Casa Firelli Italian Hot Sauce, 148 ml (Pack of 6)

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As well as killing pain, endorphins are also known to contribute feelings of pleasure. So, in the same way some people love the pain of long-distance running, many people can grow to associate the peppery pain of capsaicin with a pleasant, endorphin-based rush. This all depends on your tolerance to spice, which you can slowly build up with more exposure to capsaicin-filled foods and products like hot sauce. How are spiciness levels measured? On the other side, unfermented hot sauces forgo fermentation and are usually cooked out instead. These are more common in supermarkets, as they are faster and easier to make, while often having higher Scoville levels since the chillies are not broken down.

Common sauces start at around 400, with the absolute maximum we would recommend – for your internals’ sake – being around 9 million. However, regular hot sauces will stay well below this mark, usually registering in the thousands and hundreds of thousands, rather than millions. For example, a classic hot sauce from Tabasco typically comes in at around 2,500 to 5,000 on the Scoville scale. What types of hot sauce are there?From there, testing hot sauces goes down just as you might expect: getting that spicy goodness into our mouths. We would taste each sauce individually before then trying it together with its intended use case. If no particular foodstuff was suggested, then we would opt for a meat or vegan meat substitute as the default tasting dish to avoid clouding and potentially mischaracterising a sauce’s flavour with the ingredients and spices of a regular meal. READ NEXT: Best tonic water The best hot sauce you can buy in 2023 1. James Cochran’s Scotch Bonnet Jam: Best all-rounder hot sauce for any meal Fermented hot sauces, as the name implies, are created by fermenting hot chillies and other ingredients in a container. Hot sauce ingredients get decomposed by healthy bacteria and enzymes – often by submerging the mixture in salt brine or by letting healthy bacteria break down other ingredients over time. This produces a more tangy, sour-tasting hot sauce and can help to bring out the flavours of other ingredients. They usually taste a little fresher too and have the added health benefit of containing probiotic bacteria (like yoghurt or kombucha), because of the fermentation process. This is thought to help the body break down food and better absorb nutrients.

Some of the best hot sauces blend both spiciness with rich flavour, which is certainly no mean heat. This versatility can be a real boon and save you forking out on one sauce for marinade and another for daily dipping.

Simply put, it’s endorphins. We can’t actually taste spice as a flavour, but we do feel pain from it through receptors in our mouths – the ones that are normally responsible for sensing heat. The majority of spicy peppers, such as jalapenos and naga chillies, contain the chemical capsaicin which, when consumed, combines with these pain receptors to cause a reaction not unlike scalding your mouth with a hot drink. Scientists believe that, just like when the body is hurting on other occasions, this chilli pain causes endorphins to be released – the body’s natural pain-killing compounds.