Hot Winter Bulgarian Carrot Hot Sauce Review

Hot Winter Bulgarian Carrot

I was not at all familiar with the Bulgarian Carrot pepper prior to coming across this sauce and bought it somewhat on a whim. The only previous sauce I’d ever from them, the Hatch Chile, was a tad on the underwhelming side, but I always get a little excited and my tail starts wagging and my ears prick up when I come across a new pod in a sauce that I haven’t had before, so I drove in full gainer...

...and was rewarded with a pretty fantastic sauce. For some reason, I thought this was a variety of a Habanero, which was borne out by the flavor, but looking into it further, Habanero is in the mix, but it is not a Habanero variant per se. Rather, it is a cross between a Habanero and a different Bulgarian pepper, with the idea being that the pod looks like a baby carrot. There are no actual carrots in this sauce, though the idea that there was initially drew me to it. 

This is not a sauce so much as a mash and is very pepper forward, with peppers being the first ingredient. There are a couple vinegars, rice and cider, which do a nice job of complementing each other and not transmitting any of the stinky foot aspect of the latter vinegar. There is also some sugar, some salt, and some of that good hardneck garlic and the flavor profile, top to bottom, is really quite brilliant.

It is very thick, very clumpy, and does not like to smooth out. There is a lot of rough sort of gritty bits to it as well, all of which sort of make this a bit of a challenge in terms of usage. As far as flavor, this went great with nearly everything, but as far as texture...for me, it works best in a sandwich setting, where you can spread it out or leave it in its own layer (I’d also love to try this as a pizza sauce, just this sauce by itself, to be clear), so things like burgers and chicken sandwiches and sub sandwiches respond very well with this, where it both meshes and retains a bit of its identity as it melds with proceedings. Even though Hot Winter calls this both very hot and their hottest available sauce, I found it rather mild all told and I don’t think it will give too many people much of a challenge.

Bottom line: An absolute ringer, just a dynamite gem of a product, but definitely one that I think is somewhat dependent on its setting.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 10
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 6

 

Ghost Wolf Pepper Co. Elder’s Revenge Hot Sauce Review

Ghost Wolf Pepper Co. Elder’s Revenge

I was going to start this review by saying that I don’t know what I did to the pupper Elder to make him want revenge, but whatever it was I’m sorry...but that opening seemed sort of frivolous. This company was started due to one of the hardest episodes for anyone to go through and the resulting theme is a rather somber and melancholy one. To wit, this sauce was created to memorialize the sauce maker’s doggo, who evidently suffered from an illness and the loss of a good, close friend, even one covered in furry, perhaps especially one of those, is never going to be an easy thing to take. There is some suggestion that perhaps down the road a fund to support the people going through this and the attendant vet bills and grief counseling and so on may come to be, as well as perhaps a memorializing of other people’s animal friends. The graphics and design seem particularly devoted, perhaps more approaching art than a mere product label. This is the flagship sauce from a company on a mission and it seems like a good one. I encourage interested parties to check their website for more info.  

On the other hand, to the “revenge” part specifically, this is unquestionably a superhot-forward sauce and it is immediately punchy. It is past a 3, but not quite all the way to a 4, so I guess consider it a very strong 3. This is unquestionably chilehead only territory and if you’re not a chilehead, you may as well plan to skip this party and go to another, as if you do come here, you’re probably going to have a pretty bad time...unless you want a bottle for the art and aren't planning on ever opening it. The artwork does feature, or at least strongly reference, one of my very most favorite forms of expression, that of European graveyard sculpture, so this may be the second bottle ever that I’ve kept after finishing the sauce...

We have here the might and fury of 7-Pot Primo mash and then piling on after that, both smoked Scorpion and Ghost pepper powders. This lends even more of the superhot bitter quality to things, which is also generally the first and most forward flavor. On the back end of that, we do have some smokiness, from the powders, along with the flavor of sage, and, depending on what you pair it with, a very nice, albeit somewhat subtle, berry flavor. 

