The purist hot sauce for devoted chileheads

Call us loony, but we like our hot sauce to taste like its main ingredient: chile peppers.

For our money, then, there's no finer fiery condiment than Youk's Hot Sauce.

The vermillion liquid is the creation of Scott Youkilis, the chef at San Francisco's Maverick restaurant. A few years ago, he found himself with a glut of organic peppers from the Bay Area's celebrated Mariquita Farm. "We meant to order a pound but ordered a case," he recalls.

So desperation bred creativity: Youkilis roasted the peppers, then blended them with the simplest of ingredients: distilled white vinegar and salt.

A little trial and error yielded the perfect ratio of red jalapeños, red serranos and cayenne peppers for a hot sauce that glowed with the unmistakable--and unadulterated--burn of capsicum.

The stuff is available at the restaurant or online ($7 for 3 ounces or $18 for three 3-ounce bottles). Our only advice: Use liberally. The sauce's tagline has become "It goes on anything!"--which we didn't even realize until we'd been dousing it on everything from tacos to chicken wings with gleeful abandon.

src:  Tasting Table