What Is Xanthan Gum? And Why You Won't Find It in Our Sauce

When we first started making hot sauce, I did something that probably sounds boring: I started flipping bottles over and reading the back.

And I'm not going to call out a single brand, because I didn't have to. These were all the major players in the market, and the vast majority of them were doing the exact same thing.

Pepper. Vinegar. Salt. Fine. Then, further down the list, a word that didn't belong in a kitchen: xanthan gum. Then again on the next bottle. Then the next one.

It wasn't a conspiracy. It was a pattern. The big mass-produced sauces on the shelf were leaning on the same ingredient to do the same job, and once I noticed it, I couldn't stop noticing it. We were deep in the bad-homemade-sauce phase, tasting, tweaking, and failing, and here was a shortcut sitting in plain sight. We decided not to take it.

Let me tell you why. But first, let's be fair to the stuff.

What Is Xanthan Gum? (The Short, Honest Version)

Xanthan gum = a powdered thickener made by fermenting sugar with bacteria.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

The bacterium is called Xanthomonas campestris, which, fun fact, is the same one that causes black rot on cabbage and broccoli. Before you spit out your coffee, relax. The gum itself is purified. Nobody's eating bacteria. Here's how it gets made:

1. Producers feed sugar to the bacteria in big fermentation tanks. The sugar usually comes from corn, soy, or wheat, depending on the manufacturer.
2. The bacteria produce a thick, slimy goo as a byproduct.
3. The goo gets precipitated out with alcohol, dried, and ground into a fine white powder.

It was discovered and developed in the early 1960s by Allene Rosalind Jeanes, an American carbohydrate chemist, and her research team at the USDA's Northern Regional Research Laboratory in Peoria, Illinois. Today it's in salad dressings, ice cream, gluten-free bread, and yes, hot sauce.

I'm not going to stand here and tell you it's poison. It isn't. It's approved for food use in the U.S., and plenty of good products use it for good reasons. If you're baking gluten-free bread, it's doing real work.

My issue isn't with the ingredient. It's with what a lot of sauces use it for.

The Trick Behind the Thick Pour

Here's what makes xanthan gum so useful to a manufacturer: a tiny amount goes a long way. A few grams of powder can thicken a huge batch of liquid.

It also has a neat property. It holds the sauce thick when it's sitting still, then thins out when you shake it or squeeze it. So you get a sauce that looks substantial in the bottle, clings to the food, and doesn't separate on the shelf for months.

Now think about what's underneath. A hot sauce at its simplest is a pepper mash thinned with vinegar. If you want it to look and pour like it has real body but you don't want to pack in more peppers, you've got a choice. You can spend money on more peppers. Or you can add a pinch of powder.

That's the trick. In my opinion, it's a cheap one. Thickness is supposed to be a side effect of having a lot of actual pepper in the bottle. With gum, you can fake it. You get the look of a rich sauce without the substance behind it, and the margin on that is a hell of a lot better than the margin on peppers.

Thick doesn't mean flavorful. It just means somebody added thickener.

What We Do Instead

We use more peppers. That's the whole answer, and it's about as unglamorous as it sounds.

Our sauces are made with fresh, domestically sourced peppers, no extracts, and the body in the bottle comes from the pepper itself: the flesh and the fiber. More peppers means more flavor, and more flavor means the heat has something to sit on instead of just burning. That's the whole philosophy behind heat as the amplifier, flavor comes first. You can't amplify something that isn't there.

Is it more expensive? Yeah. Does it make production harder? Absolutely. We're doing small batches in Warren, Rhode Island, and every extra pound of peppers is a pound we have to buy, prep, and process.

I didn't start this company to find the cheapest way to make something look good. I came out of the military with a pretty strong allergy to people who cut corners and call it efficiency.

That goes for all six sauces: Dragon's Breath, Mean Green, Big Red One, Tango Mango, Nuclear Option, and F.U.B.A.R. Not one of them has gum in it.

The Part Where I'm Honest About the Trade-Off

Real ingredients come with real inconvenience. Here's what you might notice with our sauces that you won't notice with a gum-stabilized bottle:

• It may separate a little. Give the bottle a shake. That's not a defect. That's what a sauce with real ingredients and no stabilizer does.
• Texture can vary a bit from batch to batch. Peppers aren't identical from one harvest to the next, and a batch made with fresh peppers is going to reflect that.
• It might not look as thick as the mass-market stuff. Cool. It tastes thicker.

I'd rather answer a question about separation than a question about why the bottle looks better than it tastes. If you're cooking with it, you'll notice the difference. If you want the full rundown on building a wing sauce that clings the way you want it to, the ratios are all in Best Hot Sauce for Wings: My No-BS Wing Guide.

Why I Care This Much About a Label

This is where it ties back to why we do what we do.

At events, people flip the bottle over. They do it constantly. Vets, first responders, spouses, the guy who's been burned by a brand that waved a flag and sold him garbage. They're reading the label because they're done being sold to.

And that matters to me, because trust is the whole game. The same people who can smell a fake story from a mile away can smell a fake ingredient list. If I'm going to stand behind a table and talk about service, community, and taking care of each other, the least I can do is make sure what's in the bottle matches what I'm saying.

You can't build a table where people feel safe being honest if you're not honest first. That goes for the story, and it goes for the sauce.

Closing

We didn't set out to make the thickest sauce on the shelf. We set out to make one that tastes like the peppers it came from. No shortcuts, no powder doing the work that peppers should be doing, and no pretending.

If you want to see where those peppers start, The Subtle Art of Not Killing Your Garden: A No-BS Guide to Pepper Glory is the place to go. And I've got more to say about what else hides on a hot sauce label. "Natural flavors" is a rabbit hole of its own, and I'll get into it in a future post.

Stay Spicy 🔥

—Sean,

Founder, 13 Stars Hot Sauce.

Veteran | Builder | Burner of Bulls**t