On November 13, 2005 I coined a new word/term, "Hotsauce booger".

What is a hot sauce booger?

A hot sauce booger is the dry, crusty thing that grows around the bottle-cap of your hot sauce bottle and inadvertently falls into your food or on the floor and gets stuck to the bottom of your foot every time you use your hot sauce. It is closely related to the ketchup booger and the spaghetti-sauce booger, but has a slightly tangier taste. Hotsauce boogers are more common on thicker hot sauces such as Tapatio, but they have been spotted on thinner sauces such as Tabasco. Hotsauce boogers tend to grow in cool, dry places such as kitchen pantries. The average size of a hotsauce booger is about 5mm, but they can grow in length to over 2cm. The color of a hot sauce booger ranges from black, to dark brownish-red. They are usually crescent shaped and have the consistency of regular nose-boogers.

What to do with your hot sauce boogers?

I generally flick my hot sauce boogers across the room into the sink, but as mentioned above, they often fall to the floor, or into my food before I get a chance to flick them. If they do reach the sink, they tend to rejuvenate and become semi-slimy from the moisture, until they get rinsed down the drain. Because of the dry-nature of hot sauce boogers, it is difficult to wipe them on the underside of a table like one would do with a regular booger - they usually just fall right off.

Don't be ashamed of your hot sauce boogers!



Everybody has hot sauce boogers, so you should not be ashamed of them. Do your best to wipe your hot sauce bottles with a paper towel or tissue often and you can reduce the amount of your hot sauce boogers. Before throwing a dinner party or inviting friends over for tacos, avoid the dreaded screams of "a hot sauce booger just fell in my meat!" by checking your bottles beforehand.

If you still aren't sure what a hotsauce booger looks like, I've included a photo of some of the better 'pics' from my collection. The ruler and the dime on the right are for scale. You can click on the photo for a larger version, so you don't miss any of the detail in the boogers.  ¶ 5:53 PM