Circa 09.27.12
Well, not actually, in the lake, per se, but in the area, specifically in the city proper. There are, precisely, two and another about an hour away. Before I get to talking about them, I should back up. Long, long ago, back when I was first doing the Chilehead ride before the thing had a proper name, there were two places in Salt Lake that pushed the heat end. One of them was Grove Market and the other was a shop in Fashion Place Mall where we'd buy a bottle of Dave's Insanity every 6 months or so for drunken party bravery challenges.
The place in Fashion Place, whatever the name, is now long gone, but Grove Market is still around, doing their damn thing. Mostly, that means making gigantic (and tasty) deli sandwiches. They also have a couple floor to ceiling shelves (and an area behind the register) featuring nothing but hot to superhot sauces. Some of them are probably more keepsakes, such as John McCain campaign bottle of something and possibly that bottle of Orange Krush I got a couple weeks ago, than actually usable, but the range is overall pretty good, even discounting the bullshit like Melinda's and Marie Sharp's and other assorted sauces that use the dreaded ass-onions as part of their makeup. I've decided to make this my go-to store, for a variety of reasons and have put in some tags for the Original Death and a couple others to pick up sometime in the next month (backlog and all). They even have Danny Cash stuff, which I frankly never expected to see on a shelf. One major caveat, to go back to the keepsake thing for a second, is that anything on the very top shelf of the north shelf must be inspected closely. Several of the bottles are apparently just for collectible purposes and several of them have discolored sauce remnants up the necks of the bottles.
By way of update to Grove's, as of today, 11/03/12, I've bought 6 bottles of hot sauce there. Three of them have been out of date and the sauce has been discolored. Accordingly, I must recommend that you check the date and color carefully before making an actual purchase.
The other Satl Lake store is called Chili & Max and is in the top area of the detestable outdoor Gateway Mall, down the street from the more useless outdoor City Creek Mall. In the age of the internet, for a brick & mortar anything to succeed, they need to do one of two things: offer something unique and that people really want and can only get there OR offer a great enough selection to offset the higher price for convenience vs. ordering whatever it is online for probably (maybe) cheaper and having to wait a week or so. What Chili & Max has done is neither. This is evidently an outlet for a sauce company unfortunately named "Its F'n Hot." Loads of that on the shelves, along with a few things from CaJohn's and Dave's, but the selection seems almost haphazard. There are a few of the superhots and the store, with its hundreds and hundreds of bottles, seems to run the gamut, but where is the Blair's and where is the rest of the CaJohn's? Again, with the Melinda's and Marie Sharp's, several of which are in grocery stores, but when you're putting a storefront in a mall, where patrons have to validate their fucking parking, your ass better bring it and this store was a resounding and solid disappointment. I may go back again someday, but damn if it's worth a special trip. I seriously can't see how you can cater to that narrow of an audience, most of the shoppers from there can be counted on to be knowledgeable, and then have that skimpy of a selection.
An hour north, in another mall and nestled in a Quilted Bear storefront (I couldn't make up something that delicious if I wanted), is a third, called Burn Your Tongue. Now, it's a waste of my time and money to drive to that town merely to peruse the wares on display, even if I buy something, but if I'm in the area, I'll definitely drop in. The selection they have listed on their website is intriguing and by names alone, world better than either of the two I already mentioned.
Grocers are carrying more sauces now. Smith's (part of Kroger), goes about as far as El Yucateco, but Harmon's carries several of the charged habanero sauces and Fresh Market has several more. Whole Foods is supposed to have a good selection (I couldn't find any on my last visit) and some of the more boutique stores also advertise their supposed prowess here. I can't canvass them all, obviously, but I always check the shelves for something recently added. A Trader Joe's is supposed to open downtown and that has some possibilities, but in a town this size -- and even including Ogden an hour north -- 3 shops that specialize (sorta) in hot sauce is piss poor pathetic. Salt Lake is not a "dead" food town-- there are a lot of great and flavorful eateries and we have the Kobe Sushi restaurant, with its infamous 7 levels of heat (working my way up to that one) -- it's not like it's Fargo, where nobody knows anything about food or flavor, after all. It is, somewhat, a "safe" town, though and the Chilehead movement, while gaining some ground, is not storming the castles here just yet...
Friday, September 28, 2012
Saturday, September 22, 2012
CaJohn's Bourbon Infused Chipotle-Habanero Hot Sauce Review
CaJohn's Bourbon Infused Chipotle-Habanero (15th Anniversary Limited Edition)
UPDATE: Video support now available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZYKJn4_LQg
Part of me is tempted to greatly simplify this and call it Tiger Sauce Amplified and On Steroids, which, while somewhat accurate, is also woefully inadequate. My initial impression on tasting it plain was that it was a similar sort of sweet/hot sauce and the immediate reminiscence was of that, but 2 seconds later, the similarity ended. Whereas Tiger can be quickly cloying and has a feel and taste of "cheap" to it, requiring it to be used very judiciously, BICH is on a level where it could be poured into a shot glass and slugged. Very few sauces tasted good enough to consider drinking (not that I would), but this is one where I found myself thinking..."yes, but I could." Sweet-hot is always high on my list and this one fills the bill magnificently!
The heat is almost perfectly orchestrated. It is a slight delay, then a steady build into an overall crescendo of notes that is not too bracing, but at a pleasant enough level to let you know that it's there and you may commence with the happiness over that fact. The grace notes of vinegar and the chipotle overtones are fantastically well done, but the real skill, for me, came in the use of the Jim Beam Black. It is hard to imagine a better choice of bourbon for use here. While Jim Beam Black is a bit too sweet for me to keep on hand for drinking (I much prefer Eagle Rare as my on-hand bottle for bourbon), it is still an excellent bourbon and that exact sweetness really shines here. The choice is sheer brilliance and it shines through very nicely in the sauce.
While I have tested this extensively on nearly everything I can think of -- including eggs -- along with the standards of pizza and chicken strips, I found it interesting on tacos, but not something I would choose again. The taste is so delicious that I don't think there is a way that adding it to anything would be necessarily bad, however, it borderline clashes, which makes for the taste to be curious and a nice change of pace, but not anything that would be necessarily used regularly. I think where it really shines is on the grill. While slightly thin, it sticks well enough to food and it has a somewhat heavier, darker taste that it can easily be used for anything from hamburgers to chicken to steak to pork. This is another marked difference from Tiger, which works well on fish, chicken, rice and mashed potatoes and very little else. The BICH also caramelizes incredibly well and the very slight astringency from the vinegar would make this a fantastic mop or finishing sauce for ribs.
Bottom line: I still have a great many sauces in line for testing before I add another one to my standbys, but I have a sneaking suspicion that when I run out of this bottle, I will be buying another couple next time I hit the store or order online, presuming I can find it. At $10 for a 6.8 oz. bottle, the enjoyment per dollar level is the highest I've found this year, excepting maybe the Red Devil. The only thing that gives me some degree of pause is the availability of it, which may be an issue at some future point.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 9
Flexibility: 7
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10
Overall: 7
UPDATE: Video support now available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZYKJn4_LQg Part of me is tempted to greatly simplify this and call it Tiger Sauce Amplified and On Steroids, which, while somewhat accurate, is also woefully inadequate. My initial impression on tasting it plain was that it was a similar sort of sweet/hot sauce and the immediate reminiscence was of that, but 2 seconds later, the similarity ended. Whereas Tiger can be quickly cloying and has a feel and taste of "cheap" to it, requiring it to be used very judiciously, BICH is on a level where it could be poured into a shot glass and slugged. Very few sauces tasted good enough to consider drinking (not that I would), but this is one where I found myself thinking..."yes, but I could." Sweet-hot is always high on my list and this one fills the bill magnificently!
The heat is almost perfectly orchestrated. It is a slight delay, then a steady build into an overall crescendo of notes that is not too bracing, but at a pleasant enough level to let you know that it's there and you may commence with the happiness over that fact. The grace notes of vinegar and the chipotle overtones are fantastically well done, but the real skill, for me, came in the use of the Jim Beam Black. It is hard to imagine a better choice of bourbon for use here. While Jim Beam Black is a bit too sweet for me to keep on hand for drinking (I much prefer Eagle Rare as my on-hand bottle for bourbon), it is still an excellent bourbon and that exact sweetness really shines here. The choice is sheer brilliance and it shines through very nicely in the sauce.
