Sriracha Salad Dressing (2024)

FAQs

Is sriracha sauce healthy? ›

Therefore, sriracha is likely healthiest when it's considered as one small, nutrient-rich part of an overall healthy diet. Pairing the hot sauce with other nutrient-dense foods, like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean proteins, will boost its nutritional value.

Sriracha (/sɪˈrætʃə/ sirr-ATCH-ə or /sɪˈrɑːtʃə/ sirr-AH-chə; Thai: ศรีราชา, pronounced [sǐːrāːtɕʰāː]) is a type of hot sauce or chili sauce made from a paste of chili peppers, distilled vinegar, pickled garlic, sugar, and salt.

How spicy is sriracha? Sriracha brands will vary in their intensity, but as hot sauces go, sriracha is considered to be on the mild side. Depending on the crop of peppers used, sriracha can range from 1,000 to 2,500 Scoville units. To put that into perspective, Tabasco sauce runs anywhere between 2,500 and 5,000.

Sriracha though will have a fruitier profile than a buffalo sauce and will often have a heavy garlic presence. In terms of uses, a sriracha style hot sauce is suited well to seafood, noodle dishes or kebabs.

Potential Risks of Sriracha

The health risks of sriracha boil down to the same health risks of many other savory condiments: too much salt. There is a lot of salt in sriracha, and too much salt can raise blood pressure.

Sriracha. Sriracha is one of the best low-calorie condiments. It's very low in sodium and also contains capsaicin, which helps reduce cholesterol in your body and even inhibits the growth of cancer. Capsaicin is also known to help regular blood sugar levels even help you lose weight.

Melinda's Thai Sweet Chili Sauce

Melinda's makes over a dozen substitutes for Sriracha that every spice lover can buy online. The closest to Sriracha is the tasty Thai Sweet Chili, but don't sleep on others, including the habanero honey mustard and black truffle hot sauce.

Though sriracha won't spoil, the flavor will change and since chili peppers change color over time as they are exposed to air, older sriracha sometimes looks brown. Every bottle comes with a best-before date, "lasered on towards the neck of the bottle. You can feel it with your fingers," says a rep from Huy Fong Foods.

Here's why: The specialty jalapeno chili peppers Huy Fong Foods has been using in its hot sauce since 1988 were supplied by a single grower — Underwood Ranches, in Ventura County, California — are now no longer available to the Irwindale, California, Sriracha sauce manufacturer, thanks to a fiery dispute that is raging ...

Frank's Red Hot sauce tends to lean a bit more on the vinegar side in terms of flavor and has a thinner consistency, whereas the sriracha we are familiar with today is thicker and the flavor of the chili peppers is more pronounced (via Food Champs).

Why is sriracha so good? ›

Basic Sriracha is made of chilli peppers, vinegar, garlic, salt, and sugar. The quality of the chillis and garlic and the ratios of the added ingredients are the other defining factors of the classic Sriracha flavour. Thai chefs are masters at combining simple ingredients in exact amounts to create a definitive taste.

While Tabasco sauce is more Cajun-inspired and is composed of only distilled vinegar, red pepper, and salt, Sriracha is more ketchup-y with a laundry list of ingredients including chili, sugar, and garlic.

Today, the bottle lists the ingredients as: "chili, sugar, salt, garlic, distilled vinegar, potassium sorbate, sodium bisulfite and xanthan gum". Huy Fong Foods' chili sauces are made from fresh, red, jalapeño chili peppers and contain no added water or artificial colors. Garlic powder is used rather than fresh garlic.

These trusty bottles of Sriracha — a thick, spicy blend of chiles, garlic, vinegar, and salt — are now so ubiquitous that it feels like the sauce has been part of East Asian cuisine since, well, forever.

Unfortunately, one condiment that ranks worse than ketchup on the health scale is Sriracha sauce, Jalali says, mainly because it contains so much sugar. "The label lists the ingredients in teaspoons, but most people are eating closer to a tablespoon with their meals," she says.

Sriracha

One teaspoon of Sriracha sauce only contains 5 calories, but it also contains one gram of sugar, according to the nutritional label on a Sriracha bottle. That might not seem like very much, but few Sriracha enthusiasts will be satisfied with just one teaspoon.

Hot sauce can help to reduce the amount of insulin needed to digest food, translating into a lowered overall level of blood sugar.

But even if the calorie count is not really zero — a tablespoon of zero-calorie sriracha sauce is 12 calories, compared to four calories in a teaspoon — some users think these products are worth the price.