Mild Hot Sauces

What "mild" means on our scale

Mild is our bottom band: under 2,500 Scoville units, which is where a jalapeño starts. These are the sauces you can pour rather than dot, where the pepper turns up as flavor (fruit, smoke, something green) instead of as a burn that takes over the plate.

It's the bottle that's rated, not the pepper

Every sauce gets one of our four levels, and the rating is for the finished bottle. That's why about a quarter of the sauces here still list habanero: once a little of it is diluted by vinegar, fruit and vegetables, what's left is the habanero's apricot flavor without much of its heat. The most common pepper in the collection is the jalapeño, in about a third of the bottles, followed by habanero, serrano and chipotle.

Flavor first

Garlic is in three quarters of these sauces and onion in half, with lime in a third and cilantro, tomato and carrot close behind. A good number are chipotle sauces, where smoke-dried jalapeño does the work without much fire, and the sweeter ones lean on honey or pineapple.

How to use it

Breakfast, mostly: eggs come up on more of these bottles than anything else, then chicken, tacos, burgers and pizza. Because the heat is gentle you can use a mild sauce as an ingredient (a spoonful in mayo, sour cream or a marinade) rather than as a finishing drop.

Where to go next

If mild is starting to feel like seasoning rather than heat, medium is the next band up and our biggest one, with the same everyday flavors and a kick you can feel. To stay here and still find something new, the chipotle and honey collections are both full of mild bottles.