You can’t find any Tabasco sauce in Tabasco, Mexico. Did you know that? In fact, tabasco sauce does not come from the Mexican state of Tabasco. It’s an US product made using Tabasco chillies – that’s where the name comes from. We learnt this when driving through the real Tabasco.

As it’s not our preferred chilli sauce, we weren’t too disappointed. It’s nowhere near any of our favourites, although it is the best known worldwide. We don’t keep Tabasco sauce in our fridge, but we definitely always have chilli sauce on stock.

The best ones we have tried are still homemade. You can usually find them in any restaurant across Latin America – just ask for salsa picante, chile or ají, depending on where you are. You won’t find the same flavour twice, even if it’s called the same, but at least it’s always spicy. Sometimes, when we really like it, we ask the restaurants if we can buy some of their sauce to take away. And they are usually so proud that tourists were buying their hot sauce that they gave it to us as a gift. Our favourite so far? Miss Liz’s habanero sauce from Belize.

A tour that wasn’t one

The ‘tour’ itself isn’t a proper tour of the factory; it’s more of a video. This was a bit disappointing, though the second part was well worth it: tasting 32 spicy products! Some were spicier than others, and by the end our mouths were numb.

We drank plenty of orange juice and ate lots of crackers with each spicy product during the tasting – and yes, you really need to love spicy food! In the end, the smoked hot sauce came out on top.

Thousand names for one thing: cayenne sauce, chile, ají, chipotle…

One of the first commercially produced hot sauces appeared in the US around 1807 in the form of a bottled cayenne sauce. Since then, it has grown in popularity all over the world.

Hot sauces as we know them today are therefore a relatively new product, although the tradition goes way back. It’s amazing to think that the rest of the world didn’t know about this type of spiciness until the Spaniards arrived in America.

Hot sauce emerged as a means of preserving and enhancing flavour. The Aztecs and Mayans also used it as a remedy or to punish people by burning chillies to produce a burning smoke.

Our tasting session at the production site in Belize was definitely not a punishment! It was amazing to experience all the different flavours, and there are many, many more to discover. At Marie Sharp’s they mainly work with habanero chillies.

In South America, aji sauce is more common. ‘Aji’ is another name for chilli, and as a sauce it is usually mixed with onions and some tomato; further south, it also contains a lot of coriander. But not necessarily. They use other types of chilli, such as rocoto or aji.

In Costa Rica, if you want hot sauce, you have to ask for chimichurri, which is similar to ají sauce in the south, but has nothing to do with Argentinian chimichurri. In Central America, you can basically ask for chilli, or more specifically, ‘salsa picante’. Then you’re sure to get homemade sauce.

In Mexico, most things with chipotle are spicy. They have so many spicy sauces that they’re rather specific at naming them. However, there’s always a spicy and a non-spicy option, so just ask. Don’t assume that if the salsa verde is not spicy in one place, it will be the same at the next.

We’re still working our way through the large jar of habanero chilli sauce that Ms Liz gave us in Belize. Over a month later, we still have some left. Although it’s very good, you can’t put too much of it on your food — it’s really spicy!

Next on the chilli list? Well, we’ll see what’s new to try in the next region.

With only a bit of effort and thanks to his practice, he manages to drive a screw perfectly into the board by hand. Michael tries it as well: his screw goes in a bit wonky. But it goes in and out without any trouble – and all without an electrical drill.

We had already been near Mennonite communities in Bolivia and Paraguay, but somehow never made the detour. This time, it’s just one turning away, so we are very curious.

We’ve ended up with the Mennonites in Belize. There are many of them: some more traditional, some more modern; those with horse-drawn carriages and no electricity, and those with massive tractors and perfectly equipped DIY stores.

Welcome to Springfield!

The women wear blue dresses; the men wear black trousers with braces over white shirts. Most also wear a hat or a bonnet.

There are a few wind turbines and plenty of children everywhere, all of whom are busy. We stop at a sawmill. Is all of this really supposed to work without electricity? We can hardly believe it.

Ruben is repairing a saw when we approach him. He speaks Spanish, English, and Pennsylvania Dutch. His family came to Belize from Paraguay 30 years ago. At that time, Mennonites in Paraguay were being robbed constantly. Since there was already a community in Belize, they migrated there.

He shows us the saws. The drive system? Pure horsepower – the literal kind. They have horses walking in a carousel which powers the saws. But there is a backup solution in case no horses are available: water power. Water runs at high pressure through their PVC pipes and provides enough power to run even very modern woodworking machinery. Just like in Europe, only without electricity.

For their community, electricity is a threat to the cohesion; therefore, there is a tendency to reject anything electrical.

Ruben sends us on to his brother Martin, who is a carpenter. He is currently pulling a post out of the ground with his three boys. His wife and the other three children are standing nearby. They are just as interested in us as we are in them.

We speak German with them – they learn it in school because the Bible is read in German. At home they speak Pennsylvania Dutch, (it’s called Dutch probably from the similarity to the dialect word Deutsch for German. Alongside the old characteristics of the Palatine dialect, they use many loanwords from English in their German. So, Martin isn’t a Schreiner, he does Carpenterarwett (carpentry work) and they “farm” their land instead of bewirtschaften (cultivating) it.

It’s a bit hard to understand them when they speak their dialect to us, but it still works quite well. Even in the High German they learned for reading the Bible, you can sense the 18th or 19th-century origins. In any case, we can make ourselves understood; otherwise, they would also speak Spanish and English.

“Aha, caught you!” – or maybe not?

Further along in the village, a young lad is building huts – with a mains hook-up! “Aha, caught you,” we think. But the wooden huts are not for them; they are for sale. The work is well done, and the finished huts are loaded up and sold to outsiders.

They quiz us, and we are surprised by how much they know and how they use modern technology. They order parts from Amazon via third parties, be it doors or PVC pipes. They also have bank accounts and talk to their families in the USA on the phone, though not via their own mobile phones.