To be frank, this sauce is somewhat difficult to pair, both because of its intensely blazing nature, but also because of those bitter notes and because it doesn’t seem to point itself in any particular direction. This is a sauce I’ve spent a lot of time testing, and will be testing further still, until I either find where it works best or until I run out. It does seem to do very nicely with chicken, particularly roast chicken, but leaning into the sage didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. I would try to lean into the berry, but I kind of wonder if Elderberry wasn’t included because of the namesake connection to the mascot of the sauce. Also, the berry is fairly slight in this one. It is far more just blazing superhot bitter than any single other flavor note. 

Bottom line: This is a very punchy sauce, right out of the gate, and is fairly unrelenting, so its use works best perhaps as accent. Given the blazing nature, definitely chilehead only. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 3
            Flavor: 3
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3

Overall: 3

La Preferida Louisiana Style Hot Sauce Review

La Preferida Louisiana Style

For quite some time, every year, I’ve taken to haunting the Wal-Mart holiday section from Halloween on, looking at what might be coming for a given year’s hot sauce sampler collection. While most of them are very clearly aimed at being novelty sauces and not much more, in essence, buying labels and packaging, in some years, there have been some decent sauces. Many of them are covered in the Mini- Reviews section either way, whether they are or not.

For most of them, it’s just throw any old colored liquid that looks like a hot sauce into a bottle, shrink it, and call it a day, as they’re not trying to sell sauce or tap a new customer base, per se, but are interested in that one sale, in that “customer knows [x] person in relation to them who likes spicy food, so here’s an easy gift,” in short, perhaps pandering to laziness. For those that aren’t that good, they all have a sort of commonality to them, what I refer to as a flavor of “the cheap,” that more high quality sauces don’t have.

The taste here, while recognizably Cayenne-adjacent, is kind of like a less aggressive and worse-tasting version of Crystal. It almost has a staleness to the taste and a bit of a sourness to the vinegar, to a kind of weird point. It was still generally usable, but I started to wonder if it was a bad batch, as it was kind of hard for me to picture this end result being the actual intention. This is just not a very good product overall. While this type of sauce generally doesn’t pack a huge heat punch, this one has basically none. The “bite” is very much only from the astringent vinegar. It is also slightly salty. While the watery consistency is right, the color is much more pointed towards the orange spectrum of things.

Bottom line: While I’m pretty far from impressed with this sauce, it is also not the worst of this type that I’ve tried...though it is definitely near the bottom.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: 3
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 1

Overall: 2

Redacted Wet Work Hot Sauce Review

Redacted Wet Work

I rather enjoyed the other sauce I had from Redacted and their sort of cloak and dagger skullduggery spycraft type motif and themes. Most of their sauces have onions and are thus not something of which I can partake, but this one happily does not...and I’m pleased that it doesn’t because it features Scotch Bonnet, one of my favorites, again paired with Habanero. While I would prefer it just be the Scotch Bonnet, the ultimate conclusion is what matters and here, it is quite tasty.

The sauce leans very heavily into the idea of a pepper forward sweet-hot, using guava and mango to give it a tropical fruity vibe, by way of a slight citrus underdone from the Key lime juice. I’m definitely very happy with what they did on the flavor side, as it goes a long way to advance the pepper flavor foremost, in that sort of sweet setting. The sort of gripe I have about this sauce is that it is overly loose for what I would like. A loose sauce is not the end of the world, but here, it intrudes a bit on flavor concentration and also limits a bit where one can easily use it, as it is quite runny...not quite watery, per se, but not especially distant, either.

I think with a lot of tweaking, such as reducing it further, maybe dumping the Key lime entirely, and go for some reduction, this would be a pretty fantastic more universal sauce, able to be used fairly ubiquitously. As it is, I find it pretty solid on fried foods, as long as there is enough breading there to absorb the liquid. I would not find this something I would consider using on pizza, for instance, as I don’t want my pizza to be wet, and having the sweet element is already going to kind of point the sauce in fairly specific directions. This one will take a bit of tinkering to find the right setting, but once you do, it is quite nice. Heat-wise, neither Scotch Bonnet nor Habaneros are particularly scorchers and this sauce is definitely more on the tame side.