While I have tested this extensively on nearly everything I can think of -- including eggs -- along with the standards of pizza and chicken strips, I found it interesting on tacos, but not something I would choose again. The taste is so delicious that I don't think there is a way that adding it to anything would be necessarily bad, however, it borderline clashes, which makes for the taste to be curious and a nice change of pace, but not anything that would be necessarily used regularly. I think where it really shines is on the grill. While slightly thin, it sticks well enough to food and it has a somewhat heavier, darker taste that it can easily be used for anything from hamburgers to chicken to steak to pork. This is another marked difference from Tiger, which works well on fish, chicken, rice and mashed potatoes and very little else. The BICH also caramelizes incredibly well and the very slight astringency from the vinegar would make this a fantastic mop or finishing sauce for ribs.
Bottom line: I still have a great many sauces in line for testing before I add another one to my standbys, but I have a sneaking suspicion that when I run out of this bottle, I will be buying another couple next time I hit the store or order online, presuming I can find it. At $10 for a 6.8 oz. bottle, the enjoyment per dollar level is the highest I've found this year, excepting maybe the Red Devil. The only thing that gives me some degree of pause is the availability of it, which may be an issue at some future point.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 9
Flexibility: 7
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10
Overall: 7
El Yucateco Red Habanero Hot Sauce Review
El Yucateco Red Habanero
UPDATE: Video support now available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZPp3PGf28
NOTE: This sauce appeared in Season Two and Season Three of The Hot Ones.
Since my newest pressing sauce "need" is still for a new "Mexican"-type sauce, I picked up a bottle of this I happened across during the course of my normal grocery shopping. At 5, 800 SHU, it's not particularly hot, but a significant step up from Pico Pica or the random sauce packets I had from whatever Mexican type food place I was at last or from the usual suspects of Tapatio/Cholula. If it did turn out to be good, the $2.59 I spent on the 4 oz. bottle would be well worth it.
The initial taste is a very vivid and lively one, something I would best describe as "bright", nearly as bright, in fact, as the red coloration of this sauce. It's a very peppery, very chile-tasting sauce, though it happily does not have a lot of the obnoxious overtones of habanero that makes the pepper itself one that I use sparingly. The taste is something I would rate as palatable, but not too strong one way or the other and the heat flush, something else atypical of habaneros for me, is immediate, though it tends to be a mouth heat only, failing to radiate into an overall internal burn, such as Thai peppers have a happy habit of doing.
All is not rosy, however. My main contention with this sauce is that it can quickly and easily overpower everything else. This is not a negative if the flavor of the sauce is enjoyable. To me, this one, as noted, is not. It is what I say is average. I found it to be best when mixed and being, as it is, intended for the Mexican market, it excels at those foods, when mixed in thoroughly with something else. Just slapping the sauce on something generally means a big hit of sauce that doesn't always play nice with other things in the mouth and becomes the focal point. This distraction is what really limits its overall flexibility for me. Despite the burst of initial mouth heat, I could stand for this to contain more of the usual habanero element of building heat.
I tried this on a wide variety of the usual suspects, such as pizza & chicken strips and while it wasn't totally dissatisfying, I was happy when the small sections that I used it on were consumed. It worked far better on mole' chicken, tacos, burritos, pinto beans, pork & beans and eggs.
Bottom line: This is a significant upgrade from what I was using normally as a Mexican sauce and I'm in no way dissatisfied at all. It is not on a level, however, that I will give up my search and frankly not really good enough in terms of what I'm wanting to make it a standby. By far the most redeeming thing about it is the under $1/oz. price and the near-ubiquitous availability, which makes it an outstanding value. Unfortunately, the other factors are just not there as much as I need them to be. This is what I would call a very solid mid-range sauce.
Breakdown:
Heat level:1
Flavor: 5
Flexibility: 4
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 7
Overall: 4
UPDATE: Video support now available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZPp3PGf28NOTE: This sauce appeared in Season Two and Season Three of The Hot Ones.
Since my newest pressing sauce "need" is still for a new "Mexican"-type sauce, I picked up a bottle of this I happened across during the course of my normal grocery shopping. At 5, 800 SHU, it's not particularly hot, but a significant step up from Pico Pica or the random sauce packets I had from whatever Mexican type food place I was at last or from the usual suspects of Tapatio/Cholula. If it did turn out to be good, the $2.59 I spent on the 4 oz. bottle would be well worth it.
The initial taste is a very vivid and lively one, something I would best describe as "bright", nearly as bright, in fact, as the red coloration of this sauce. It's a very peppery, very chile-tasting sauce, though it happily does not have a lot of the obnoxious overtones of habanero that makes the pepper itself one that I use sparingly. The taste is something I would rate as palatable, but not too strong one way or the other and the heat flush, something else atypical of habaneros for me, is immediate, though it tends to be a mouth heat only, failing to radiate into an overall internal burn, such as Thai peppers have a happy habit of doing.
All is not rosy, however. My main contention with this sauce is that it can quickly and easily overpower everything else. This is not a negative if the flavor of the sauce is enjoyable. To me, this one, as noted, is not. It is what I say is average. I found it to be best when mixed and being, as it is, intended for the Mexican market, it excels at those foods, when mixed in thoroughly with something else. Just slapping the sauce on something generally means a big hit of sauce that doesn't always play nice with other things in the mouth and becomes the focal point. This distraction is what really limits its overall flexibility for me. Despite the burst of initial mouth heat, I could stand for this to contain more of the usual habanero element of building heat.
I tried this on a wide variety of the usual suspects, such as pizza & chicken strips and while it wasn't totally dissatisfying, I was happy when the small sections that I used it on were consumed. It worked far better on mole' chicken, tacos, burritos, pinto beans, pork & beans and eggs.
Bottom line: This is a significant upgrade from what I was using normally as a Mexican sauce and I'm in no way dissatisfied at all. It is not on a level, however, that I will give up my search and frankly not really good enough in terms of what I'm wanting to make it a standby. By far the most redeeming thing about it is the under $1/oz. price and the near-ubiquitous availability, which makes it an outstanding value. Unfortunately, the other factors are just not there as much as I need them to be. This is what I would call a very solid mid-range sauce.
Breakdown:
Heat level:1
Flavor: 5
Flexibility: 4
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 7
Overall: 4
Monday, September 17, 2012
An Open Letter to Hot Sauce Manufacturers
What I'm about to write was prompted by a discussion in the comment section of a review Scott Roberts recently did for a sauce called Johny 5 by Threatcon Kitchens, available here: http://www.scottrobertsweb.com/Review-Johny-5-Hot-Sauce-from-Threatcon-Kitchens#comments
Reading through the review, Roberts ultimately didn't enjoy the sauce and like others of which he's had an identical reaction, he said so. So far, so good, right? Except here's where it get stupid...
In his first post in the comment section, one Chris Tice, creator of the sauce, took great umbrage at the review Mr. Roberts did of the Johny 5 sauce, the first to be released commercially from Threatcon Kitchens. Part of his grievance centered on having to wait months for the review, despite Roberts repeatedly posting that he has an enormous backlog of review items. Given the amount of effort put into any given Roberts review (amusingly, one of Tice's gripes was that Roberts did not post a photo of every single thing the sauce was used on), along with his children and other more important elements that demand his time, he clearly is not in a position to churn them out, like these text-only posts I do. Even with my own, it still takes time to test the sauce and line out where it falls in the scheme of things, because the obligation to readers is one any good reviewer takes seriously. Roberts is also, far and away, the king of the hot sauce blog world, unquestionably. That doesn't make him always right or even someone that I necessarily agree with on all things a significant portion of the time, but that's why a manufacturer would want his review. To get into that rarefied air, there are conditions that come with the territory. A review on his site will potentially expose a product to a greater segment of the hotter sauce buying base, the exact customer demographic that a sauce such as this would appeal. Obviously, other companies recognize this, which is why he has boxes and boxes of stuff unopened before him. If someone wants him, he's not exactly invisible and trade shows and there are plenty of pages on his site for them to research so they know what they are getting. Failing to do this is on them.
Scott Roberts does not know me and does not need me to defend him, but there are some larger issues raised by the comments of Tice that have a more direct bearing. Tice, for instance, attempted to take Roberts to task for trying the sauce on pizza and "bar food". In the comments section, he levied this attack repeatedly, insisting that not only does sauce not belong on Italian foods at all, restricting any addition to the dried and dessicated hot pepper flakes and seeds, but further that reviewers should pair hot sauce to its pallet [sic] when testing. He also was angered that his "gourmet" sauce was used on Hamburger Helper. Finally, there were numerous misspellings in Tice's angry posts, yet he bandied his stature as some sort of published food writer for a couple papers in Florida as a means in his attempt to belittle Roberts further.
