Hot Times at the Tabasco Plant

Hi Blog!

We are settled into Betty's RV Park in Abbeville, Louisiana. We spent the first few days here hunkered down due to the freezing weather and ice storms. Now that temperatures have warmed up, we are starting to get out and about. Betty is famous for her hospitality and is an amazing host. She has made a list of all the things in the area we needed to explore.

On Monday, January 22, 2018, we caravanned with several other Betty's residents to Avery Island - the home of Tabasco!

Here is our crew as we prepare for our tour. Our first stop was the history museum.

Tabasco sauce was first produced in 1868 by Edmund McIlhenny, a Maryland-born former banker who moved to Louisiana around 1840. McIlhenny initially used discarded cologne bottles to distribute his sauce to family and friends. McIlhenny is one of just a few U.S. companies to have received a royal warrant of appointment that certifies the company as a supplier to Queen Elizabeth II, who - not coincidentally - loves Tabasco sauce. We learned lots of other cool facts about Tabasco while we strolled around the museum.

Originally all peppers used in Tabasco sauce were grown on Avery Island. Today peppers grown on the Island are used to produce seed stock, which is then shipped to foreign growers, primarily in Central and South America. More predictable weather and readily available farmland in these locales allow a constant year-round supply. This ensures the availability of peppers should severe weather or other problems occur at a particular growing location. Following company tradition, peppers are picked by hand. To ensure ripeness, pickers compare peppers to a little red stick (le petit bâton rouge); peppers that match the color of the stick are then introduced into the sauce production process. Pictured below is the Tabasco pepper plant. We were surprised at how tiny the peppers are.

Peppers are ground into a mash on the day of harvest and placed along with salt in white oak barrels (previously used for Jack Daniel's whiskey or Buffalo Trace bourbon). To prepare the barrel, the inside of the barrel is de-charred (top layer of wood is removed), torched, and cleaned, to minimize the presence of any residual whiskey. The barrels are then filled with mash and topped with salt and stored in warehouses on Avery Island for aging the mash.

Much of the salt used in Tabasco production comes from an Avery Island salt mine, one of the largest in the U.S. Below Kathy is feeling a little salty.

After aging for up to three years, the mash is strained to remove skins and seeds. The resulting liquid is then mixed with vinegar, stirred occasionally for a month, and then bottled as finished sauce. As we looked down on the blending plant, we could open a vent to allow the fragrant aroma of mixing hot peppers. Man-o-man did we feel the burn!

Tabasco brand pepper sauce is sold in more than 185 countries and territories and is packaged in 22 languages and dialects. The Tabasco bottle is still modeled after the cologne-style bottles used for the first batch of sauce in 1868. As many as 720,000 two-ounce bottles of Tabasco sauce are produced daily. An enclosed walkway, took us through the bottling plant. Different lines hold different sized bottles.

Like most tours, we ended in the gift shop. In the back of the gift shop was a tasting bar. If we were brave enough, we could have tried every product they produced, including the Scorpion Sauce (20 times hotter than the original Tabasco)! We decided to be kind to our taste buds and only sample those items we thought we would like. In addition to our free samples, we ended up coming home with Sweet and Spicy and Chipotle Sauce, along with spicy mayo.

After making our purchases, our merry band of RV travels trekked into town for lunch at Bon Creole. While Kathy enjoyed her crawfish po-boy, Dave continued his quest to find the best gumbo in Acadiana.

While the rest of the gang returned to the RV park, we decided to return to the grounds of the Tabasco plant and experience the natural beauty and tranquility of Jungle Gardens - a 170-acre semitropical garden that stretches along Bayou Petite Anse. The gardens were created by Edward Avery McIlhenny, second son of Edmund McIlhenny, the inventor of Tabasco sauce.

While Jungle Gardens is well known as a refuge for the snowy egret and many other bird species, it also supports a wide variety of other wildlife.

We even managed to catch this napping gator.

The gardens are planted with azaleas, Japanese camellias, hydrangeas, Louisiana irises, papyrus sedges, bamboo, and wisteria.

A glass temple set within a Chinese garden, houses a Chinese Buddha from circa 1100 AD given to McIlhenny in 1936 by two friends.

Four miles of gravel roads are lined with live oak trees and Spanish moss. Here we stopped to admire a palm garden.

One of Jungle Gardens' primary attractions is a bird sanctuary called Bird City. It provides roosts for snowy egrets and other wildfowl species. In 1895 McIlhenny raised eight snowy egrets in captivity on the island, and released them in the fall for migration. They returned the next spring with other egrets, and have continued to do so over generations. Today thousands of egrets inhabit the island from early spring to late summer. Since we are still in January, we didn't expect to find anyone home. However, we did find one hopeful suitor staking a claim to the best nest location.

We finished our walk with a stroll through the Camellia Garden. The recent hard freeze was hard on the recent blossoms. We did find a few hardy souls.

It felt good to get out and hike after such a long period of travel and logistics. With all the activities Betty has scheduled for us, it might be a few days before we get out hiking, biking or kayaking. However, there will be no shortage of adventures.

Laissez les bons temps rouler!