a sauceCrystal Hot Sauce
also: Crystal · Crystal Louisiana's Pure Hot Sauce
A reddish-orange Louisiana pepper sauce made by Baumer Foods since 1923: aged red cayenne peppers, distilled vinegar, salt. Three ingredients on the 6 fl oz bottle; the gallon jug adds xanthan gum. Writers put it against Tabasco as having "a more prominent dark chile flavor, and a slightly subdued vinegar profile". Buffalo kitchens that do not buy Frank's usually buy this.
The story Cited · wp-crystal-hot-sauce
Baumer Foods started in New Orleans and stayed a family business. Its factory on Tulane Avenue in Mid-City carried a lighted sign — a chef stirring a pot, steam from the plant venting out through the pot — visible from Interstate 10 and known across the city. The preserves the sign advertised went into US military rations in the Second World War and are no longer made.
Hurricane Katrina wrecked much of the New Orleans plant in 2005, sign included. The company moved production up the Mississippi to Reserve, in St. John the Baptist Parish; the sign was replicated and set on top of a new apartment building on the old factory site. As of April 2021 the head office sits in Metairie.
Three million US gallons a year ship to seventy-five countries. The brand is popular in Saudi Arabia, carried there by Louisiana petroleum workers. David Chang has said Crystal is his favourite hot sauce, and Ed Currie, who bred the Carolina Reaper, called it "probably the best tasting of the table sauces."
How it is done Tradition
Same job as any cayenne bottle: melt butter, stir the sauce in warm, toss fried wings in it. Tradition holds — cooks who choose Crystal over Frank's say it needs a touch less butter, because the vinegar sits further back. It is also the pepper sauce that goes into a Nashville paste, into gumbo and onto eggs.
Today Harvested · fdc-crystal-hot-sauce
Made in Reserve, Louisiana; head office in Metairie. As of 16 September 2026 the USDA label panel for the 6 fl oz bottle reads 135 mg sodium in a 1 teaspoon serving — 405 mg in a tablespoon — with no sugar. Baumer publishes no Scoville number, which is the usual case: almost no wing-sauce maker does.
The particulars
| base | vinegar-pepper |
|---|---|
| heat | mild |
| styles | buffalo |
| region | New Orleans, The United States |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-16 |
On the label
| what was read | bottle · Baumer Foods, Inc. · Reserve, LA |
|---|---|
| pepper or chile | #1 on the label |
| vinegar | #2 on the label |
| butter or oil | — |
| tomato | — |
| sugar | — |
| soy sauce | — |
| mustard | — |
| sodium per tablespoon | 405 mg (the FDA counts 2,300 mg as a day) |
| sugar per tablespoon | 0 g (a tablespoon of table sugar is about 12.6 g) |
| Scoville | nobody publishes one for this bottle |
| the label, in order | aged red cayenne peppers, distilled vinegar, salt |
Read from this page, 2026-09-16. Measured off the 6 fl oz bottle. Label serving is 1 tsp (5 mL) = 0.333 tbsp; label sodium is 135 mg, so 135 × 3 = 405 mg per tablespoon. The 64 fl oz food-service jug carries a fourth ingredient, xanthan gum, and its USDA record omits sodium, so the small bottle is used here. No Scoville number is published by the maker or by a lab; Wikipedia's 'medium heat' is a description, not a measurement, and is not recorded as one. Town is the production plant; the head office is in Metairie. Every bottle we have read is on the sauce page.
Recipes you can use
Old cookbooks are printed whole, spelling and all. Where a recipe is still somebody's copyright, you get the ingredient list and a link to the rest.
Crystal Louisiana's Pure Hot Sauce, as labelled
- aged red cayenne peppers
- distilled vinegar
- salt
Ingredients only, in label order, from the USDA branded-food panel. Three lines on the 6 fl oz bottle; the 64 fl oz jug adds xanthan gum. Baumer's ageing process is not published.
Pepper vinegar
- half a dozen red peppers
- three dozen black peppercorns
- two tablespoonfuls of sugar
- a quart of vinegar
Copied verbatim, old spellings kept. Seventeen years before Baumer started bottling, a home cook is steeping red pepper in vinegar and sending it to the oyster plate.
Not to be confused with
- Frank's RedHot — The label. Frank's lists garlic powder; Crystal's small bottle lists three things and no garlic.
Who it runs with
Where we got it
- Crystal Hot Sauce · link
- Buffalo wing · link
- Carolina Reaper · link
- Tabasco sauce · link
- Crystal Louisiana's Pure Hot Sauce — branded food label (FDC ID 2300103) · link
- Scoville scale · link
- Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping — Marion Harland, 1906 · link
Where it came from: Cited a source we name · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Tradition what the tradition says, hedged · Inference this project's reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.