Almost all of Tice's behavior is laughable but his irate sentences about not pairing a sauce to its palate is absurd. Even if the label says the sauce is strictly intended for certain foods under the full pale moonlight after turning three time widdershins and even if the manufacturer gets some kind of commitment (somehow) that the food will only be used according to those directions, the fact remains that all bets are off once it is in the hands of the reviewer (or consumer). A good review will state how something is tested. Roberts did that. Nothing further is necessary. Readers can decide for themselves if it is fair and applicable and if Tice didn't believe it was and felt strongly about it, all he had to say was that the sauce would be better oriented to other things and leave it at that. That he chose to use the comment section as a sort of electronic assault is crass.
The sauce, as a condiment or accompaniment to food, comes to us, not the other way around. It either fits in with what we're doing and what we're eating or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it fails. There's nothing wrong with using sauce on pizza. Pizza is fine as a staple as is Hamburger Helper or mac & cheese or chicken strips. If any of the chilehead households have young children, dollars to doughnuts some of those foods will be staples, so of course the food at hand is where the sauce will be tested and it will pass or fail on its relative merits thereof. Pizza, it also should be noted, is one of the easiest tests there is for a sauce and one of the things I use as a base. If a sauce fails there, it typically points to a larger issue with the sauce in general. Very few sauces I can think of have failed this test or that of ramen noodles, which was my baseline test years and years ago. Sauces, if they are any good, should be able to fail this easy test and even the more specific Asian-oriented one have done so easily in the past. Even though I felt I had a handle on the Jim Beam Hot Sauce well enough to review it, as long as I have some in the bottle, unless a sauce is so awful I have to toss it, I will continue to test it on a variety of things, such as mole' chicken last night and Italian meatloaf tonight. I even ran it on a BLT(-L) sandwich while I was at it and have a couple more tests this week to continue checking and confirm things. Ultimately, the whole point of doing a food-based review is so that someone else can read your experience and determine if they have similar tastes and if they would use the product in a similar manner. That's why people read reviews, to help them answer the question "should I spend money on this thing" and maybe to be entertained in the process. Theoretically, assuming Tice is a competent reviewer (I have not and will not read any of his articles), he should know this already.
As a reviewer, I really want a sauce to have flexibility because I will not ever stock 50 - 100 sauces for every thing I might ever cook or eat. I believe everyone else reading the reviews probably wants the same thing. Just give us something good that we can (or do) love on a variety of foods and you'll have a repeat customer, we'll have a new staple and it's a win-win. For Tice to suggest that food be bought specifically for a sauce review is ridiculous and frankly asinine and demonstrates a core lack of understanding for the marketplace. The only way I could conceivably see that happening is if Tice paid for the food to be used during the review, but even then, it would probably be tested on other stuff as well because we want to know. Why be afraid of a sauce being used on a variety of foods? If the sauce is really great, possibly food would be purchased specifically for it, but probably 99.9% of the time that would be the exception and not the rule.
Here's the rub, though. Johny 5 is not a sauce I would have ever considered, due to my intolerance of the onions in it, but if the day comes when Threatcon makes a sauce without that component, I won't be tasting it. When I saw that reaction from Tice, my first counter-reaction was that there was a sauce company who would never get my money, who I would make it a point to ignore and if ever I was asked, would intentionally steer people away from. It doesn't matter how good the sauce is; it could be the greatest sauce in the world and I would still say no because that sort of bizarre reaction from Tice I find highly offensive, as well as off-base and I have no intention of even indirectly supporting it. Fact is, I will never spend a cent on anything from Threatcon because of this and I will encourage others not to buy anything from them either. There are too many other good and great sauces from good and great companies and much more deserving sauce creators to support.
I've reviewed products for years and years, everything from CDs to bodybuilding products. I've known a great number of reviewers in that time and I will state categorically that of all the other reviewers I've known, as well as speaking for myself, we truly want to love what we're reviewing. We all want to find the next great thing, to find something that will help us to the next level of training or will be another addition to the list of "Island" CDs or to find the sauce that will ratchet up the taste factor of our food. Nobody sets out wanting to write a "bad" review, to tell someone that their product is not ready for prime time yet or needs more development or should have been erased from the studios hard drive, yet sometimes, in order to do our jobs as reviewers, whether we are paid or not -- from a pride perspective, if nothing else -- we must tell the truth. Not every product is great. Most are not even good. The highest single statistical area is that of average. The really bad ones are as few as the really great ones and the notably below-average about the same as notable above-average. In any field, the most competitive area is in the middle, but with an industry relatively in its infancy, such as hot sauce, it becomes very important to try to gain and latch onto a paying fan/customer base. Treating a neutral reviewer that badly and generally acting an ass to the other commenters in the community is not the way to go about doing that. Indeed, this is the epitome of what not to do.
Reading through the review, Roberts ultimately didn't enjoy the sauce and like others of which he's had an identical reaction, he said so. So far, so good, right? Except here's where it get stupid...
In his first post in the comment section, one Chris Tice, creator of the sauce, took great umbrage at the review Mr. Roberts did of the Johny 5 sauce, the first to be released commercially from Threatcon Kitchens. Part of his grievance centered on having to wait months for the review, despite Roberts repeatedly posting that he has an enormous backlog of review items. Given the amount of effort put into any given Roberts review (amusingly, one of Tice's gripes was that Roberts did not post a photo of every single thing the sauce was used on), along with his children and other more important elements that demand his time, he clearly is not in a position to churn them out, like these text-only posts I do. Even with my own, it still takes time to test the sauce and line out where it falls in the scheme of things, because the obligation to readers is one any good reviewer takes seriously. Roberts is also, far and away, the king of the hot sauce blog world, unquestionably. That doesn't make him always right or even someone that I necessarily agree with on all things a significant portion of the time, but that's why a manufacturer would want his review. To get into that rarefied air, there are conditions that come with the territory. A review on his site will potentially expose a product to a greater segment of the hotter sauce buying base, the exact customer demographic that a sauce such as this would appeal. Obviously, other companies recognize this, which is why he has boxes and boxes of stuff unopened before him. If someone wants him, he's not exactly invisible and trade shows and there are plenty of pages on his site for them to research so they know what they are getting. Failing to do this is on them.
Scott Roberts does not know me and does not need me to defend him, but there are some larger issues raised by the comments of Tice that have a more direct bearing. Tice, for instance, attempted to take Roberts to task for trying the sauce on pizza and "bar food". In the comments section, he levied this attack repeatedly, insisting that not only does sauce not belong on Italian foods at all, restricting any addition to the dried and dessicated hot pepper flakes and seeds, but further that reviewers should pair hot sauce to its pallet [sic] when testing. He also was angered that his "gourmet" sauce was used on Hamburger Helper. Finally, there were numerous misspellings in Tice's angry posts, yet he bandied his stature as some sort of published food writer for a couple papers in Florida as a means in his attempt to belittle Roberts further.
Almost all of Tice's behavior is laughable but his irate sentences about not pairing a sauce to its palate is absurd. Even if the label says the sauce is strictly intended for certain foods under the full pale moonlight after turning three time widdershins and even if the manufacturer gets some kind of commitment (somehow) that the food will only be used according to those directions, the fact remains that all bets are off once it is in the hands of the reviewer (or consumer). A good review will state how something is tested. Roberts did that. Nothing further is necessary. Readers can decide for themselves if it is fair and applicable and if Tice didn't believe it was and felt strongly about it, all he had to say was that the sauce would be better oriented to other things and leave it at that. That he chose to use the comment section as a sort of electronic assault is crass.
The sauce, as a condiment or accompaniment to food, comes to us, not the other way around. It either fits in with what we're doing and what we're eating or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it fails. There's nothing wrong with using sauce on pizza. Pizza is fine as a staple as is Hamburger Helper or mac & cheese or chicken strips. If any of the chilehead households have young children, dollars to doughnuts some of those foods will be staples, so of course the food at hand is where the sauce will be tested and it will pass or fail on its relative merits thereof. Pizza, it also should be noted, is one of the easiest tests there is for a sauce and one of the things I use as a base. If a sauce fails there, it typically points to a larger issue with the sauce in general. Very few sauces I can think of have failed this test or that of ramen noodles, which was my baseline test years and years ago. Sauces, if they are any good, should be able to fail this easy test and even the more specific Asian-oriented one have done so easily in the past. Even though I felt I had a handle on the Jim Beam Hot Sauce well enough to review it, as long as I have some in the bottle, unless a sauce is so awful I have to toss it, I will continue to test it on a variety of things, such as mole' chicken last night and Italian meatloaf tonight. I even ran it on a BLT(-L) sandwich while I was at it and have a couple more tests this week to continue checking and confirm things. Ultimately, the whole point of doing a food-based review is so that someone else can read your experience and determine if they have similar tastes and if they would use the product in a similar manner. That's why people read reviews, to help them answer the question "should I spend money on this thing" and maybe to be entertained in the process. Theoretically, assuming Tice is a competent reviewer (I have not and will not read any of his articles), he should know this already.
