‘Scorpion’ Is Tabasco’s Hottest Hot Sauce, Ever

Beginning Wednesday, July 19, iconic hot sauce maker Tabasco will introduce a limited edition of the hottest hot sauce the company has ever made: the Scorpion Sauce.

And that’s not just a catchy name, either—the main ingredient in this eye-watering, mouth-numbing sauce is the Trinidad moruga scorpion pepper, native to the Moruga district of Trinidad and Tobago. Until it was ousted by the Carolina Reaper in 2013, the scorpion pepper was known as the hottest pepper in the world, with a mean heat score of 1.2 million on the Scoville scale, with some individual plants registering at 2 million.

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By comparison, the small-batch Scorpion sauce is nearly 20 times hotter than Tabasco’s Original Red Sauce, made from tabasco peppers, which have a peak Scoville score of 50,000.

It’s not for everyone, but if your approach to hot sauce is something like “the pain is how you know you’re alive,” then the sting of Scorpion Sauce is for you. In a nod to its Trinidadian heritage, the heat of the scorpion peppers is paired with a tropical touch—guava and pineapple—for “untamed heat and a touch of Caribbean sweetness.”

Get it online, or take the opportunity to visit the home of Tabasco—Avery Island, Louisiana.

To be clear, Tabasco's climb up the Scoville scale doesn't make Scorpion Sauce the hottest in the world—for instance, there's Get Bitten, a sauce made with pepper extract with a Scoville score of 6 million, and in fact, you can buy pepper extracts that register up to 9 million Scovilles if you're feeling experimental and not at all sentimental about your tastebuds.

While we're on the subject of pepper-induced pain, let's take a look at one of my favorite videos ever—the 2014 "very special chili tasting" of Danish National Chamber Orchestra, in which each person eats one of the hottest peppers in the world (Carolina Reapers, ghost peppers, and Trinidad scorpion peppers) and then has to perform Tango Jalousie. You'll feel their sweat and pain through your computer screen.

If there’s an even hotter hot sauce that ignites your soul, let me know what it is in the comments!