the availability of more farmland allow a more predictable and larger year-round supply of peppers. Following company tradition, the peppers are hand-picked by workers. To tell their ripeness, peppers are checked with a little red stick or le petit bâton rouge (the little red stick) that each worker carries around. Those peppers not matching the color of the stick are not ready to harvest yet, and are allowed to fully ripen. This multiple picking continues until the end of August.
4. The same day the peppers are hand-picked, they are mashed, mixed with a small amount of Avery Island salt, placed in white oak barrels, and shipped to Avery Island. Once there, they are allowed to ferment and then age for up to three years. The bright red mash is so corrosive that forklifts are reported to last only six years. When deemed ready by a member of the McIlhenny family, who personally inspects each barrel of cleaned and drained pepper mash, the approved, fully-aged mash is then blended with an all-natural, high-grain vinegar (and there lies its secret: what kind of vinegar?).
5. About four weeks later and after continuous steady stirring with a wooden paddle, the pepper skins and seeds are strained out. Three giant mixing vats at the factory hold more hot sauce than Edmund McIlhenny brewed in his entire lifetime. A single mixing vat contains about 3,000 pounds of mash and 1,400 gallons of vinegar. One vat can produce about 1,600 gallons of finished sauce. Several new types of sauces are now produced under the name Tabasco Sauce, including jalapeño-based green, chipotle-based smoked, habanero, garlic, and “sweet and spicy” sauces. The original, classic red variety of Tabasco pepper sauce measures 2,500 to 5,000 SHU on the Scoville Heat Unit scale while the habanero sauce is considerably hotter, rating 7,000 to 8,000 Scoville units.
6. The “finished” sauce is bottled by modern methods and prepared for shipment to over 160 countries around the world. It is packaged in 22 languages and dialects. As many as 720,000 two-ounce bottles of Tabasco [1] sauce are produced each day at the Tabasco factory on Avery Island. Free factory tours are available; access to Avery Island requires a one-dollar toll fee.
7. The company has cashed in on its brand name by licensing the production of branded merchandise, available at its Country Store, on-line shopping and other strategically located stores downtown and airports. They sell neckties, hand towels, golf shirts, boxer shorts, posters, Bloody Mary mix, and even casino slot machines featuring the trademarked diamond logo. McIlhenny Company now produces numerous Tabasco brand products that contain pepper seasoning, including popcorn, nuts, olives, mayonnaise, mustard, steak sauce, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, teriyaki sauce, grilling/marinating sauce, barbeque sauce, chili sauce, pepper jelly and potato chips. The company also permits other brands to use and advertise Tabasco sauce as an ingredient in their products, including Spam (luncheon meat), Slim Jim beef sticks, Heinz ketchup, A1 steak sauce, Plochman’s mustard, Cheez-It crackers, Lawry’s salt, and Vlasic pickles. Tabasco sauce has a shelf life of five years when stored in a cool and dry place.
8. As early as the 1890s, the McIlhenny family became involved with the preservation of wildlife by allotting special areas of the Avery Island for the migratory snowy egrets preening in beds of giant palmettos. Alligators also poke up from the primeval soup of coastal marshes and dense majestic groves of oak and cypress festooned with Spanish moss. A botanical garden is also a must-see destination on the island.
9. Happy Hour: Riding an “oyster lugger,” our group was shown around the island through its bayous leading out to the Gulf of Mexico. Onboard, we had a feast of Tabasco’s other products like potato chips, peanuts and olives, downed with Tabasco Bloody Mary. On the way back, we docked at the Trappers’ Camp, where a sumptuous lunch awaited us.
10. At the Trappers’ Camp, chef Donald prepared a down-home-goodness Cajun feast. Bushels of Louisiana bluepoint crabs and crawfish (a.k.a. mud bugs, also barrelful of monkeys), with their spiny shells turning bright red-orange when tossed in a giant steam cauldron steeped in a mixture of Tabasco hot pepper sauce, lemon, salt, onions, cayenne, corn, potatoes and boldly seasoned spicy sausage or andouille (pronounced ohn-dooey).
11. Up at the trappers’ cabin verandah, an oyster boat was prepared by chefs Kevin and Chad. Succulent and lusciously fat oysters were shucked on the premises, eaten clean with nothing but a dash of Tabasco and lemon juice. The oysters come from a farm in the gulf owned by Chad Phares’ family; he is also the chef patron of a restaurant in Lafayette called Phares’, which specializes in oysters (but of course), seafood and steaks. At farm gate price, a 100-pound (roughly 45 kilo) sack of oysters costs $38, yielding about 18 dozens oysters or five pounds of oyster meat.
12. “Laissez les bons temps rouler” (Let the good times roll): A Cajun feast wouldn’t be complete without singing and dancing. Above, Cid Jean’Isse and Melanie LeMaire show us how to have fun while Joe Douglas and his Bayou Boss band play homespun Zydeco music. Remember the song Jambalaya (On the Bayou), as popularized by the Carpenters in the early 1970s? It captures a caricature of the rough, loud Louisiana folk — good-time types who eat blistering-hot food and dance to the “chank-a-chank” of black Creole zydeco music.
“Jambalaya and a crawfish pie and fillet gumbo. For tonight, I’m a-gonna see my my-my cher a mi-o. Pick guitar, fill fruit far and be gay-o. Son of a gun, we’ll have big fun on the bayou...”
13. Kamayan — Louisiana style! An average serving of the boiled crawfish would be about four to six pounds (two kilos plus) per person, served with corn on the cob, potatoes and andouille sausages. This crustacean was once considered a lowly, inedible scavenger, (much like our talangkâ), but today, it is considered Louisiana’s state food. It is the star of most feasts, so popular, in fact, that an annual crawfish festival is held in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, where the equally popular crawfish dish étouffée (crawfish tails, onions, cayenne, crawfish fat, etc., slowly simmered in a covered iron pot) was invented.
14. After our hefty lunch, we took turns riding the airboat operated by Mr. Releigh. Airboats are essentially flat-bottomed boats propelled in a forward motion by an aircraft-type propeller and powered by an automotive engine. The engine and propeller are enclosed in a protective metal cage that prevents objects, i.e., debris, branches, wildlife from coming in contact with the whirling propeller, which could cause devastating damage both to the vessel, operator and passengers. The flat-bottomed design of the airboat, plus the fact that there are no operating parts below the waterline, permit the vessel to be easily navigated through shallow swamps and marshes, canals, rivers and lakes as well as on frozen lakes. The airboat’s design makes it the ideal vessel for flood and ice rescue operations. In fact, they proved to be indispensable during the flooding of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, when airboats from across the United States rescued thousands of flood victims.