BRIDGETOWN — Bottles of a leading brand of Sriracha hot sauce are suddenly hard to find, driving up prices for them as high as $150 — but there are alternatives to opening your wallet that wide.
It’s the second time in two years that Huy Fong Foods — the best-known producer of Sriracha in the U.S. — has had low inventory of their tangy sauce with the green cap and rooster label, a problem they attribute to insufficient chile pepper supplies. That and a bit of pandemic hoarding combined to send prices soaring, with some third-party sellers cashing in.
Rather than fall for the hype, remember there’s a world of hot sauce alternatives.
Though the brand has near iconic status, Huy Fong’s is not the only Sriracha on the market, nor is it even made in the Thai town that gave it its name.
The bright-red sauce was created by Thanom Chakkapak, a home cook in Thailand who mixed a combination of fresh chiles, vinegar, garlic, salt and sugar for her own use. Around the 1930s, she began marketing the sauce as Sriraja Panich, named after her coastal hometown, Si Racha. It became Thailand’s best-selling hot sauce.
Years later, a fan of the sauce, David Tran, moved from Vietnam to California and founded Huy Fong, which made a thicker, spicier hot sauce, inspired by Sriraja Panich, that ultimately conquered U.S. kitchens. Huy Fong sources its chiles from Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, where a historic drought has now disrupted the supply chain.
That means a lot fewer bottles on store shelves.
Luckily, hot sauces and similar condiments are not difficult to make, and cooks around the world have alternatives that deliver both heat and complex layers of flavor.
Here are just three alternatives, from Barbados, Mexico and Cambodia. They won’t taste identical to Huy Fong Sriracha, but they don’t have to. All are easy to make, and you can relax about the missing rooster.