This title contains everything hot-sauce fans need to know to make their own signature hot sauces and then cook with them. What makes a hot sauce hot? What are the basic ingredients? Chile peppers - how to find, purchase, and work with the best chillies for the flavour you want. Hot sauce is good for you and is a tasty way to add flavour to reduced-salt foods. Capsaicin, the chemical that makes chilli peppers hot, is a potent anti-inflammatory agent; it may help to relieve migraines, sinusitis, and arthritis and to encourage cancer-cell death.