The iconic flavor of OLD BAY, now in a hot sauce! Tangy with a kick of heat and OLD BAY’s unique blend of herbs and spices, it makes all kinds of food all kinds of awesome.
Even though the Old Bay yellow tin spice blend has long enjoyed cult status, the reaction stunned even the Maryland-based spice maker (McCormick company), the company told The Washington Post in an email. “We especially hadn’t anticipated such a huge online order response on day one.”
Despite the Hot Sauce name, I wonder if this is really intended specifically as a wing sauce to rival Frank’s Red Hot in the market? Either way, if you managed to get some of this in the limited edition sale, what did you think of it?
Ingredients
- Hot Sauce (Aged Red Cayenne Peppers, Distilled Vinegar, Water, Salt, Garlic Powder)
- Distilled Vinegar
- Spices (Including Celery Seed)
- Salt
- Paprika
- Xanthan Gum (Thickener)
About Old Bay
Old Bay Seasoning is named after the Old Bay Line, a passenger ship line that plied the waters of the Chesapeake Bay from Baltimore to Norfolk, Virginia, in the early 1900s. In 1939, a Jewish-German immigrant named Gustav Brunn started the Baltimore Spice Company. There, in his new company on Market Place in downtown Baltimore, and having fled the Bavarian town of Bastheim, Germany in 1937 at the outset of the second World War with only a small spice grinder, Brunn created what would later become known to the world as Old Bay seasoning. He produced the “Delicious Brand Shrimp and Crab Seasoning”, as he first named it, to service the needs and tastes of the nearby seafood market. A catchier name was later suggested and Old Bay seasoning was born.
For many years, the Baltimore Spice Company produced Old Bay until the legal rights to the seasoning brand were purchased by McCormick & Co in 1990 and the rights to the Baltimore Spice Company itself were purchased by the Fuchs Group, a German spice company. McCormick continued to offer Old Bay in the classic yellow can. Gustav Brunn had worked for McCormick for a short time before starting his own spice business.
McCormick has a number of other products under the Old Bay banner, including seasoning packets for crab cakes, salmon patties and tuna, tartar sauce, cocktail sauce, and seafood batter mix. They also make other seasoning blends that mix Old Bay seasoning with garlic, lemon, brown sugar, herbs and blackened seasonings. McCormick has offered a lower-sodium version of Old Bay Seasoning.
In 2017, McCormick changed the packaging from metal cans to plastic containers in an effort to reduce the packaging costs. Sad to lose such a memorable packaging just to be replaced with more plastic that becomes trash.