As a reviewer, I really want a sauce to have flexibility because I will not ever stock 50 - 100 sauces for every thing I might ever cook or eat. I believe everyone else reading the reviews probably wants the same thing. Just give us something good that we can (or do) love on a variety of foods and you'll have a repeat customer, we'll have a new staple and it's a win-win. For Tice to suggest that food be bought specifically for a sauce review is ridiculous and frankly asinine and demonstrates a core lack of understanding for the marketplace. The only way I could conceivably see that happening is if Tice paid for the food to be used during the review, but even then, it would probably be tested on other stuff as well because we want to know. Why be afraid of a sauce being used on a variety of foods? If the sauce is really great, possibly food would be purchased specifically for it, but probably 99.9% of the time that would be the exception and not the rule.
Here's the rub, though. Johny 5 is not a sauce I would have ever considered, due to my intolerance of the onions in it, but if the day comes when Threatcon makes a sauce without that component, I won't be tasting it. When I saw that reaction from Tice, my first counter-reaction was that there was a sauce company who would never get my money, who I would make it a point to ignore and if ever I was asked, would intentionally steer people away from. It doesn't matter how good the sauce is; it could be the greatest sauce in the world and I would still say no because that sort of bizarre reaction from Tice I find highly offensive, as well as off-base and I have no intention of even indirectly supporting it. Fact is, I will never spend a cent on anything from Threatcon because of this and I will encourage others not to buy anything from them either. There are too many other good and great sauces from good and great companies and much more deserving sauce creators to support.
I've reviewed products for years and years, everything from CDs to bodybuilding products. I've known a great number of reviewers in that time and I will state categorically that of all the other reviewers I've known, as well as speaking for myself, we truly want to love what we're reviewing. We all want to find the next great thing, to find something that will help us to the next level of training or will be another addition to the list of "Island" CDs or to find the sauce that will ratchet up the taste factor of our food. Nobody sets out wanting to write a "bad" review, to tell someone that their product is not ready for prime time yet or needs more development or should have been erased from the studios hard drive, yet sometimes, in order to do our jobs as reviewers, whether we are paid or not -- from a pride perspective, if nothing else -- we must tell the truth. Not every product is great. Most are not even good. The highest single statistical area is that of average. The really bad ones are as few as the really great ones and the notably below-average about the same as notable above-average. In any field, the most competitive area is in the middle, but with an industry relatively in its infancy, such as hot sauce, it becomes very important to try to gain and latch onto a paying fan/customer base. Treating a neutral reviewer that badly and generally acting an ass to the other commenters in the community is not the way to go about doing that. Indeed, this is the epitome of what not to do.
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Jim Beam Hot Sauce review
Jim Beam Hot Sauce
Fuck, he typed as he very professionally began his review.
Here's the thing. I really wanted to like this sauce. Everyone who knows me knows I love bourbon. I don't especially love Jim Beam, despite the swimming pool of the shit I've probably drank by now, but if something says "bourbon" on it, it has my attention and immediate interest.
A quick sidetrack -- so the other day, I'm at a place in Salt Lake called Grove Market. They asses boast the largest hot sauce in the city and at well over 200 different bottles, maybe even 300+, they're right on the money there. Nobody else is even close. Like a fucking fool, I went there during a half hour lunch. Figure 7 - 8 minutes to drive there and the rest staring and drooling and dancing around people trying to order lunch sandwiches at this damn deli. I could have spent hours, but instead, I threw down my $5 and took this bottle home, figuring I would go back later (which will be 09.15.12, almost certainly).
I got it back to work (late from lunch) and cracked the bitch open to kick up some 7-11 pizza (best I could do on short notice) and my immediate impression, after taking a slug from the bottle straight (couldn't find a spoon) was that it was a pleasant-tasting sauce. It's a little difficult to place precisely. Initially, I got the chili-powder aspect, reminding me of Pico Pica, then the vinegar hit, so now we have Pico Pica + maybe Tabasco and finally I got the bourbon, albeit very light at that moment, aspect. Hmmmm. As I got further into the sauce, I began to detect more notes and the bourbon flourished more.
On pizza, it kicked all kinds of ass and frankly, this is one of the better sauces I've had on pizza. Clocking in at ~5K SHU, it is around the level of the average jalapeno, nothing special there. The taste...figuring it to be similar to Pico Pica, I slopped it on some Del Taco hardshells and became immediately depressed. Ass city. I put it on some bean burritos from there, to no avail. I got some El Yucateco to bail me out and put the JB away for another day. That day happened a short time later at a chicken strip dinner. I made both these Tyson pre-sauced things that looked like poop logs and some chicken finger appetizers as well. On the fingers, it was aces. On the BBQ strips, however, it was ass personified and I had to call on Texas Pete for a bailout there.
Bottom line: This is overall a pleasant-tasting sauce by itself and as long as you don't have other stronger flavors (hence the success with pizza and chicken fingers), it does quite well. In conjunction with more dominant flavors and the subtleties get masked and you get...vinegar, which creates an ill result. The flexibility of this sauce is lacking, but even if it wasn't, it's not a great sauce, by any means. If you want heat, this is not your sauce, but if you want something that tastes reasonably good on specific foods, you could do worse than to pick up a bottle of this. Even though the cost is higher than more useful sauces, I wouldn't be afraid to pick up a bottle if you like bourbon-sauces and haven't tried this yourself.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 6
Flexibility: original 4, update 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4
Overall: original 4, update 5
** Update: 09.18.12 **
After further consideration and testing, this stuff is somewhat more flexible than I initially indicated, though not a great deal. I've moved the overall rating up slightly in recognition of that. I still don't believe I would pay $5 for another 5 oz. bottle of it, though...
* Do yourself a favor and go to www.scottrobertsweb.com and check out his Scoville scale. It will prove infinitely useful not only with these (and others) reviews, but in general if you're stepping into this world.
Fuck, he typed as he very professionally began his review.Here's the thing. I really wanted to like this sauce. Everyone who knows me knows I love bourbon. I don't especially love Jim Beam, despite the swimming pool of the shit I've probably drank by now, but if something says "bourbon" on it, it has my attention and immediate interest.
A quick sidetrack -- so the other day, I'm at a place in Salt Lake called Grove Market. They asses boast the largest hot sauce in the city and at well over 200 different bottles, maybe even 300+, they're right on the money there. Nobody else is even close. Like a fucking fool, I went there during a half hour lunch. Figure 7 - 8 minutes to drive there and the rest staring and drooling and dancing around people trying to order lunch sandwiches at this damn deli. I could have spent hours, but instead, I threw down my $5 and took this bottle home, figuring I would go back later (which will be 09.15.12, almost certainly).
I got it back to work (late from lunch) and cracked the bitch open to kick up some 7-11 pizza (best I could do on short notice) and my immediate impression, after taking a slug from the bottle straight (couldn't find a spoon) was that it was a pleasant-tasting sauce. It's a little difficult to place precisely. Initially, I got the chili-powder aspect, reminding me of Pico Pica, then the vinegar hit, so now we have Pico Pica + maybe Tabasco and finally I got the bourbon, albeit very light at that moment, aspect. Hmmmm. As I got further into the sauce, I began to detect more notes and the bourbon flourished more.
On pizza, it kicked all kinds of ass and frankly, this is one of the better sauces I've had on pizza. Clocking in at ~5K SHU, it is around the level of the average jalapeno, nothing special there. The taste...figuring it to be similar to Pico Pica, I slopped it on some Del Taco hardshells and became immediately depressed. Ass city. I put it on some bean burritos from there, to no avail. I got some El Yucateco to bail me out and put the JB away for another day. That day happened a short time later at a chicken strip dinner. I made both these Tyson pre-sauced things that looked like poop logs and some chicken finger appetizers as well. On the fingers, it was aces. On the BBQ strips, however, it was ass personified and I had to call on Texas Pete for a bailout there.
Bottom line: This is overall a pleasant-tasting sauce by itself and as long as you don't have other stronger flavors (hence the success with pizza and chicken fingers), it does quite well. In conjunction with more dominant flavors and the subtleties get masked and you get...vinegar, which creates an ill result. The flexibility of this sauce is lacking, but even if it wasn't, it's not a great sauce, by any means. If you want heat, this is not your sauce, but if you want something that tastes reasonably good on specific foods, you could do worse than to pick up a bottle of this. Even though the cost is higher than more useful sauces, I wouldn't be afraid to pick up a bottle if you like bourbon-sauces and haven't tried this yourself.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 6
Flexibility: original 4, update 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4
Overall: original 4, update 5
** Update: 09.18.12 **
After further consideration and testing, this stuff is somewhat more flexible than I initially indicated, though not a great deal. I've moved the overall rating up slightly in recognition of that. I still don't believe I would pay $5 for another 5 oz. bottle of it, though...
