Description

Travel with Bennett-Watt and discover the Tabasco factory located in Avery Island, Louisiana, where traditional Tabasco sauce is being made for more than a 100 years.

Transcript

Visit the Tabasco Factory in Avery Island Louisiana Tony Simmons: Whether they grown in Louisiana where my family has been producing Tabasco for the last 135 years. Tabasco was started by my great, great grandfather Edmund McIlhenny and Edmund started making the product and selling it in 1868 and we’re still making the product the same way Edmund made 135 years ago like in the same place. Bennett-Watt: The Tabasco name is synonymous with Louisiana and spicy food. The family own business for five generations their Avery Island Complex is an institution here. Tony: We get somewhere between 150 and 200 people a year to come out to Avery Island and come see us. Some will look to the bird city and the Jungle Gardens and some just come to see Tabasco and where Tabasco. But we get a lot of folks they come out here to see us and we love to see them or we appreciate the fact that they do make the fact that they do make the— We’re not exactly sure why Avery Island produces such wonderful pepper but it does. The soil, the environment, possibly something to do with the salt underneath this makes a terrific soil for growing our hot peppers and we produce very hot peppers here. Remember we’re on natural products. So we have no way to change the color. When Tabasco pepper grows out on a bush, the pepper as it start to grow first they turn yellow then green and then yellow, orange and red and bright red and we can only use the brightest red as peppers for a product because that’s going to control the color of our product also. But the pepper in the Tabasco pepper doesn’t all come right to the other, the whole bush just blossom. So we have to go back and only pick the brightest pepper off the bush and we keep picking—we’ll normally pick for two to three months going back to the same fields and only picking the brightest pepper. When we pick the pepper, we’ve grind it up into a mash and we take that mash and we put some salt in with the mash and we put it in 50 gallon wooden whiskey barrels. We buy all whiskey barrels from the distilleries we take the charring out that they use to char to make a dark color in the bourbon. We decharred the barrels, we have to replace the steel hoops on the barrels and steel hoops on the barrels and use stainless steel because of the acidity of our product. And then we age the pepper mash in our warehouse for up to three years before they can open the barrels. We take the mash and we mix it with vinegar and that is Tabasco. We drain the solid off of it and we’ll left with a liquid that is most people say very hot. So we now ship to a 160 countries throughout the world. We bottled it over 20 languages and we’re one of the most widely recognized food trademarks—all from Avery Island Louisiana. Bennett: The Jungle Gardens on Avery Island is the legacy of E.A. or Ned McIlhenny. Tony: He is quite a bit with 034 saving Snowy Egrets from extinction. He created the Jungle Garden and the Bird City which I think maybe you get to see while you’re here. And he was a naturalist and a conservationist really before anybody will in—. In the early part of the century, the Snowy Egrets has been included to extinction for its feathers to make lady’s hats. The Snowy Egrets has beautiful image and they were very popular and very stylish. E. A. went out into the marshals round and round and pick up the other 7 Snowy Egrets and he built an average home and he let them hatch up their young and let the young get to where they could fly and then let them go. From that original seven, now we get—we think around 10,000 birds were here, they come back and live here, took to hatch up their young before they migrate in.