It's good. Smoky, spicy—maybe not as spicy as the Sriracha hot sauce I used to use though. That's all right; pepper and chili powder restore some of the kick I'm missing. I sometimes miss the taste of Sriracha, though.
Better yet, according to the nutrition label, Tabasco Chipotle has no calories.
Seriously?
Something this flavorful is calorie-free?
Doubtful. Anecdotal evidence suggests that U.S. law allows manufacturers to report a calorie count as zero when each serving contains five or fewer calories. That makes sense, but the conspiratorial side of me says manufacturers are intentionally abusing a rule intended to allow for rounding to increments of five calories. When was the last time you saw a nutritional label with the calorie count not ending in 5 or 10? Helen's Kitchen's products are one of the only ones I can think of, at least with entrees.
(And what's stopping manufacturers from shrinking serving sizes so that just about any food can be zero calories? I may have to look into that. [UPDATE: Slate's Explainer has written a piece about just this thing.])
Let's check the ingredients: chipotle pepper, distilled vinegar, water, salt, sugar, onion powder, garlic powder, spices, natural flavor, TABASCO (R) Brand Pepper Pulp (distilled vinegar, red pepper, salt).
(Sidenote: the original Tabasco sauce only lists those last three as ingredients: distilled vinegar, red pepper, salt. I'm stuck with a large bottle of the original at work. It's not bad, but it's no Chipotle—it's so vinegary—and I'd prefer to be rid of it. Although it may legitimately be calorie-free, or at the very least, pretty close.)
Of these, sugar troubles me the most. It's listed after salt, though, which is promising, but it's there, and sugar means calories.
The question isn't does Tabasco Chipotle have calories. The question is how many?
With condiments, I like to figure out how many the entire bottle has, as the small serving sizes make it too hard to maintain caloric consistency. When I dip vegetables in mustard, how am I to know if I just ate two or three servings, or some fraction? But when I go through a mustard bottle in, say, eight sessions, and I know how many the entire bottle contains, I have a better idea of how many calories I'm ingesting per session.
Sriracha was my previous go-to condiment, and it unfortunately was loaded with sugar: it was the second ingredient listed after chili. At 5 calories per serving (teaspoon) and 96 servings per bottle, I was adding nearly 500 calories per week and a half to my diet. or about 50 a day. That's assuming the 5 per serving is believable; maybe they can round down 9 calories to 5 on the label. Who knows.
Tabasco Chipotle lists 0 grams of sugar per serving. Since sugar's an ingredient, they've clearly rounded down, but by what amount? It's impossible to say.
I can figure out an upper limit on calories per bottle, assuming sugar is nearly the sole caloric contributor. At 4 calories per gram of sugar, and "about 30" servings per 5 oz. bottle, the entire bottle shouldn't contain more than 120 calories, since there has to be less than one gram of sugar per serving.
I'd take that a step further and say, conservatively, I can't believe there's more than 90 calories in a bottle. It's probably less than that, but I'm comfortable with 90.
Now, it's still early in my Chipotle run, but once I start using it exclusively I'll probably run through a 5 oz. bottle every week and a half, just like with Sriracha.
This much flavor and only 10 calories per day?
I think I can live with that.
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