My Favorite Sriracha Hot Sauces

Hot sauce is a hot business, literally and figuratively, which explains all the sriracha options on supermarket shelves these days. Rather than try to try them all (it's impossible), I'm focusing on my favorite sriracha hot chile sauces. They are not the same and I like them for various reasons.

The photo above represents what I have around the house right now. I used to have more but I had to clean out my pantry and unload ones that had been around for too long. These were purchased at mainstream supermarkets, Asian markets, and discount grocers. I also have one that I made. Here's how my favorite sriracha hot sauces stack up!

The Rooster

Huy Fong's Rooster sauce is associated with Viet food and restaurants and is the default sriracha chile sauce. It's tart and hot, with an edge of fermented garlic. It's made in Southern California and is beloved. The rooster sauce is more assertive than other brands of sriracha. When I develop my own recipes or test someone else's, I use the Rooster's sriracha as a benchmark.

I used to think that it's available at all supermarkets but in Montgomery, Alabama, at a Piggly Wiggly, there was no Rooster sriracha. The shelves were full of southern hot sauces tailored for the African American table. That experience taught me a lot about what we consider to be mainstream and a given.

Original Sriracha

On that note, Huy Fong's sriracha is NOT the original one. The original version is contained in the slender bottles of Sriraja Panich, made in Thailand. I recently ran out but I saw it at the Buford Highway Farmers Market near Atlanta.

Sriraja Panich uses the recipe developed decades ago by people in the seaside town of Si Racha in Thailand. It's debated as to who created sriracha first but it was a woman who manufactured and popularized the hot sauce that would become Sriraja Panich.

The taste is sweeter and mellower than that of the Rooster version. I like it because I can eat more of the condiment without it taking over other flavors in my food. The Rooster version is aggressive whereas the Thai Sriraja Panich is more friendly. It's hard to find at Asian markets but as with many things these days, you can order it from Amazon!

Shark Sriracha

Another Thai brand of sriracha that I like is the Shark brand. It's a regular at well stocked Chinese, Chinese-Vietnamese and Thai markets. It has a little more tang than the Sriraja Panich, and you may get Shark in different heat levels.

This is a big bottle, like a wine bottle. The shark is on the side of the label, should you be looking for the big fish.

Yellow Sriracha

[Update 10/4/2019] And, sriracha comes in more than just red! I totally forgot about this amazing sriracha that I picked up at Buford Highway Farmers Market near Atlanta. It was on an end cap display so I figured it was an outlier. But Michael just reminded me of it via his comment below.

This sriracha was lovely tasting -- a round flavor with moderate heat that did not sear you. It finished with stealthy oomph, a little more than the red sriracha (but maybe I'd had too much beer when we tried it).

Nevertheless, the yellow color is beautiful. Because of my carry-on luggage situation, I left it in Birmingham at an appreciative friend's house. I did drive it from Georgia into Alabama. 😉

Thanks to Michael, I now know you can purchase this yellow sriracha via Amazon. Note that the product description says that this is based on the original sriracha recipe. As mentioned above, there may have been several people who created the original hot sauce in Thailand. You can try them all!

Sriracha from Vietnam

Viet people rarely pass on a good opportunity so even though sriracha is a Thai condiment, Viet people have embraced it to make it themselves. Vietnam has a delightfully mellow hot sauce called tuong ot, which I developed a recipe for in The Pho Cookbook. The best one is made by Cholimex, a leading food manufacturer in the motherland.

I've recently spotted Cholimex sriracha at Buford Highway Farmer's Market and C Fresh market in Des Moines, Iowa. I've yet to see it in California but keep my fingers crossed.

For a tasting organized by Better and Homes and Gardens magazine in Des Moines, I had people try Cholimex and the Rooster. A number of people preferred the easy going, tangy sweet-heat of Cholimex. It was bold, yet amiable.

Note that Huy Fong introduced its sriracha to Vietnam back in 2017. There was mixed reception, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. Cholimex was already producing hot sauce and I imagine it wasn't hard for them to come up with a Thai-style sriracha. Hopefully more will be exported and distributed abroad.

Finding Viet Sriracha

But lucky us, Vietnam-made sriracha is already within reach. When I was doing field research for Vietnamese Food Any Day, I spent a lot of time in the Asian section of American supermarkets. At Whole Foods, I spotted Fix brand of sriracha and inspected the label to find out that it's made in Vietnam!

The red version has a garlicky kick and a flavor that's between the Thai version and the Cholimex version. I liked it a lot. Recently, I purchased the green sriracha. The lemongrass flavor isn't super pronounced but the sauce itself has a nice earthy heat.

And if you're an Aldi shopper, look for its private label sriracha under the Fusia brand. About three years ago, it came in red and green versions but disappeared for a while. Now I see that it's available via Instacart.

Fusia sriracha is made in Vietnam and is very pleasant, not aggressive. It goes well with the rolling hills flavor profile of many Vietnamese dishes.

Homemade Sriracha

Each year, around now when the chiles are ripe red, I pick a bunch and/or buy a bunch to make my own sriracha. This was from last year and the bottle is nearly empty. It's old and not as bright as before but it's still very good. It's made from a Singaporean style sriracha recipe that I posted several years ago.

Why make your own sriracha? Because it's fun to ferment stuff and when you make your own, you realize the vagaries of making hot sauce but you also get to dial in your own flavors! (If you want to stick to tradition, make a batch from this Thai-style sriracha recipe.)

So poke around when you're shopping. You never know what you'll find. As a parting note, this is the Southeast Asian chile sauce area at the Buford Highway Farmers Market.

The international mega market separates out inventory by region. Imagine what you'd find in the Latin and American sections!

Happy heat seeking. If you have a favorite brand, your opinion is welcomed!