Bottom line: A quite lovely tasting sauce that is somewhat marred by the consistency. I would still say it is well worth a go, particularly if you’re a fan of either Scotch Bonnets or Habaneros and like them in a fruity setting.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8

Overall: 5

Volcanic Peppers Autumn Blaze Hot Sauce Review

Volcanic Peppers Autumn Blaze

I have had a veritable cornucopia of great sauces this year, with now this making four candidates for Sauce Of The Year. I suppose I should have buried the lede, so to speak, a bit more, I wanted it right up front how fantastic of a sauce this is. The Chipotle used in here is from red Jalapenos and I suspect, unless I badly miss my guess, they are smoked at the hot sauce facility. They possess a character of smokiness that I have never had from commercial Chipotle or sauces with Chipotle before and it is absolutely stunning. 

The rest of the crew, the honey and pumpkin, do a nice job of adding in some depth, but this sauce very wisely chooses those delicious smoked red Jalapenos to be the star of the show, with the other elements tempering the apple cider vinegar a bit. The vinegar does not read as apple cider in the flavor, happily. In many respects, this could very much be one of those sauces that people who don’t like hot sauce or who are just coming into it would enjoy very much. I’ve said before that if you make a sauce taste good enough, which is the overall aim, I imagine, of the so-called “everyday” sauces, flexibility will increase, even if the food doesn’t pair totally well. With this sauce, I have yet to find anything it doesn’t work well with and on. Sure, some things are better than others, but it is as close to universal as I’ve had...and much of that has to do with the spectacular flavor.

The color, the texture, and the smoothness are also pretty good and it’s one of the few sauces where I’m not immediately spinning over in my mind for ways it could be improved. It’s frankly near-perfect as-is and while if I were to tail it very specifically to me, I might add in some fire-roasted red Habaneros to drive the heat up a touch, as this is a fairly tame sauce, that is my only complaint and a very minor one at that. I like some heat to things, but not every sauce I have needs to be face-melting. 

Bottom line: I’ve had more than a few sauces I’ve liked from Volcanic, but this one is near magical. Everyone should get it, particularly if you’re like me and a foodie first and then a chilehead. This is the 4th Sauce Of The Year candidate for 2025.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 10
            Flexibility: 10
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 8

Paul’s Haba Haba Hot Sauce Review

Paul’s Haba Haba

This is a sauce that seems to have 3 main ingredients, the mango puree, the mustard, and the Habanero mash. There are some additional spices and other modifiers, but those are the mail elements. The overall vibe here is very reminiscent of some of the Caribbean sauces I’ve had, which have similarly incorporated mustards and I find the flavor here to be itself, basically the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

It isn’t like a hot sauce, but nor is it like a mustard. It is quite distinct and seems to want to have a foot in both worlds. This idea I find fine in concept, but in actual application...I think we all have food associations, flavor expectations, and tie certain foods in with certain additions, such as various condiments. For instance, brats will generally go with mustards, as they need something fairly strongly flavored to read, but no so much with hot sauces. Likewise, fried foods would not usually be something one would put a yellow mustard on. To be sure, you could, but that would be unusual.

With this sauce trying to rest between two fairly disparate words, the issue comes in with pairing it with stuff, as it functions like neither of those condiments particularly. I think it works better where you would use a mustard than where you would use a hot sauce, but it is at least functional in both settings. The problem comes in when the sauce is acceptable, but makes you wish you had something else instead, which this one does in nearly every setting I’ve tried it in. The flavor is not bad at all or even close to it, but it is very vigorously on its own terms, which isn’t always what is wanted. Heat-wise, since Habanero is the driver, the level is fairly moderate.

Bottom line: I suspect this would work a lot better with Caribbean foods, which I will be testing at some point. It comes in a healthy 9 fl. oz. bottle, so there is plenty of experimentation to be had...which will probably be needed.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6

Overall: 4

 

Melinda’s Mexicana Hot Sauce Review

Melinda’s Mexicana

Another new-ish product from Melinda’s, as they continue their expansion, this time sees what I can only describe as more or less a merging of a Habanero taco sauce with a Lousiana-Style Cayenne sauce. I was a bit nervous that it might follow the path of Texas Pete Sabor! (reviewed elsewhere here), but it sticks pretty heavily to the motif, which is essentially a merging of those two sauce styles. 

