Food For Thought – Tabasco!

This week on Food For Thought, a visit to the only place in the world Tabasco Sauce is made, Avery Island, Louisiana.  Pictured here are the barrels of ‘pepper mash’, sealed with salt, which ferment for 3 years before being made into Tabasco.  If you want to listen to my tour in streaming RealAudio, click here .

The people who make Tabasco Sauce, the McIhenny Company, have an extensive website.  It’s loaded with facts and figures, myths and lore.

This is Hamilton Polk, master cooper, on the left, and my tour guide, George Segura, on the right. Hamilton has been maintaining the barrels at McIlhenny for the past 35 years.  They get the barrels from whiskey companies, which only use them once.  They’ve been charred on the inside, so Hamilton and his co-workers de-char them and clean them up for the Tabasco mash.  Some of the barrels are up to 100 years old!  I took a whiff inside one of the whisky barrels before it had been de-charred, and nearly passed out from the fumes!

This is what the pepper mash looks like after it has fermented for 3 years in the barrels and has had vinegar added to it.  The peppers used to make Tabasco are so hot I could feel the heat rising from the vat. The seeds, skins and pulp from the peppers are then filtered out before bottling.  The seeds are sold to companies that make topical analgesics like sports rubs.  The dried pulp is sold to New Orleans area restaurants, where chefs like to add it to the water for their crawfish boils.

  The bottling part of the factory is busy and noisy, it can fill up to 600 thousand bottles of Tabasco a day!  There is a smaller, specialty bottling line where miniature bottles of Tabasco are filled, then labeled with the logos of the clients, which include George Bush and the seal of the President of the United States of America.

Special thanks to George Segura for a great tour of Avery Island, Tony Simmons, executive vice-president of McIhenny and the great-great grandson of company founder Edmund McIhenny, Hamilton Polk and Dr. Shane Bernard, historian and curator for the McIhenny Company.  I hope he gets his wish…that is to find a letter that may have been written by Edmund McIhenny to someone that would explain where he got the first peppers he used to make the sauce and how he got the idea to make it in the first place.

I have much more material to share from Avery Island that I couldn’t put in my Food For Thought broadcast…look for it in one of my future podcasts.