* Do yourself a favor and go to www.scottrobertsweb.com and check out his Scoville scale. It will prove infinitely useful not only with these (and others) reviews, but in general if you're stepping into this world.
Review Methodology
It probably would be best if you, perhaps perusing the archives,
perhaps following at the onset, all 124 of you, were to know a few
things, more specifically What The Hell I'm Doing Here. The long and
short of any review I've done (probably numbering 1,000+ for various
items) is to tell the random person whether or not they should spend
their money on it. To me, your time and your money are valuable and I
don't want to waste either. If you come here, I want you to go away with
something, even if only momentary entertainment. It's always been that
way. Before, I told the people what records to get and why or if they
should get any of the newest offerings from Band X or should you go see
Movie Y or eat at This Place or That. I don't steer anyone wrong,
whether or not they are some faceless click across the worldwide
electronic medium we all share together or if I know someone personally.
It's my word.
With these sauces, I will continue that. When I say, something is worth buying, it means, like the Eagle Rare bourbon I've repeatedly recommended, I back it 100%. I told a friend of mine to buy a bottle of the Eagle Rare and if he didn't like it, I would buy it and cover his full price all the way, even if there was only a swallow left in the bottle. I won't do that for the interwebz denizenry, mind you, but that's the kind of trust I expect my word to mean. I've done it with CDs, books, movies, spirits, wine and now I turn my attention, finally, to sauces.
My first official review will be up tomorrow and you will see what I do, but you can expect to see some of the usual stuff. I will discuss expected uses, how I actually tested it, where it succeeds, where it fails, what the relative SHU* is, what my recommendation and perhaps unique to this blog only, what my enjoyment to dollar ratio is. Frankly, this is where most sauces pass/fail. Some of the things you won't see are me discussing labels or bottle shapes. Why? Look, the receptacle is meaningless. You eat the sauce and you throw the fucking thing away. Why am I reviewing the look and shape of trash? The "collector's" items are different, but check, you break a single seal and you've just devalued that item all the way. The new value of your opened value is $0. You might as well just eat it all up. With CDs, the libretto/liner notes are part of the magilla. With sauce...the container is bound for the nearest landfill and really, unless they are paying me, I don't see a burning need to help the sauce manufacturer's market themselves. If they do want to pay me, then we have something to talk about, but otherwise, it's like rating logos. I prefer that of Coca-Cola over Pepsi, but does anyone really care? Is there difficulty somehow differentiating between the two from some segment of the public?
I will rate using whole numbers out of 10, on a sliding scale. If you want to revert those to stars or whatever, to translate to what the other blogs are doing, divide the final number by 2. I am using a jalapeno as a "base", meaning 5000K SHU is equivalent more or less to zero heat. Like most reviewers (I think), I'm in search of the "perfect" sauce, though I know damn well that is a tall order probably impossible to fulfill. What I've always reviewed has been on the basis of how it fits into my life and in this case, my food and eating habits. I'm not going to whip up a batch of buffalo wings, which I think are one of the most overrated foods out there, simply so I can conduct a specific test for a sauce. I don't mind having a different sauce for different functions, but if it won't fit into a "regular" rotation, it greatly devalues its usefulness to me.
Here is what you can expect to see:
Breakdown: (this is how I determine the final score)
Heat level: (Anything higher than probably 8 and you're looking at a "by-the-drop" cooking additive)
Flavor: (Complexity, "mouth feel", level of intrigue and just plain tastiness are where this would go)
Flexibility: (How many different types of food will this go with and how much does it positively enhance flavor)
Enjoyment to dollar factor: (the higher the $ number, the more demands placed on the sauce)
Overall: (Average of the score of the above ranked factors)
If you see an overall of less than 5, you don't have me backing it. It's buy at your risk. I personally will not pay money for a sauce less than that. The higher the number, the more worth your monetary support: simple, direct, true.
What won't you see? Crazy graphics. I don't have a full-on kick-ass blog like Scott Roberts' and unless I can somehow afford to obtain his service at some future point, I never will. What I can do is write and write like the unholy wind of a muthafucka, so that is what I will do. I can't code and have no idea how to imbed anything. I have gone back and added pictures of the sauces for those I could find and as of fall 2019, will be having video accompaniments of several.
You also probably won't see stuff like snack foods, the aforementioned wing sauce, barbeque sauce (unless it is something compelling) or restaurant item reviews. Likewise you won't see a breakdown of powders or rubs or the like, at least not in this blog. That will, however, be available on the YouTube video series.
elit·ist noun \ā-ˈlē-ˌti-st, i-, ē-\
This is me, the quintessential elitist. I've built a rather large wine list by slogging through hundreds of bottles of sometimes cheap swill. Why? Because a $20 bill is the sweet spot and if you're like me, you have a hard time (and maybe not the cash) to plunk down much more for a bottle of the fine vino. However, once I get enough to be attached to something (see Red Devil), I'm a diehard. I've liked the UK Wildcats in college [basket]ball and the Oakland Raiders of the NFL and precious little else for longer than three decades. For my bourbon, the aforementioned Eagle Rare and I have standbys in vodka and sake as well. Point being, it's a tough battle, but win my heart and I'm yours forever, which is why I will always love heavy metal, classical music and science fiction best of all until the goddamn day I die. That shit's from the heart and it's true and it's real and you can take it to the bank as full-on bond.
As of today (09.14.12), I'm seeking a standby Mexican sauce as a high priority, but for Louisiana sauces I'm set as long as they keep making Red Devil. For Asian dishes, I'm largely set as long as there's 5-spice & chili-garlic sauce out there. You don't need eye-breaking heat for a sauce to be good. A sauce has to be good to be good, but heat is a component gaining more and more importance and that's what this blog largely is, running through the sauces that I can eat (considering the onion intolerance I have) and telling all of y'alls asses what's good in the 'hood (or elsewhere).
I have probably a couple dozen sauces on deck. I'm buying all of these that I'm testing, in the interests of full disclosure, so some of them may take a while for me to actually obtain and post thoughts regarding.
With these sauces, I will continue that. When I say, something is worth buying, it means, like the Eagle Rare bourbon I've repeatedly recommended, I back it 100%. I told a friend of mine to buy a bottle of the Eagle Rare and if he didn't like it, I would buy it and cover his full price all the way, even if there was only a swallow left in the bottle. I won't do that for the interwebz denizenry, mind you, but that's the kind of trust I expect my word to mean. I've done it with CDs, books, movies, spirits, wine and now I turn my attention, finally, to sauces.
My first official review will be up tomorrow and you will see what I do, but you can expect to see some of the usual stuff. I will discuss expected uses, how I actually tested it, where it succeeds, where it fails, what the relative SHU* is, what my recommendation and perhaps unique to this blog only, what my enjoyment to dollar ratio is. Frankly, this is where most sauces pass/fail. Some of the things you won't see are me discussing labels or bottle shapes. Why? Look, the receptacle is meaningless. You eat the sauce and you throw the fucking thing away. Why am I reviewing the look and shape of trash? The "collector's" items are different, but check, you break a single seal and you've just devalued that item all the way. The new value of your opened value is $0. You might as well just eat it all up. With CDs, the libretto/liner notes are part of the magilla. With sauce...the container is bound for the nearest landfill and really, unless they are paying me, I don't see a burning need to help the sauce manufacturer's market themselves. If they do want to pay me, then we have something to talk about, but otherwise, it's like rating logos. I prefer that of Coca-Cola over Pepsi, but does anyone really care? Is there difficulty somehow differentiating between the two from some segment of the public?
I will rate using whole numbers out of 10, on a sliding scale. If you want to revert those to stars or whatever, to translate to what the other blogs are doing, divide the final number by 2. I am using a jalapeno as a "base", meaning 5000K SHU is equivalent more or less to zero heat. Like most reviewers (I think), I'm in search of the "perfect" sauce, though I know damn well that is a tall order probably impossible to fulfill. What I've always reviewed has been on the basis of how it fits into my life and in this case, my food and eating habits. I'm not going to whip up a batch of buffalo wings, which I think are one of the most overrated foods out there, simply so I can conduct a specific test for a sauce. I don't mind having a different sauce for different functions, but if it won't fit into a "regular" rotation, it greatly devalues its usefulness to me.
Here is what you can expect to see:
Breakdown: (this is how I determine the final score)
Heat level: (Anything higher than probably 8 and you're looking at a "by-the-drop" cooking additive)
Flavor: (Complexity, "mouth feel", level of intrigue and just plain tastiness are where this would go)
Flexibility: (How many different types of food will this go with and how much does it positively enhance flavor)
Enjoyment to dollar factor: (the higher the $ number, the more demands placed on the sauce)
Overall: (Average of the score of the above ranked factors)
If you see an overall of less than 5, you don't have me backing it. It's buy at your risk. I personally will not pay money for a sauce less than that. The higher the number, the more worth your monetary support: simple, direct, true.
