Tabasco sauce used to be synonymous with “hotter’n Hell sauce” but by today’s standards of nothing excels like excess, it’s pretty mild, coming in at 2500 Scoville heat units (SHU). The company has since weighed in with their own heavy hitter, Tabasco Scorpion, at 50,000 SHU.
My mainstay, Marie Sharp’s Belizean Heat, comes in around 250,000 SHU. For cooking, I use Pure Cap, with an SHU of 500,000, and being a pure extract of capsaicin, adds heat without altering the flavour of your food: I find around 6 to 8 drops does the job for a big pot (2.5 litres) of spaghetti sauce.