Sauce Martin
Sauce Martin is a French maker of artisanal hot sauces and condiments, founded in 2019 by three cousins who are cooks by trade. Working from chili peppers grown in the south of France, the house produces a range of sauces graded on its own twelve-point heat scale, alongside mustards, a gourmet ketchup and barbecue sauces, all made in France.
The house
The idea came from a long way off. In the 2000s, two of the cousins, Anna and Jean-Baptiste Martin, ran a French restaurant in California, where the Latin American influence on local cooking introduced them to hot sauce as an everyday condiment. Back in France they could not find sauces that matched what they remembered, so they started making their own, first from peppers grown on a terrace and tasted by the students of their cooking classes. In 2019 the project became a company, with the third cousin, Benjamin, joining them.
The method begins in the field. The peppers are grown in open ground in the south of France under sustainable farming practices, without pesticides, and are harvested only when fully ripe. After sorting, washing and hand-trimming, they are turned into purées and left to ferment in barrels, a slow step the house treats much like aging wine, before the cooks finish each recipe. Very little sugar or vinegar is added, so the fruit of the pepper, not the acidity, leads the flavor. Some sauces are "pure cru", made from a single pepper variety; others blend several peppers with fruit, spices or smoke. The company also gives one percent of its revenue to environmental causes through 1% for the Planet.
What they make
Every hot sauce carries a spiciness score out of 12, which makes it easy to find your level.
- Gentle to medium heat — the Truffle Hot Sauce (4/12), the smoky chipotle-and-cocoa Diablito (4/12) and the winter-fruit Blizzard (5/12).
- Serious heat — the Carolina Reaper (10/12) and, at the very top of the scale, Tsunami (12/12), made from pure cru Armageddon peppers grown in France.
- Condiments — a Habanero Mustard, a Californian Mustard, a Gourmet Ketchup and barbecue sauces made without preservatives or thickeners.
The whole range is in the Sauce Martin collection, including a three-bottle discovery set.
Why Clipperton chose them
Clipperton is a family importer, and we work directly with small French makers whose products we use at our own table. Sauce Martin stood out because it treats chili the way a good vintner treats grapes: French-grown fruit, picked ripe, fermented patiently and cooked by people who trained in kitchens rather than laboratories. The heat scale is honest, the flavors are genuinely different from one bottle to the next, and there is something for a cautious first-timer as well as for the friend who thinks nothing is ever hot enough. We wrote more about their three-step method in our Journal: Sauce Martin, French artisanal hot sauce made from ripe chili peppers.
