Hot sauce saved from rising tide

NY Times:

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The McIlhenny family knew Hurricane Rita would bring high winds and rain to southern Louisiana. They had heeded an evacuation order and had a volunteer crew of workers in case something went wrong. They assumed Avery Island, one of the highest points along the coast and home to their Tabasco sauce, would be fine.

They were wrong.

The day Rita made landfall, a guard called at 8 a.m. and said water was rising quickly. Everyone on the island raced over to the low-lying factory to see what they could do. The sight gave them pause.

Water was starting to cover the main road leading to the factory and was gaining ground quickly. Employees jumped on forklifts to move some of the barrels of hot sauce onto pallets to give them a few inches off the ground. Others ferried computers to the main office up the hill. The low-lying pepper fields were underwater and white caps dotted the surface. Two hours later, the water was four inches from the factory floor.

And then it stopped. At 9 feet 8 inches, it was nearly double the highest flood level anyone could remember.

While the factory was saved by mere inches, the family lost some of its pepper plants, a gatehouse and six days of bottling to the storm.

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The McIlhenny Company is now one of the country's biggest hot sauce makers and turns out as many as 720,000 two-ounce bottles every day. Its slender glass bottles are found in soldiers' rations, restaurant tables across the country and in 161 countries, according to the company.

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For all the variation, the family has stuck to the same basic recipe ­ peppers, salt and vinegar ­ and production techniques since its beginning. After the Civil War, Edmund McIlhenny experimented with growing peppers on Avery Island as a way to spice up his food, said Shane K. Bernard, the company's historian and curator. They still follow Edmund's growing instructions and use seeds from the original plants.

Most of the peppers are now grown in Latin America ­ they ran out of room here in 1965 and started experimenting with plants in Mexico ­ but all the seeds are still grown on the island. While different climates and soils affect a pepper's heat level and flavor, the McIlhenny Company blends them in the final product so the taste remains familiar.

When the peppers are harvested, they are shipped back to Avery Island where they are ground into mash. Salt is added and the mixture is put into old whiskey barrels from distilleries like Jack Daniels and Jim Beam to age for up to three years. (The bright red mash is so corrosive that forklifts last only six years.) After three years, a family member samples the mash and, if approved, it is mixed with vinegar and stirred for one month. The seeds and skins are then removed and the sauce bottled.

The family has not tweaked Tabasco to shave expenses or lower prices because they make money from more than just the sauce. On Avery Island, a 2,200-acre salt dome west of New Orleans, they mine rock salt, pump oil and natural gas and operate Jungle Gardens, a botanical garden. They also reuse everything, from selling their used oak barrels to selling the seed mash to a company for use in candies.

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I carried a bottle in Vietnam to tweak the C rations. I still enjoy their sauce and apparently a lot of other people do too. There is much more in the story. I think I may have to do a tour one of these days.