A Trip to Avery Island, Louisiana - Tabasco Factory

December 26, 2009.

www.tabasco.com

We spent Christmas in Louisiana with our family and we made a trip to Avery Island to visit the legendary Tabasco hot sauce factory and mainly the Jungle Gardens which was first established by Edward Avery McIlhenny, the second son of the founder of McIlhenny company, Edmund McIlhenny. Here's some highlights of the trip in part one.

The signature logo of McIlhenny company with its renowned Tabasco sauce directs us to the factory and Country Store with a palmetto plant on its side, one of the most common tropical plants in the area. The whole place is seated on top of a very large salt dome of Avery Island which salt is mined and used in the process of sauce making.

The one and only Tabasco sauce factory where fermented tabasco pepper is mixed with vinegar and stirred for 28 continuous days, then bottled, labeled in many different languages, and shipped to all over the world. The factory produces 700,000 bottles of hot sauce each day. Factory tours available 7 days a week, but during the weekend the factory itself is not in operation. You are going only to see the bottling part of the factory through a glass window though. I was hoping to be able to see their warehouse where wooden barrels are stacked up high, but the area is not for public, I guess. The tabasco plantation is not open for public either and at this time of the year there's no activity there.

Tabasco Country Store showcases Tabasco's lines of food products and souvenirs, among them are the latest Tabasco Chipotle Pepper Sauce, jalapeno and sweet and spicy ice cream kit (you can sample them too), and a bunch of merchandises with Tabasco brand and Louisiana signature graphics.

A wooden barrel, where the mix of fresh tabasco pepper and Avery Island salt were stored to ferment for 3 years before mixed with vinegar to produce the signature Tabasco hot sauce, are exhibited by the entrance of the store. Variegated ginger foliage at the background are very common in this area.

© Burke's Garden, 2009.