12/6/07 | Pico Pica Hot Sauce
[ Currently Eating: Fajitas For Breakfast ]
Sorry for the later post this week - we’ve been dealing with a feeble internet connection lately. It was too frustrating to try and make blog posts when submitting the form could send 2 hours of work into Nowhereland. When it finally got fixed, I realized I didn’t have anything lined up to talk about.
So I turned to an old standby: Pico Pica Hot Sauce.
I don’t mean that I’ve written about this before, but I’ve been meaning to make a post about it for a year or so now. I call it a standby because we always have a bottle of this sitting in the fridge. My parents always had a bottle of this in their fridge. Actually, it seems like it was the same particular bottle for about 10 years…
Although it’s currrently distributed by Juanita’s Foods, it has been in production since 1937. According to the website, it was “one of the original bottled Mexican hot sauces in Southern California.” I believe that Juanita’s is also the number one seller of Menudo (not the band, the stomach pieces) in the U.S. as well.
What I always liked about Pico Pica’s hot sauce was that it IS an old standby. I originally got into it in the 80s after I discovered it tasted remarkably like Taco Bell hot sauce. It’s a little less watery and thin than I remember Taco Bell’s being, but not as thick as some other hot sauces. It’s a blended hot sauce made primarily of red chile peppers, tomatoes and spices.
On the heat scale, it’s not unbearably hot - I can take a lot more heat than this. But it’s pleasant to eat when you’re just hungry but want to add some zing to a bland burrito. It has a mild afterburn, but I wouldn’t call it mild hot sauce. The flavor has a fairly strong cumin or chile powder scent, and a bit of a “raw” taste to it that I suspect some people might not like. I think compared to Tapatio it’s milder and less of a cumin taste to it. But I haven’t tried them side by side.
What I like about it is that it doesn’t have as much of a vinegar taste like some other hot sauces - I mean I dig dashes of Tabasco for certain things like eggs and breakfast skillets, but if you want something to pour liberally on top of your meal then I like Pico Pica better.





I have been getting so much cereal lately for review. The thing with cereal is that I hate to keep opening new boxes until I’m done with the old ones - otherwise there are 10 boxes of cereal open. And since I don’t eat a TON of cereal for breakfast, they sometimes can go a bit stale.
Time for another trip down memory lane. It’s been ages since I had Froot Loops - I sort of associate those artificial fruit mini doughnuts with childhood because we used to only have them at my late aunt’s house when we were being babysat overnight. I remember Toucan Sam and his enormous multicolored nose uttering magical phrases like “follow your nose.” I think I may have been confused back then thinking he meant to put the Froot Loops UP your nose. They barely fit at the time. Ah, good times.