I’m not certain who this is for, though. The label copy suggests using it on “everything” (because of course they do), in cocktails, and popcorn, of all things. Yes, that is exactly what my popcorn has been lacking, a very loose, nearly watery, more astringent than normal taco sauce...think I’ll just go and take a pass on that idea entirely. It also is much more vinegary than I tend to like my taco sauces or Mexican-style sauces, as I don’t generally find that food so overly rich I need to cut it. 

Where I did find this useful was in a very specific frozen Southwest style quinoa bowl and for frozen foods, this is actually not a bad sauce. I could see it also working pretty wonderfully on breakfast stuff, so long as you want things a bit on the vinegar-side. It would probably also be fine to cook with. As it’s only Habanero as the main heat driver and a bit far back in things to boot, this is not a particularly hot sauce.

Bottom line: I find this sauce a bit puzzling, though the concept fairly well done, for what it seems like they were going with. I don’t have a lot of uses where this would fit, but this might be well worth checking out for those that do. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 4
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6

Overall: 4

Spice Trade Outpost Cleric Hot Sauce Review

Spice Trade Outpost Cleric

Note: This sauce was provided by Roger Damptz of Burn Your Tongue for purposes of review. Check him out on Facebook and Instagram. 

This was enticed me with the lure, the siren song of a class of characters from the fantasy world, perhaps best epitomized by D & D tabletop games and novels and later popularized by various video games. That kind of thing will never not have my rapt and immediate attention, but I was a bit disappointed to find this was the only sauce in the line that did not have onions. 

Still, honey, peach, and Habanero should be a pretty good combination, even if cinnamon was also present. It was very much at the end, where it belongs, so I had hopes it would not play too much into the flavor. It is there mostly as a grace note and doesn’t intrude much, so good there. I did notice that there seemed to be a lot of shifting in the sauce, with the heavier bits all towards the bottom, but I don’t get too concerned with that, as stuff settles quite a bit and it’s standard chilehead practice by now to agitate everything...or at least try to agitate everything, before using. 

Once I got the bottle properly agitated and open, I noticed something that had escaped my attention when picking up the bottle...it was during a haul and as usual, I had several sauces in the basket, but this is a very thin, even watery along the lines of a Louisiana-style Cayenne sauce.  As with other sauces I’ve done over time in this blog, this raised the immediate issue of flexibility being notably altered, as well as flavor density. Using cinnamon already changed that equation, as it also has to be paired, but when a sauce is this runny, it does cut down where, when, and how much can be used. In my estimation, this sauce suffers a bit for this and I would rather it been reduced down somewhat...and also had the cinnamon removed entirely.     

The flavor here is pretty nice, all told, though I found it worked best, on chicken tendies, as it is quite vinegar forward as well. I didn’t mind it on grilled pork chops, but the thinness really worked against it here. The breading of the tendies does a nice job of melding with the sauce and the notes of cinnamon. I kept wishing I could get more of the peaches, but this is more along the lines of vinegar, cinnamon, honey and Habanero, with a very slight grace note here and there of peaches. The thinness definitely does not help here. As it is Habanero for heat, this is a fairly mild sauce, all told. 

Bottom line: A very curious approach to a fruit-based sweet hot that I’m not sure I found overly favorable. I did like it more than not, but the consistency did it no favors.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 2
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4

Overall: 3

Uncle Chainsaw The Terrifyer Hot Sauce Review

Uncle Chainsaw The Terrifyer

Note: I understand this sauce has gone through an evolution of sorts, as sauces sometimes do, and now uses Jalapenos rather than Fresnos. This review is for the Fresno version.

If Uncle Chainsaw keeps going like this, I’m going to haul off and add them to my favorite saucemakers list. They do a lot of things that speak to me directly, little intangibles, such as their label art being among my favorite of any sauce maker, the overall “heavy metal” vibe, the admonishment to keep refrigerated after opening, the use of bold text to highlight the ingredient list, which come directly after the nutritional facts, a lot of little things that isolated are perhaps less significant, but the devil is in the details, kids, and it all adds up. 

