Great Sauce

We were just in Los Angeles, where we ate in Chinatown for two nights - once in a Chinese place and the other time in a Vietnamese restaurant. (We had Pho in the Vietnamese restaurant - terrific!) Both places had a hot sauce on the table. It was delicious, and we wondered about it. It seemed to be an all-purpose Asian hot sauce.

The day after we got back from L.A., we picked up the New York Times food section and saw an article about the sauce -- sriracha sauce, also known as "rooster sauce." See synopsis and link below.

This is a story of true entrepreneurship. A family makes hot sauce in Vietnam, comes to the U.S. and finds that there is a need for such a sauce in the Asian communities here. They start making it here, and the family hot sauce becomes an amazing success. It's stories like this that show how creativity and hard work can really be rewarded in our country, where free enterprise is prized. Read the article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/dining/20united.html

A Chili Sauce to Crow About

By JOHN T. EDGE

Published: May 20, 2009

Some American consumers believe sriracha to be a Thai sauce. Others think it is Vietnamese. The truth is that sriracha may be best understood as an American sauce, a polyglot purée.