Mad about Science: Cholula

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Staff

In my household, there is only one hot sauce that reigns supreme. My lady’s love for Cholula extends beyond the four walls of our home, and any time we go out to eat, the first question to servers is: ”Do you have Cholula?”

While a travel-sized bottle of Cholula for her purse is looking like an attractive stocking stuffer this Christmas season, I figured I would give my better half an even better gift by looking into how the metaphorical hot sausage is made.

Cholula hot sauce is named for the city of Cholula, Puebla, the oldest continuously inhabited city in North America. Located in southern Mexico, the city of Cholula has existed in various forms for at least 2,500 years. During the colonial period, the Spanish invaders restructured the city into parishes around specific churches, which filled both a religious and administrative role in the city.

Despite being named for Cholula, the hot sauce has never actually been manufactured there. Instead, it is produced in Chapala, Jalisco — 28 miles from Guadalajara in central Mexico. The company behind the hot sauce, the Cholula Hot Sauce Company, is actually based in Stamford, Conn. Even more confusing, this company is actually owned by McCormick & Co. Inc., based in Maryland. A lot of paperwork goes into getting hot sauce onto your table.

There are a number of myths and speculation surrounding the lady on the Cholula label. According to the Cholula website, she is “La Chila” — a stylized representation of the “beloved cook and abuelita figure” Camilla Harrison, who first prepared the sauce for the “famed Jose Cuervo family.”

Others say it’s Bob Saget in a Mexican-style dress. In actuality, she is likely fictionalized and the product of corporate marketing and focus groups to create an image of Mexican authenticity and nostalgia. Given the hot sauce was developed and established in 1989 and grown through the 1990s, the focus group thing seems to be the most likely origin of La Chila.

Despite the fact that Cholula is barely older than I am, its recipe has origins that go back thousands of years, carried through time by oral instruction and traditions that predate Spanish conquerors. Rooted in traditional Mexican recipes, Cholula has evolved for a wider market while still trying to keep a classic and authentic Central American flavor.

It starts with peppers. To understand the heat of peppers, it’s good to have a baseline measurement, done using the Scoville scale. Measuring taste is difficult, as everyone has different tastes and resistance to spice based on their genetics and life experiences. The Scoville scale is a uniform and scientific measurement system that involves dissolving peppers in alcohol to extract and measure the capsaicin that gives the peppers their heat. A bell pepper with no heat registers as a 0 on the Scoville scale, while a jalapeño sits between 4,000 and 8,500 units.

Pequin peppers used in Cholula sit around 30,000 to 60,000 units on the scale, still much lower than habaneros, which register between 100,000 and 300,000 on the scale. Cholula also blends in árbol peppers, which register between 15,000 and 30,000 units on the Scoville scale — spicier than a jalapeño, but not enough to mace anyone with.

The peppers take more than seven months to cultivate from seed; and, once they are picked, they are dried and ground up to be mixed with other ingredients in Cholula’s secret recipe. Drying peppers reduces the water content of the pepper and makes the capsaicin more potent, giving them more heat.

Raw heat isn’t the end goal for Cholula, however. Hot sauce is meant to augment the flavor of food, not convert it into a molten ball of tasteless plasma.

The peppers are air-dried under the Mexican sun before they are ground. This method uses less energy than artificial heat, while also allowing the peppers to undergo a natural process of drying rather than an expedited one. The peppers are then ground into a fine paste — seeds and all — and this paste is put into a huge vat. From there, it’s pumped into wooden barrels through a long hose by workers and mixed with other ingredients to develop into that rich Cholula taste you know and love.

Cholula is bottled in glass for a number of reasons. Glass better preserves the contents and is easily recycled. It’s heavier in the hand and just feels better to the consumer to use in addition to conveying that sense of authenticity while using it. It costs more and is more fragile than a plastic container, but having handled my fair share of hot sauce bottles, I can safely say it’s worth every penny.

The iconic wooden cap and label are the last things added to the bottle. The wooden cap isn’t just practical due to its easy removal, but it’s also a nod to the authenticity and handcrafted roots of the sauce within. Also, it’s really easy to find when you set the bottle and the cap down and forget about it. How many plastic bottle caps have you lost, leaving you ultimately committed to downing that entire two-liter of root beer in a single sitting? Never once with Cholula, I can tell you that.

Stay curious, 7B.