The Hack To Make Dressing Out Of An Almost Empty Hot Sauce Bottle

With food costs continuing to rise, many budget-conscious shoppers are looking for ways to stretch their dollars at the grocery store and eliminate as much food waste as possible. One way people are doing this is by making their own dressings at home. If you have a reasonably well-stocked pantry with a few essentials, whipping up your own dressings and sauces can be a cheaper alternative to buying pre-packaged versions. And, as an added bonus, your homemade version is also usually tastier than anything you could buy. In fact, one clever TikTok user has even found a way to wring every last drop out of a bottle of hot sauce while also crafting a versatile dressing.

You can test out her hack at home when your own bottle of hot sauce starts to run low. In the video, the creator started with a nearly empty bottle of Tabasco hot sauce and instead of trying to get any remainder out of the bottle and into another container, she simply removed the dispenser at the top. Then, she treated the hot sauce bottle itself as the mixing vessel, pouring additional ingredients directly into the bottle (which is coincidentally kind of the perfect size for dressing). She added her own preferred combination of ingredients, including maple syrup, olive oil, and rice wine vinegar, although you could use virtually any ingredients you want that would benefit from a little burst of heat courtesy of the hot sauce.

The simple dressing hack received over 15,000 likes, and many TikTok users took to the comments section to share that they were eager to try this hack. However, one user asked why she didn't just use a bowl. In response, the creator wrote that, unlike when you mix up dressing in a bowl and store it in a separate container, it's more convenient to make the dressing and store it in the same container. "[Y]ou can store the bottle in the fridge and use the dressing until it's done," she explained. 

@dzaslavsky

hot sauce dressing hack @tinx @tabascobrand #ad #tinxdressinghack #hack

♬ original sound – danielle

While dressing is incredibly flexible and can be adapted based on whatever you have on hand, if you haven't made too many homemade dressings before, there are a few rules of thumb that can provide helpful guidance. In addition to the burst of heat from the hot sauce, your dressing should have some element of acid, salt, sweet, and umami incorporated for a tasty final product. For example, the creator used rice wine vinegar, salt, maple syrup, and olive oil to provide these flavors.

For this particular hack, you will also want to be mindful of the texture of the ingredients you use, since you're just shaking it up in the bottle and not actually blending it. For dressing made in this fashion, steer clear of roughly chopped items like handfuls of fresh herbs or things like capers and pickles (although you'd likely have a tough time squeezing too-large pieces through the neck of a hot sauce bottle anyway). While delicious in most dressings, they'll throw off the texture of your hot sauce-bottle dressing.