How Austin Hot Sauce Brands Are Solving the Great Sriracha Shortage

ATX Hot Sauce founder and President John McClellan (Photo by John Anderson)

The clear tapered bottle. The bright green twist nozzle. The rooster icon on the label. The vivid red liquid. It's tough to think of a hot sauce that's more instantly recognizable than Huy Fong sriracha, and it's equally hard to come up with a sauce that's more beloved.

Sriracha's balance of heat, sweetness, acidity, and flavor gives it an advantage that few other hot sauces can claim: It makes your food spicier, but it also tastes really good. But Huy Fong sriracha's legions of fans currently find themselves suffering through a product shortage that has persisted for more than three years, causing sriracha droughts in grocery stores and specialty shops, along with skyrocketing bottle prices on the secondhand market. If you (like most Austinites) can't get your hands on that increasingly precious rooster sauce, fear not – Austin's hometown hot sauce makers know how you feel and are ready to fill the sriracha void.

"It's all the best things," says Yellowbird Sauce CEO George Milton of sriracha's enduring appeal. "The combination of sweet and salt and umami and garlic, spicy but not too spicy – it just makes you feel something."

Milton tells us that Yellowbird, a condiment company with roots in Austin that's now gaining national recognition and racking up serious Amazon sales numbers, decided to try out their own spin on sriracha several years ago (prior to the Huy Fong shortages). For Milton and the Yellowbird team, the appeal of a sriracha-esque hot sauce rested on its versatility. "People realized that [Huy Fong sriracha is] good on fried eggs and on burgers and on sushi and hey, why not try it on a taco?" he says. It goes with everything, it's appealing to heat fiends and more cautious consumers alike, and it's earned the approval of countless pro chefs. And because "people are eating it," non-Huy Fong brands "will be making it and coming up with ways to make it better."

Yellowbird's take on that challenge resulted in Blue Agave sriracha, which Milton's team makes with all-natural ingredients like red jalapeños, blue agave nectar, organic vinegar, garlic, and lime juice. Yellowbird also includes tangerine juice in its sriracha, which amps up the citrus notes and works with the blue agave to balance the sauce's heat and tang with gentle sweetness. Milton tells us that he originally built Yellowbird sriracha as an ode to margaritas – it has citrus and agave and tangerine juice, which Milton "likes to use instead of Cointreau" in his margs – which gives this Huy Fong alternative a distinctly Texan twist.

Another local purveyor committed to weaving Texan elements into the traditional sriracha flavor profile is Diamondback, a Central Texas hot sauce brand that dubs its signature product "Texafied sriracha." Like Yellowbird, Diamondback launched its sriracha prior to the Huy Fong drought. "We've been selling our sauce at H-E-B and Central Market for five years," explains Natalie Jardine, vice president of Texas Legend Foods, Diamondback's parent company. The "Texafied" aspect of Diamondback comes courtesy of its higher heat level, which is balanced by a higher sweetness level. The combination of the two, along with a distinct umami funk provided by the fermented red jalapeño mash that serves as the sauce's base, gives Diamondback sriracha a flavor profile reminiscent of an excellent East Texas barbecue sauce.

Another Central Texas hot sauce artisan making fermented sriracha is ATX Hot Sauce, an award-winning small-batch operation based in Austin. Founder and President John McClellan tells us that fermentation both loans the sriracha an attractive undercurrent of funk and also helps keep the sauce shelf-stable in a way that doesn't require extra vinegar. "A lot of sauces are cooked with a lot of vinegar to get a low pH for shelf stability. We only add as much vinegar as we need for flavor, and we use the fermentation process to drop the pH levels and give it better stability," McClellan explains.

ATX Hot Sauce's Texas sriracha includes a number of unique ingredients, from plums to cardamom to cane sugar. As far as the "Texas" element is concerned, McClellan's team uses dried ancho chiles (a beloved Tex-Mex ingredient) in addition to fresh peppers. Also, while ATX Hot Sauce sources the red Fresno chiles in its sriracha from California, they also weave in peppers grown right in Wimberley, Texas.

The Huy Fong shortage owes its longevity (at least in part) to the fact that Huy Fong grows all of its peppers on its own proprietary California farm. If drought conditions affect that specific area of the state, the brand can't produce enough sriracha to meet demand. Austin's craft sriracha makers, however, all seek to diversify their supply by working with multiple farms and farmers. Also, because these companies are all on the smaller side, they don't need to stress about producing the volume of sauce that Huy Fong is expected to release.

But pepper growth isn't the only factor that influences Huy Fong's limited availability. McClellan mentions that "there are a lot of countries around the world that are having labor shortages – we have them in the United States for sure. And it's very meticulous work to pick peppers, so you need a good workforce to do that." He adds that supply chain issues have slowed down the production side of condiment companies, especially those on the scale of Huy Fong. "It's not just the product itself that you need to think about, but also the container that holds it." He notes that about a year ago, ATX Hot Sauce found it difficult to get the bottles and caps that they need, even with their small-batch level of output.

Yet, even despite their challenges and their fairly daunting sriracha-related goals, ATX Hot Sauce, Diamondback, and Yellowbird all have the infrastructure, the local support, and the determination to keep our city well-stocked with spicy, sweet, and garlicky rooster sauce until – and even beyond – the time Huy Fong reappears on store shelves throughout Central Texas. Milton notes that he "doesn't root against Huy Fong – they're iconic." Nevertheless, the Huy Fong sriracha shortage has provided these local purveyors the opportunity to prove to Austinites that they are more than capable of stepping into the rooster-sauce-shaped hole in their lives.

Yellowbird and ATX Hot Sauce are among the hot sauce vendors slated to appear at The Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival on Sun., Sept. 10. For more info visit austinchronicle.com/hotsauce.