Perhaps my favorite thing is the seeming deliberateness of the ingredient selection. I thought their previous sauce, reviewed elsewhere here, was super impressive and well-thought out and this sauce, despite far fewer ingredients no less so. That sauce utilized Calabrians, one of my favorite peppers, and this one uses Fresnos, yet another of my favorite peppers. That this one is largely, for lack of better description, more of a Lousiana-style in looseness, at least, I was pretty pre-disposed to love it. That doesn’t mean I always will with sauces, of course, but it was pretty nicely teed up. 

I did and do love it, as it turns out. Fresnos can be a bit of a pain to come across, but for all that, I don’t understand why more sauce makers don’t use them. In a lot of ways, they’re kind of the ultimate cheat button to make a sauce nearly instantly taste better. Here, the sauce highlights that pepper. Garlic comes after the Fresnos in the ingredient list and in the flavor, as well, with a very nice grace afternote, unlike some sauces that treat garlic as a hammer with which to pound one’s taste buds. As it is a Fresno, heat is fairly minimal, but this is very much a flavor first mindset from this maker, yet another feather in the cap for them. 

The one minor issue I have here is with the looseness. As I’ve noted many times, sauce consistency can and will dramatically influence flexibility. The more runny a sauce is, the more that needs to be taken into consideration in terms of application. So, while I think a much thicker version of this would be borderline heaven on pizza, for instance, it is much too watery to work there. The purity of this sauce also means it will need to be agitated frequently. Think of it very much in terms of where you might use a Louisiana-style.

Bottom line: In a lot of ways, this is a celebration of the Fresno, where even the fruity nature of the pepper while shine though here and there, all in a quite wonderful and delicious setting.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 10
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 6

Hot Line Pineapple Paradise Hot Sauce Review

Hot Line Pineapple Paradise

I think of a lot of things when I consider the term “paradise.” A lot of people think of tropical beaches on distant islands, perhaps, places which I immediately think will be hot, sweltering, overly humid pseudo-swamps, but I presume they are meaning more of that idea that was heavily popularized in the 80s, thanks to stuff like the Magnum P.I. tv show and the Hawaiian Tourism Board. 

Point being that usually paradise is used to denote something really good and enjoyable and I’d imagine that was their other motivation for choosing this...while there are certainly tropical fruits in this, or at least one in particular, that being pineapple, I can’t say that the secondary definition I just mentioned would apply much here. I’ve mentioned it numerous times before in other reviews, but this is a very well-represented segment of the market, both the fruit-based sweet hots and in particular the tropical fruit-based sweet hots, many of which I’ve covered (see TOC at right). 

I’ve mentioned the two main approaches I think a hot sauce company can take if they decide to enter into that segment (see other reviews for those), but there is also a third, which is one this one does, and that is to put out what amounts to basically just another entry, kind of making a sauce just to have one, I suppose, as in we also have one of those, so to speak. 

While I love the name “Hot Line” and appreciate the use of a flask, that is where my admiration sort of ends. The consistency and color resemble applesauce a bit, which I find off-putting to a degree. Flavor-wise, this is very, very apple cider vinegar forward. If there is a taste, beyond onion-derivative, of course, that I wish not to find in a sauce, it is definitely that overused, overhyped, and generally disgustingly-flavored vinegar and it is unfortunately here in abundance. I get it, people buy the hype that it’s supposed healthy (a claim wholly unbacked by evidence) and people actually drink the shit, but I find it vile. Some sauces do a great job of having it not be prominent or, even more rarely, use it effectively, but I can’t say that is the case here. This does depend a bit on what you use it on, though, as I did have it on a few things where it was more a garlicky pineapple sort of vibe and the vinegar did not come overly to the fore.

This does become a problem in usage. With fruit-based sweet hots, you need to pair the fruit to whatever you’re using the sauce on. Depending on the fruit, this will inherently limit flexibility. When you have an external element in the sauce this prominent, you also need to pair the food with that as well. So, if you happen to like, say, pineapple on pizza, as I do, this is not a candidate for that, as the last thing I would want sullying up a nice good pie is the flavor or odor of stinky-foot vinegar. Heat-wise, it’s very modest, as it’s only Habanero and pretty far back in the mix.

Bottom line: For me, this sauce is not particularly representative of the segment it’s trying to enter, let alone a good example of it. If you somehow like apple cider vinegar, you may like it more.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 3
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 0

Overall: 2