Hot Time on Avery Island

Many of the rally attendees made the trek down to Avery Island although not all on the same days. The Mcllhenny family has made their famous Tabasco sauce here on the island for five generations. Built on a salt dome, the island is where the red peppers are grown, home to the factory with tours, a store, restaurant, and the Jungle Gardens. I visited once before but the tour through the factory is much improved. Unfortunately, they were not bottling when we visited. You start the tour with a visit to the museum.

You will find all kinds of information on how the whole story began, members of the family, the Tabasco itself, and the island itself.

Edmund Mcllhenny started the whole process in 1868 because the diet of the south at the time was pretty bland especially for Louisiana tastes. Mcllhenny was given seeds of Capsicum frutescens peppers that came from Mexico or Central America. An avid gardener, he sowed the seeds, nurtured the young plants, and was thrilled with their spicy flavor.

The first commercial pepper crop was grown in 1868 and, one year later, he sent 658 bottles of sauce at one dollar apiece wholesale to growers around the Gulf Coast, especially New Orleans. He gave it the name "Tabasco" name based upon a word of Mexican Indian origin which means "a place where the soil is humid" or "place of the coral or oyster shell". A patent was obtained in 1870 and by the end of the decade the sauce was sold throughout the U.S. and even in Europe. The sauce was packaged in a bottle similar to a perfume bottle with a spout on top as it was definitely meant to be sprinkled not poured on food.

Today the sauce is aged in barrels for up to three years and fine quality vinegar is used. It actually comes in 8 flavors. Tiny bottles were included in soldiers MRE packages.

Part of the tour took us through a greenhouse showing all different kinds of peppers.

When you get to the storage area, there is a film about the process as well as a view of all the barrels in storage. The Tabasco is aged just like fine liquor.

The pepper mixture is sealed into a barrel using a salt crust before the lid is put on.

The tour is a little out of order due to the arrangement of the processes.

The is part of the bottling area where vats of the peppers and vinegar are mixed.

This represents the salt mines right there on the island where the salt is obtained to store the sauce while it ages.

When you visit the restaurant, you will find every variety of Tabasco available to try on your food. The store also has lots of sampling opportunities including ice cream made with Tabasco.

We also took the Jungle Garden tour. Both tours of the factory as well as the gardens are self guided although the Gardens have a phone number that you call so you can be guided through the whole garden and given information on what you are seeing.

There are also signs along the way.

This is where you buy tickets for the Jungle Garden Tour but, if you are doing both the factory tour and the garden tour, buy your tickets together at the factory area as you will get a significant price break.

The Jungle Gardens are famous for their camilias and we were there while they were blooming.

I never realized there were so many different kinds and the smell was quite nice.

The oak trees on the grounds are amazing. In addition to the Spanish moss, they are also covered with ferns which I have never seen before.

All in all, it was a great day and well worth the drive down to the coast.

It's a Hot Time on Avery Island

Monday morning Birdie and I headed back west again. Our first stop was just down the road on I-10....the Atchafalaya Rest Stop. If you are traveling I-10 east or west, this is a great place to stop. For one thing, they have a section that is just for RVs......completely separate from the semi-truck parking which makes it really nice if you want to spend the night. Cars have their own lot too. Of course, you will always run into the odd idiot who thinks they have to park their car in the RV area but you can't fix stupid, right? Anyway, there are quite a few spaces.

Then you get to the very nice welcome building.

They have all kinds of things to look at.....just like a small museum.

They even have a short movie presentation about the Atchafalaya Swamp and, of course, all the information pamphlets you could ever hope to need.

It didn't take us too long to get to Abbyville which was our next stop. We were heading to Betty's RV Park which many RVers know about but more about that later. Martha came up to visit us at Betty's and we went downtown to a music event in the park. It was great....lots of people enjoying it. One guy was especially entertaining.....not sure if he was inebriated, different stroke for different folks or what but his dancing with or without a partner was hilarious, very exaggerated movements and facial expressions. I think every woman there held their breath every time he looked around for a dance partner.

The next morning, Martha came to pick us up and we headed south towards New Iberia.

We were on our way to Avery Island, the home of McIlhenny Tobasco Sauce. There is a $1 toll to cross to the island. The McIlhenny's started making Tobasco pepper sauce in 1868 and the company is still family owned.

 

Edmund McIlhenny, a food lover and avid gardener, was given seeds of Capsicum Frutenscens peppers from Mexico or Central America. He planted the seeds and loved the spicy flavor of the peppers they produced. After the civil war, food in the south was very bland so he began picking the reddest of his peppers, mixing them with Avery Island salt and aged the mash for 30 days. Then he mixed the mash with French vinegar and aged it again for 30 days. He bottled it in old perfume bottles with sprinkler tops and sealed it with wax. He gave some bottles away and then sold it at local grocery stores for $1 a bottle.

Other than the fact that the aging process for the mash is much longer, up to three years in white oak barrels and high quality distilled vinegar is now used, the process is much the same over 140 years later.

The Tabasco sauce is bottled and labeled in 22 different languages and sold in over 180 countries. It is even included in soldiers rations. It is so well-known that all pepper sauce is called tobacco.

We were invited to join a 1965 class reunion for their tour.

The bottles we saw being bottled and labeled were in Japanese.

 

The white stuff on the top of the barrels is salt which hardens like concrete while the sauce is being aged.

Expansion is underway which will make a visit to the bottling plant even better. Over half of the 200 employees actually live on Avery Island and are later generations of the first employees.

On to the store where samples are available. Ever try Raspberry Chipolte Ice Cream or how about Jalepena Ice Cream or numerous kinds of specially flavored sauce.

It's a very colorful place. Needless to say, we all picked up a few items.

 

 

Just as we were ready to head out to see the other sites like the Jungle gardens and Bird Sanctuary, Martha got a call. Her husband fell and she had to head out to tae him to the hospital. He is a stubborn one just like mine. He is 88 and still rides his cutting horse every day. Not on the horse this time but he had two broken ribs. The next day, he was on the treadmill.....you can't keep Harold down.