What won't you see? Crazy graphics. I don't have a full-on kick-ass blog like Scott Roberts' and unless I can somehow afford to obtain his service at some future point, I never will. What I can do is write and write like the unholy wind of a muthafucka, so that is what I will do. I can't code and have no idea how to imbed anything. I have gone back and added pictures of the sauces for those I could find and as of fall 2019, will be having video accompaniments of several.
You also probably won't see stuff like snack foods, the aforementioned wing sauce, barbeque sauce (unless it is something compelling) or restaurant item reviews. Likewise you won't see a breakdown of powders or rubs or the like, at least not in this blog. That will, however, be available on the YouTube video series.
elit·ist noun \ā-ˈlē-ˌti-st, i-, ē-\
This is me, the quintessential elitist. I've built a rather large wine list by slogging through hundreds of bottles of sometimes cheap swill. Why? Because a $20 bill is the sweet spot and if you're like me, you have a hard time (and maybe not the cash) to plunk down much more for a bottle of the fine vino. However, once I get enough to be attached to something (see Red Devil), I'm a diehard. I've liked the UK Wildcats in college [basket]ball and the Oakland Raiders of the NFL and precious little else for longer than three decades. For my bourbon, the aforementioned Eagle Rare and I have standbys in vodka and sake as well. Point being, it's a tough battle, but win my heart and I'm yours forever, which is why I will always love heavy metal, classical music and science fiction best of all until the goddamn day I die. That shit's from the heart and it's true and it's real and you can take it to the bank as full-on bond.
As of today (09.14.12), I'm seeking a standby Mexican sauce as a high priority, but for Louisiana sauces I'm set as long as they keep making Red Devil. For Asian dishes, I'm largely set as long as there's 5-spice & chili-garlic sauce out there. You don't need eye-breaking heat for a sauce to be good. A sauce has to be good to be good, but heat is a component gaining more and more importance and that's what this blog largely is, running through the sauces that I can eat (considering the onion intolerance I have) and telling all of y'alls asses what's good in the 'hood (or elsewhere).
I have probably a couple dozen sauces on deck. I'm buying all of these that I'm testing, in the interests of full disclosure, so some of them may take a while for me to actually obtain and post thoughts regarding.
Friday, September 14, 2012
Mini-Reviews
The idea here is to run through a bunch of commercial hot sauces that I've already tried. There are not a lot of extreme ones here. This is mostly to try to get everything brought up to date.
Crystal Hot Sauce
Spent plenty of this time when I was down on my luck and only had a buck to get me some sauce to pour on a little cluck-cluck. I've been around the world culinarily and spent some time with Asians (more on that in a future post) and the bruthas and the Latinos and damn near everyone, including the boring predominant cuisine of the white-bread motherfuckers that made me seek out the heat in the first place. This is possibly the weakest and cheapest of the vinegar-cayenne blends out there. It is the Rothschild vodka of the hot sauce world, but in a pinch, it's better than nothing and much better than....
Louisiana "Original" Hot Sauce
I could call this the heartbreaker sauce and not be far off. At a time when I couldn't readily get my beloved Red Devil, I found this at a local store and bought some after hearing from a friend that it would do the damn thing. After burning through a few bottles, I happily was beginning to conclude that maybe I had an effective substitute...until the day that I bought one, opened it, had some in ramen, put it back in the fridge and opened the door to find the top half had turned green, as in some sort of mold or something. I tossed the bitch and heard later from that same friend that hers had done the same thing. There is no excuse for that, so despite this being a pretty decent vinegar-cayenne sauce overall, no way am I going to fuck with something like that, especially when it wasted up my brand new bottle.
Trappey's Louisiana Hot Sauce
Not a bad cayenne-pepper sauce (at one time, I ate a shit-ton of that style sauce...now just a ton), but not Red Devil and not worth the change. I'd say this is slightly hotter, but far less tasty. Red Devil is really a marvel unto itself...
Taco Bell Sauces (Various)
None of these are actually good, but the best-tasting of the lot is the mild, so I always get that. For a long time I didn't and suffered through basically micro-drops of the Hot in an absurd quest to be macho. Stupid, stupid. All of them strike me as basically chili powder-based and taste cheap as Hell. The mild works with all of the product that the chain offers, but will cheapen anything you put it on. Hot and Fire and consecutively more chunky and correspondingly ass-awful. At one time, we (myself and others) used to scavenge and horde this for those awful ramen noodles that keep cropping up in this narrative...it was not a Good Time.
Del Taco Sauces (Various)
You are dealing with ketchup, in all cases. If you like ketchup, you're set. If not, you will have to spike it. Their regular green sauce that comes with the burritos is surprisingly decent, the red sauce less so. It's better than nothing, but not by much. The mild and the one below Inferno are rotten abortions and should be avoided entirely.
Taco John's Sauces (Various)
At one time, you could buy these by the bottle...after consuming the sauce, presumably one could break the conveniently shaped flask and use it to slit one's own wrists. The dreadful packets with the unidentifiable chucks and alternately tasteless and nasty assault on my taste buds was quite enough for me, however.
Huy Fong Sriracha
Make friends with a Thai person or shop at an Asian grocer's. That's the only way you're going to experience even the remotest sense of What The Big Deal Is (though it is still nothing I would call "good"). If you buy the bastardized American version, you're getting ketchup. Crap ketchup. With a nasty horseradish ring-around-the-tongue.
Frank's Hot Sauce
Someone -- and I'm too drunk to remember now who the guilty party is -- should be shot for telling me to get this. I should be shot for listening. A friend of mine who did not believe in refrigeration (but it has vinegar, which is a preservative, et. al.) kept this crap in a hot closer in the top half of her split-level house. There was not a marginal difference in the taste between her awful bottle and mine. The big difference came down to me throwing mine out without finishing it. Probably the worst of the cayenne-vinegar sauces, yet inexplicably possibly the most popular. The public's taste for crap will forever remain unsatisfied and H.L. Mencken said it best. You will never go broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
La Victoria Salsa Brava/Ortega Hot Sauce
My parents fed me this cheap crap as a kid. I recently got a bottle of each to see if it was as bad as I remembered. Truth be told, it was worse. I should demand a refund. Both are even worse, somehow, than the Taco Bell sauces.
McIlhenny Tabasco Sauce
Dammit, all those other chilehead bloggers out there are calling this pepper-flavored vinegar and damn if they're not right. Still, this is the original and deserves props for basically inventing the field (though Trappey's might also hold claim to that). As to usefulness, I like to mix it with ketchup at IHOP to spike it a little, but I can't really get past the overwhelming vinegar. There is precious little heat to speak of and although this is a standby in many refrigerators, it has never been one in mine.
McIlhenny Green Jalapeno Sauce
One of the most disappointing things I've had...the taste was not too shabby, but utterly lacking in heat. Pass.
Bufalo Sauce
I forget now which I had, but it was a thick, red paste and nearly impossible to get out of the bottle. Once I did, I was flatly overwhelmed and kind of wished I hadn't. I'm being too harsh, I suspect...the taste wasn't awful, but it also wasn't worth the work to get the shit out of the stupid bottle.
Dave's Insanity Original Sauce
The first of the "boutique" hot sauces that we (the group of us into those things years and years ago) came across...it tasted flatly awful, indicative of extract sauces and honestly, no one ever used it on food...just on drunken "bravery" challenges. The next day after was never very pleasant and it became used much more rarely for that purpose. I can't think of a single reason to obtain this...
Louisiana Gold (Green) Hot Sauce
Have not seen it around for years, but it was one of the more enjoyable sauces I've encountered. Sort of a cross between vinegar-cayenne, but with a nice jalapeno charge...quite tasty. You could do worse than to pick up a bottle, if you come across one.
Crystal Hot Sauce
Spent plenty of this time when I was down on my luck and only had a buck to get me some sauce to pour on a little cluck-cluck. I've been around the world culinarily and spent some time with Asians (more on that in a future post) and the bruthas and the Latinos and damn near everyone, including the boring predominant cuisine of the white-bread motherfuckers that made me seek out the heat in the first place. This is possibly the weakest and cheapest of the vinegar-cayenne blends out there. It is the Rothschild vodka of the hot sauce world, but in a pinch, it's better than nothing and much better than....
