Makes everything taste like Excellent.

The Stax Bros' love for various hot sauces is legendary.  One weekend, when we lived in Portland, Oregon (but only until the statute of limitations ran out) Lincoln and I, and a couple of other brothers, Leto and Voltaire, sat in the basement of our house and had a little Hot Sauce Party.

We had a little table, on which was a box of saltines, a couple of cans of spray cheese, a beef summer sausage the size of a calf's leg, and a big knife with which to slice the sausage.  There might have been a few chairs as well, and my mountain bike was down there.  Somebody had given me one of those home-brew beer-in-a-bag things, which we had made and then hung up on a nail down there to ferment, and it was time for that to spring forth.

We had gone up the hill to an upscale grocery that had a huge hot sauce selection, and Lincoln and I had spent about seventy dollars on a wide variety of different sauces, each one sounding like it had something to prove: DAVE'S INSANITY SAUCE; FRANK'S ASS-KICKIN' HELL SAUCE; EL DIABLO'S DEMON BREW; RICK'S I DIDN'T GET ENOUGH ATTENTION FROM MY FATHER AS A CHILD SO NOW I'M OVERCOMPENSATING BIG DICK SAUCE; and so forth. Laden with a paper grocery bag (kids: ask your parents) full of sauces and possibly some extra beer in case the bag thing didn't work out, we wandered back home, chased a baby possum out of the basement, watched Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, and then got cracking.

It's simple.  First, you take a cracker from the box.  Next, make a small ring around the edge of the cracker with the spray cheese.  This is to act as a retaining wall for the hot sauce.  Then, you select a hot sauce and pour some inside the cheese wall.  The idea is that you want to make a sort of pool or reservoir of hot sauce, surrounded by cheese.  Then, you put a disc of summer sausage on top, then pop the whole thing in your mouth. 

Then, you ride the bike three times around the basement, without cracking your head on the low ceiling beams or touching the concrete floor.  I'm not sure why this was an important part of the Hot Sauce Party, but you have to remember that beer was involved.  Also, we are guys. 

So, we like hot sauce, is the point I was apparently trying to make here.  Let's go ahead and assume that it was.

So when I tell you that Sriracha Sauce is the most awesome bitchin excellent hot sauce that the universe can provide, you know that I'm not succumbing to hyperbole.  Well, okay, yeah, I am, actually. 

But it is pretty darn good.  Lincoln and I first encountered it on an earlier visit to Portland, where it was served with a particularly favorite food of ours, lumpia, a sort of Filipino egg-roll/burrito/meaty snack sort of thing.  I squirted some of the sauce on there and wow was it tasty.

So I spent a long time assuming it was Filipino at first, then, upon looking at the legend on the bottle, Cambodian, or possibly Vietnamese.

Turns out that Tướng Ớt Sriracha is as American as apple pie, bangers and mash, pho, and burritos.  David Tran, a Vietnamese guy of Chinese descent, moved to Los Angeles in 1980 and, apparently guided by Divine Providence, began to make his own version of this traditional Thai sauce.  He of course, has his own company, Huy Fong Foods, which, as near as we can tell, makes nothing that isn't absolutely delicious.

Like another fluid I recently reviewed, a little dab of this stuff goes a long way.  As a truck driver, I spend a lot of time on the road, and I am trying to be reasonably careful about what I eat, in the interests of not exploding from a stroke before I reach fifty.  At the same time, I'm not really interested in living to be fifty if I can't have some flavor in my life, so I always keep a bottle of this stuff (as well as a bottle of Tapatio Mexican hot sauce) in the cooler.  I get a Veggie Delight from Subway with no dressings, bring it out to the truck, and lay one thin line of sauce down the middle of the sandwich, and it's heaven.

The sauce has its own fan club on Facebook, and hundreds of people are currently petitioning the company to create a t-shirt with the rooster logo on the front.  Most people want the shirt to be red, with the logo in white and the collar and cuffs to be the green of the plastic cap.

I think that would be so cool.

So, next time you're looking to spice up that sandwich, or pizza, or tray of egg rolls, or German chocolate cake, or whatever, reach for the big red rooster bottle.  You won't be disappointed.