Here's The Hottest Of All The Taco Bell Sauces

"The hottest sauce at Taco Bell" is always going to be kind of a relative term, right? You don't see too many spice fiends stocking up on those little packets they hand out with your meals at the Bell — chances are most of the real heat hounds have a bottle of their preferred condiment at home, anyway. (Although if they do go to Taco Bell, they can be assured that they're free except for the Avocado Verde sauce.) But for the rest of us, it's worth knowing which of Taco Bell's many sauces we should think twice about offering to, say, our moms, or a five-year-old. Obviously, we can't know the spice tolerance of you or your loved ones — but we can advise you to be careful with Diablo, the hottest Taco Bell sauce.

Taco Bell offers many different sauces with varying heat levels. Some, like the Nacho Cheese Sauce, aren't spicy at all; tangy, at most. Others, like Chipotle and Red Sauce, offer a bit more piquancy, if not heat. Then there are the sauces which are augmented with spice, like Spicy Ranch or Creamy Jalapeño, without being overly heat-centric. The four most famous sauces, though, are the hot sauces, which Taco Bell hands out in those aforementioned little packets. These have a sort of hierarchy of spice, with Diablo at the very top.

In terms of Scoville units, the typical measure of spice, the lowest of the Taco Bell hot sauces is, appropriately, the Mild offering. At somewhere between 500 and 1,000 Scoville units, it's a little bit hotter than Frank's Red Hot. Then comes the Hot sauce, which ranks between 2,500 and 3,000 Scoville units — just a little hotter than the original Tabasco Sauce recipe. Next is Fire, a thicker sauce that ranks around 4,000 to 5,000 Scoville units — and then, cranking things way up, is Diablo sauce, whose heat could bring a tear to the eye of the poets who write in Taco Bell Quarterly.

Diablo sauce has between 15,000 and 20,000 Scoville units, which is about as hot as munching on a straight-up cayenne pepper. It may not be the absolute hottest thing you can possibly consume — it doesn't have a patch on the Da Bombs of the world, thank goodness — but for a fast food hot sauce, it's surprisingly strong stuff. So if you're going to be pouring some on one of those neat decade-throwbacks Taco Bell is offering, just be sure you have something to wash it down with.