Louisiana "Original" Hot Sauce
I could call this the heartbreaker sauce and not be far off. At a time when I couldn't readily get my beloved Red Devil, I found this at a local store and bought some after hearing from a friend that it would do the damn thing. After burning through a few bottles, I happily was beginning to conclude that maybe I had an effective substitute...until the day that I bought one, opened it, had some in ramen, put it back in the fridge and opened the door to find the top half had turned green, as in some sort of mold or something. I tossed the bitch and heard later from that same friend that hers had done the same thing. There is no excuse for that, so despite this being a pretty decent vinegar-cayenne sauce overall, no way am I going to fuck with something like that, especially when it wasted up my brand new bottle.
Trappey's Louisiana Hot Sauce
Not a bad cayenne-pepper sauce (at one time, I ate a shit-ton of that style sauce...now just a ton), but not Red Devil and not worth the change. I'd say this is slightly hotter, but far less tasty. Red Devil is really a marvel unto itself...
Taco Bell Sauces (Various)
None of these are actually good, but the best-tasting of the lot is the mild, so I always get that. For a long time I didn't and suffered through basically micro-drops of the Hot in an absurd quest to be macho. Stupid, stupid. All of them strike me as basically chili powder-based and taste cheap as Hell. The mild works with all of the product that the chain offers, but will cheapen anything you put it on. Hot and Fire and consecutively more chunky and correspondingly ass-awful. At one time, we (myself and others) used to scavenge and horde this for those awful ramen noodles that keep cropping up in this narrative...it was not a Good Time.
Del Taco Sauces (Various)
You are dealing with ketchup, in all cases. If you like ketchup, you're set. If not, you will have to spike it. Their regular green sauce that comes with the burritos is surprisingly decent, the red sauce less so. It's better than nothing, but not by much. The mild and the one below Inferno are rotten abortions and should be avoided entirely.
Taco John's Sauces (Various)
At one time, you could buy these by the bottle...after consuming the sauce, presumably one could break the conveniently shaped flask and use it to slit one's own wrists. The dreadful packets with the unidentifiable chucks and alternately tasteless and nasty assault on my taste buds was quite enough for me, however.
Huy Fong Sriracha
Make friends with a Thai person or shop at an Asian grocer's. That's the only way you're going to experience even the remotest sense of What The Big Deal Is (though it is still nothing I would call "good"). If you buy the bastardized American version, you're getting ketchup. Crap ketchup. With a nasty horseradish ring-around-the-tongue.
Frank's Hot Sauce
Someone -- and I'm too drunk to remember now who the guilty party is -- should be shot for telling me to get this. I should be shot for listening. A friend of mine who did not believe in refrigeration (but it has vinegar, which is a preservative, et. al.) kept this crap in a hot closer in the top half of her split-level house. There was not a marginal difference in the taste between her awful bottle and mine. The big difference came down to me throwing mine out without finishing it. Probably the worst of the cayenne-vinegar sauces, yet inexplicably possibly the most popular. The public's taste for crap will forever remain unsatisfied and H.L. Mencken said it best. You will never go broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
La Victoria Salsa Brava/Ortega Hot Sauce
My parents fed me this cheap crap as a kid. I recently got a bottle of each to see if it was as bad as I remembered. Truth be told, it was worse. I should demand a refund. Both are even worse, somehow, than the Taco Bell sauces.
McIlhenny Tabasco Sauce
Dammit, all those other chilehead bloggers out there are calling this pepper-flavored vinegar and damn if they're not right. Still, this is the original and deserves props for basically inventing the field (though Trappey's might also hold claim to that). As to usefulness, I like to mix it with ketchup at IHOP to spike it a little, but I can't really get past the overwhelming vinegar. There is precious little heat to speak of and although this is a standby in many refrigerators, it has never been one in mine.
McIlhenny Green Jalapeno Sauce
One of the most disappointing things I've had...the taste was not too shabby, but utterly lacking in heat. Pass.
Bufalo Sauce
I forget now which I had, but it was a thick, red paste and nearly impossible to get out of the bottle. Once I did, I was flatly overwhelmed and kind of wished I hadn't. I'm being too harsh, I suspect...the taste wasn't awful, but it also wasn't worth the work to get the shit out of the stupid bottle.
Dave's Insanity Original Sauce
The first of the "boutique" hot sauces that we (the group of us into those things years and years ago) came across...it tasted flatly awful, indicative of extract sauces and honestly, no one ever used it on food...just on drunken "bravery" challenges. The next day after was never very pleasant and it became used much more rarely for that purpose. I can't think of a single reason to obtain this...
Louisiana Gold (Green) Hot Sauce
Have not seen it around for years, but it was one of the more enjoyable sauces I've encountered. Sort of a cross between vinegar-cayenne, but with a nice jalapeno charge...quite tasty. You could do worse than to pick up a bottle, if you come across one.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
The Standby Sauces/Past Favorites
These are hot sauces that I have known, loved dearly and will never be without...mostly. Since I'm going through a Renaissance of sorts, it's possible some old favorites may get the heave-ho to make way for some new loves...I will also include past loves in here as well...none of these on this list will be reviewed from this point on (09.12.12), though if a new sauce makes it on the list in a review after this is posted, it won't be deleted. Clear as fucking mud, right?
Circa 09.12.12 (in no particular order):
Trappey's Red Devil
This one has been with me the longest (I fell in love with it the first time I tried it nearly 20 years ago) and though it does not pack much, if any, heat, it is perhaps the greatest of them all. It is a typical vinegar/cayenne based sauce, but the blend is such that it's one of the few sauces I've found that I could drink straight. Aside from Mexican food, which does not tolerate vinegar particularly well, it goes with everything else well and elevates the taste astronomically. Those cheap shitty frozen dinners that you got for a buck at the grocery store to have at work? Throw some of this on there and elevate them to a whole new level. Does it make them great? No. Nothing exists to make shit shine (yet), but for $1.50/bottle, this is the greatest taste to dollar ratio value there is. Unfortunately, several grocers around me have stopped carrying it lately and I have to drive several blocks to get it. I usually clean out the stock of whatever store I find it in when it's shopping time, which could be up to 12 bottles, but it is well worth it. This is one of the few sauces I won't be without and always have on hand. In fact, I typically have stock both at work and at home, perhaps the greatest testament to a sauce I can make.
Thai Kitchen Red Curry
Not a sauce per se, but my wife likes to use this when she makes the jumble of random vegetables and chicken in a sauce pan stirred with coconut milk and a few spoonfuls of this and calls it "curry". I find it useful to spike up the otherwise bland version of Thai peanut chicken deviation I make at the behest of her son from an engagement previous to me. The most I've seen it for is $3.99 for the little-ass jar this comes in, but the shit lasts damn near forever and complements the Asian-based foods I make overall well. As long as I stay married to my current wife, I'd expect it to be a staple. It is minorly hot and mostly non-offensive and doesn't take up too much door refrigerator space.
Huy Fong Chili-Garlic Sauce
This is my preference as far as Asian-oriented sauces go. Most of the time you can throw a couple bucks at it and have one of these small jars. They don't ever seem to last as long as the Thai Kitchen red curry, but somewhat longer than the Red Devil. Like the Red Devil, they have a great range of uses, excepting Mexican, again, but if ever there is a lull in usage, this also degrades somewhat quickly and dries on the sides, a trend wholly unpalatable if ever there was one. Still, no refrigerator is complete without it.
--------------------------
Since undertaking this new quest, I've moved a number of sauces out of rotation and have opened up the market to the new and exciting possibilities out there. Here is, more or less, my sauce graveyard, though I enjoyed my time with them all greatly.
TryMe Tiger Sauce
Red Devil was the second-longest and this was the first. I was introduced to this in high school, which put it at least 25 years+ by my side. It was the first sauce I loved, though even then I knew it had very limited uses. Specifically, we're talking fish, pork, potatoes and other very light meats. As time wore on, I mixed with Yoshida's and the Huy Fong Chili-Garlic sauce to make my bodybuilder's concoction of tuna and jasmine rice, but the writing was on the wall. I love sweet and hot, but this was never hot enough, unless spiked with jalapenos and then only barely and the taste, though distinctive, is something I crave very rarely now, if ever. I still have some left and it's been there a while. Once I clear that bottle, I'm not sure I will ever get another.
Texas Pete Hot Sauce
This is the original, not the hotter or chipotle versions, which I have yet to try, though probably will get to at some point. I encountered this at Chick-Fil-A and was impressed enough with how it blended with the entree' offerings there to get a bunch of packets at the restaurant. Once I ran out of them, I got a bottle, since I was low-to-out of Red Devil and wanted a backup. As far as backups go, this would be acceptable to cover for a lack of Red Devil, at least temporarily. It is slightly spicier, slightly saltier, but despite my initial impression, far less tastier. While better than Frank's (as is nearly everything), it is not Red Devil and once I run the bottle out, I don't see another one in my future. This is also the fastest run of anything I've considered as a staple, as well.
