Day 1: Today's Pick — A Hot Sauce From Yuca, Florida (Pop. 412)

We were in the panhandle for a wedding. We pulled into a gas station outside Yuca that had been converted into a sandwich shop, ordered a Cuban, and were handed a bottle of something called Curt's Backyard Hot with a red Sharpie label and instructions to "go easy."

We did not go easy.

This is, hand-to-heart, the best small-batch hot sauce we've tried in three years of putting hot sauce on everything. It's a habanero base — the fruit is unmistakable, mango-adjacent, that florid quality that habanero gets when somebody respects it — but it's been smoked over something Curt won't disclose. (We asked. He laughed.) The texture is right too: thick enough to hold a line on top of a fried egg, thin enough to lace through a bowl of rice without pooling.

The story, in brief

Curt is a former line cook who bought the gas station in 2019 because he wanted to make sandwiches and bottle the sauce his grandmother taught him. He bottles 200 bottles a week, sells them out of the gas station, and ships maybe 40 of them to a list of regulars he keeps in a spiral notebook. There is no website. There is a phone number printed on the label, and when you call it, Curt answers.

We do not know how to scale this recommendation. We don't think Curt wants to.

What it tastes like

Imagine a habanero hot sauce. Now make the front fruitier. Now imagine somebody put the bottle next to a campfire for an hour. Now make the back end a little more sour, a little more tomato-bright. That's it. That's the sauce.

It's spicy — meaningfully spicy — but it doesn't ask for a sacrifice. We've used it on:

• Eggs, every variety
• Rice and beans (transcendent)
• Pizza (correct)
• A grilled cheese (incorrect, but we tried)
• Stirred into mayonnaise for a sandwich spread (excellent, do this)

The bottle

Five ounces. The label is paper, hand-applied, and falls off in the dishwasher within three cycles. Curt does not care. The cap is a generic black plastic that doesn't drip. The pour is correct.

How to actually buy it

Pull off I-10 east of Pensacola. Look for a former Texaco. There is no sign. You will know.

Or call the number. Curt answers.

Tomorrow: a kitchen sponge from a small German town that has, somehow, become the only sponge in three of our test households.