Medium Hot Sauces

What "medium" means on our scale

Medium runs from 2,500 to 30,000 Scoville units: the band between a jalapeño and a cayenne. It's our biggest heat level, and for most people it's the everyday one: enough heat to feel it arrive and fade, with plenty of room left for what the sauce actually tastes of.

What's in the bottle

Habanero leads here, in a little over four in ten, used with a lighter hand than it is further up the scale. Jalapeño is in about a quarter, cayenne in one in seven, and serrano, scotch bonnet and ghost pepper turn up in smaller numbers, usually blended in behind a milder pepper.

Flavors that carry

Garlic is in two thirds of these sauces and onion in nearly half, with lime, tomato, carrot and ginger the next most common. Carrot is worth knowing about: it's the backbone of a lot of Caribbean-style sauces, where it adds body and a little sweetness that keeps habanero in check.

How to use it

This is the bottle that lives on the table. Eggs, tacos, chicken and pizza come up most often on these labels, then wings and burgers. A medium sauce is also the easiest one to cook with, since a spoonful stirred into a pot of soup, chili or rice seasons the whole thing without anyone reaching for the water.

Where to go next

Coming down from here, mild keeps the same everyday flavors with the heat pulled back. Going up, hot starts at 30,000 Scoville units and is where habanero and ghost pepper stop being background.