SCOVILLES ON THE SUPERMARKET SHELF.

The Cold Spring Shops Way when it comes to salsa and hot sauce is to brew up the former, and send out from time to time for high-test versions of the latter.  There are, according to Food and Wine editors, gems to be had at your local grocer.

To help get you started on your hot sauce journey, our editors performed a masked taste test of nine brands found at most grocery stores. Hot sauce taste testing is not for the faint of heart (or palate); we sampled these sauces along with a big stack of quesadillas. The hot sauce was poured into numbered containers and the testers rated them and gave comments.

For hot wings, they recommend Frank's Red Hot, which to my (possibly overstressed) taste, is Tabasco-adjacent; that might be a pattern as they also commended Zatarain's Cajun Hot, another Tabasco-adjacent product.  Recall, dear reader, that Tabasco grow all their peppers on sacred ground near New Iberia, Louisiana.  They also had good things to say about Cholula, which might have been out of the taco rotation here for too long.