If you’re looking for the perfect stocking stuffer for the food enthusiast in your life, don’t move a muscle—you’re in the right place. Sauces and condiments make for terrific additions to stockings, a unique offering at gift exchanges, or a memorable token for a party host. From interesting hot sauces to the best brands of chili crisp, we’ve compiled a list of the most fun products we’ve encountered this year, all of them delicious.
After seeing their seemingly ubiquitous ads across social media and a team-up with Taco Bell, we finally gave Truff hot sauce a try. Despite approaching the truffle-flavored hot sauce with some skepticism, we ended up loving it. It’s not your typical hot sauce: it’s on the sweet side and pours a bit thick, but it shines on pretty much any dish, adding a complex layer of flavor.
Truff comes in a standard and hotter variety hot sauce, along with a fancier white truffle version. Truffled mayo, pasta sauces, and truffle oil are also available, and all make a worthy gift to give friends and family looking for something slightly different for their stocking stuffers.
The Chinese fried condiment known as chili crisp deserves a permanent place on your table. It’s spicy, but not prohibitively so, and it also adds a complex and crunchy blend of fried dry chilis in oil, along with other supporting ingredients, to bolster umami flavors on whatever you’re eating it with.
This year, two chili crisp varieties caught our eye, Fly by Jing and Momofuku (the latter called chili crunch). Fly by Jing makes for a remarkable all-purpose chili crisp that you can put on anything, while Momofuku’s focuses on texture and savoriness, with help from the inclusion of shiitake mushrooms in its mix. Both make great stocking stuffers and are a gift in every bite.
If you’ve ever seen a black package in the ramen aisle with the word “Buldak” (Korean fire chicken) written on it in big red letters, be warned: that stuff is blazing hot. And supremely delicious. Samyang’s fire chicken ramen is a cult favorite among instant noodle lovers, but did you know there’s also a hot sauce version? The hot sauce is unabashedly spicy, fun, and is a far cry from your typical blend of cayenne and vinegar, which is why it makes such a good gift.
For some people, Huy Fong is the only acceptable Sriracha, the ideal chili sauce for adding heat to any meal. But maybe those people need to be introduced to Fix sauces. Fix is run by a team of three siblings and their friend, and the goal is to perfect their family’s recipe and center the flavors of farm-fresh Vietnamese produce and other non-processed ingredients in a hot sauce that nevertheless packs a serious punch. We recommend gifting the green bottle of Lemongrass Sriracha, whose six ingredients add a verdant kick to everything you can think of, and whose bottle looks great all tied up with a bow.
We love a sauce with moxie, and Simon’s Secret Sauce is one of the moxie-est we’ve come across this year. Its label describes it as “a delicious tangy sauce that goes with just about everything” and lists brown mustard, lemon juice, a ton of spices and seasonings, and two types of relish among its ingredients. Also mentioned twice on the label is the claim that it’s “so good you can drink it!” While we don’t recommend you drink it with a straw (we tried), it really is good enough to enjoy all on its own, though it’s much better with food. Any sandwich lover would be grateful to find this in their stocking.
Our romance with Bachan’s began earlier this year, when staff writer Lillian Stone started using it with almost every meal. Bachan’s is sweet and umami-rich without being too thick or sticky. Plus, it comes in a variety of flavors, including a brand new yuzu flavor that lends a very welcome tang to meat or veggie dishes. This year, the brand has a handful of holiday gift packs; for example, The Family of Sauces Gift Pack, which retails for $44.99 and features all four Bachan’s sauces (Original, Hot and Spicy, Gluten-Free, and Yuzu) in a festive little gift box. The gift packs are also guaranteed to arrive by Christmas if ordered by December 15.
Okay, look, we realize that this one isn’t necessarily as sexy or mission-driven as some of the other condiments on our list. But Marconi brand Hot Giardiniera is a stalwart when it comes to Chicago’s signature condiment; the brand has been around for 120 years and its ratio of oil to pickled vegetables pairs well with pizza, Italian beef, eggs, grilled cheese, you name it. We specifically recommend that you Chicagoans out there gift a jar to your out-of-town loved ones, because hot giardiniera isn’t available in many regions of the country, and it offers folks nationwide a taste of our Midwestern metropolis.