Cholula/Tapatio
For a while, during a sort of down period, this was the best I could do and I made the most of it. Cholula is great on a salad, but is a sort of dismal chili powder-based concoction. It will do in a pinch or in a restaurant if that's the best they can do, but that's about it. Tapatio was brought to me by some Mexican friends from CA. It was evidently a sort of regional sauce there. It tastes sort of cheap, but worked well to spice up the cups of ramen noodles I found myself frequently eating at the time. I got away from it for about 15 years and tried it again recently. Still as cheap-tasting as ever, but in a pinch, it's better than any taco sauce from Ortega, La Victoria or whatever chain restaurant in that line you can name (looking at you, Taco Bell).
Pico Pica
This is a hard one to walk away from because I've burned through many, many bottles of this. It was a standby for years and had many attributes I liked: nice hearty thickness, good, solid earthy tones, a very distinctive taste and smell and was no more than $2 a bottle. This is the kind of sauce you can pour into a bag of Fritos, shake it up and just eat them like that for a tasty snack. Being chili powder-based, it is sort of a one-trick pony and for the taste being distinctive, it is somewhat strong, nearly to the point of overpowering. It makes it easy to use if you like the taste and very difficult to taste when you develop your palate more to want to catch a wider array of food tones. I still think it is a good sauce, but like most kid's cereals to me, I think I've outgrown the taste.
Circa 09.12.12 (in no particular order):
Trappey's Red Devil
This one has been with me the longest (I fell in love with it the first time I tried it nearly 20 years ago) and though it does not pack much, if any, heat, it is perhaps the greatest of them all. It is a typical vinegar/cayenne based sauce, but the blend is such that it's one of the few sauces I've found that I could drink straight. Aside from Mexican food, which does not tolerate vinegar particularly well, it goes with everything else well and elevates the taste astronomically. Those cheap shitty frozen dinners that you got for a buck at the grocery store to have at work? Throw some of this on there and elevate them to a whole new level. Does it make them great? No. Nothing exists to make shit shine (yet), but for $1.50/bottle, this is the greatest taste to dollar ratio value there is. Unfortunately, several grocers around me have stopped carrying it lately and I have to drive several blocks to get it. I usually clean out the stock of whatever store I find it in when it's shopping time, which could be up to 12 bottles, but it is well worth it. This is one of the few sauces I won't be without and always have on hand. In fact, I typically have stock both at work and at home, perhaps the greatest testament to a sauce I can make.
Thai Kitchen Red Curry
Not a sauce per se, but my wife likes to use this when she makes the jumble of random vegetables and chicken in a sauce pan stirred with coconut milk and a few spoonfuls of this and calls it "curry". I find it useful to spike up the otherwise bland version of Thai peanut chicken deviation I make at the behest of her son from an engagement previous to me. The most I've seen it for is $3.99 for the little-ass jar this comes in, but the shit lasts damn near forever and complements the Asian-based foods I make overall well. As long as I stay married to my current wife, I'd expect it to be a staple. It is minorly hot and mostly non-offensive and doesn't take up too much door refrigerator space.
Huy Fong Chili-Garlic Sauce
This is my preference as far as Asian-oriented sauces go. Most of the time you can throw a couple bucks at it and have one of these small jars. They don't ever seem to last as long as the Thai Kitchen red curry, but somewhat longer than the Red Devil. Like the Red Devil, they have a great range of uses, excepting Mexican, again, but if ever there is a lull in usage, this also degrades somewhat quickly and dries on the sides, a trend wholly unpalatable if ever there was one. Still, no refrigerator is complete without it.
--------------------------
Since undertaking this new quest, I've moved a number of sauces out of rotation and have opened up the market to the new and exciting possibilities out there. Here is, more or less, my sauce graveyard, though I enjoyed my time with them all greatly.
TryMe Tiger Sauce
Red Devil was the second-longest and this was the first. I was introduced to this in high school, which put it at least 25 years+ by my side. It was the first sauce I loved, though even then I knew it had very limited uses. Specifically, we're talking fish, pork, potatoes and other very light meats. As time wore on, I mixed with Yoshida's and the Huy Fong Chili-Garlic sauce to make my bodybuilder's concoction of tuna and jasmine rice, but the writing was on the wall. I love sweet and hot, but this was never hot enough, unless spiked with jalapenos and then only barely and the taste, though distinctive, is something I crave very rarely now, if ever. I still have some left and it's been there a while. Once I clear that bottle, I'm not sure I will ever get another.
Texas Pete Hot Sauce
This is the original, not the hotter or chipotle versions, which I have yet to try, though probably will get to at some point. I encountered this at Chick-Fil-A and was impressed enough with how it blended with the entree' offerings there to get a bunch of packets at the restaurant. Once I ran out of them, I got a bottle, since I was low-to-out of Red Devil and wanted a backup. As far as backups go, this would be acceptable to cover for a lack of Red Devil, at least temporarily. It is slightly spicier, slightly saltier, but despite my initial impression, far less tastier. While better than Frank's (as is nearly everything), it is not Red Devil and once I run the bottle out, I don't see another one in my future. This is also the fastest run of anything I've considered as a staple, as well.
Cholula/Tapatio
For a while, during a sort of down period, this was the best I could do and I made the most of it. Cholula is great on a salad, but is a sort of dismal chili powder-based concoction. It will do in a pinch or in a restaurant if that's the best they can do, but that's about it. Tapatio was brought to me by some Mexican friends from CA. It was evidently a sort of regional sauce there. It tastes sort of cheap, but worked well to spice up the cups of ramen noodles I found myself frequently eating at the time. I got away from it for about 15 years and tried it again recently. Still as cheap-tasting as ever, but in a pinch, it's better than any taco sauce from Ortega, La Victoria or whatever chain restaurant in that line you can name (looking at you, Taco Bell).
Pico Pica
This is a hard one to walk away from because I've burned through many, many bottles of this. It was a standby for years and had many attributes I liked: nice hearty thickness, good, solid earthy tones, a very distinctive taste and smell and was no more than $2 a bottle. This is the kind of sauce you can pour into a bag of Fritos, shake it up and just eat them like that for a tasty snack. Being chili powder-based, it is sort of a one-trick pony and for the taste being distinctive, it is somewhat strong, nearly to the point of overpowering. It makes it easy to use if you like the taste and very difficult to taste when you develop your palate more to want to catch a wider array of food tones. I still think it is a good sauce, but like most kid's cereals to me, I think I've outgrown the taste.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Introduction (Again)
Updated 09/22/19 - see bottom section.
What a long, strange life it's been. I'm 41 (as of this writing), yet I can think of no more apt description.
I had in mind, when I first started this blog, to use it as an artistic thing, kinda sorta like what Neil Gaiman does. I cribbed the title from Poul Anderson and then decided that I couldn't quite make the nut of what the fuck it was supposed to do. Part of the problem with blogs is content. If I wrote shit I wouldn't want my wife to read, then it's a diary and those are to be private. However, I've always found those to be dreadfully stupid and boring (such as the pages of any famous person unfortunate enough to have theirs published) and so never had the interest in a diary. I also, despite not putting actual names to anyone, don't want someone to be caused pain because of something I wrote, truthful or no.
So, like my LiveJournal, which was dedicated mainly to a time period when I was doing nothing but literally working myself out of being a disgusting fatass, this blog languished. I had a bodybuilding-type blog, when I had time for bodybuilding, elsewhere. I had a music blog, when I was active in that scene, elsewhere. I didn't want to make a "holy shit I'm a new father OMG this kid is shitting everywhere" type blog, so it meandered from "holy shit I'm a new husband OMFG this woman and her son (not my baby) are shitting everywhere" to let's talk about a season of Top Chef to bitching about the dumbshit online reviewers of the Netflix servers.
Waste of space? Hard to argue against it. There's enough noise on the internet, so I forgot about it...until now. A week and a half ago, I had the distinct displeasure of being hammered in the ass by the bill at Red Robin for very mediocre and substandard foodstuffs, most particularly the pizza I ordered for the baby, which was so noxious I had to spit it into a napkin. I really wanted to go find a construction site, steal a jackhammer, dig up their parking lot and bury that putrid, wretched pile of cheese-covered shit, but my disdain for a pointless jail sentence got the better of me and I elected to not pursue that particular course.
During that dinner, however, I noticed they were offering a sauce based on the Bhut Jolokia pepper, the so-called "ghost pepper," and since I hadn't a chance to try a food with a heat rating that could earn someone a trip on a speeding white truck to the nearest emergency room, I was all for it. Since chain restaurants generally cannot do anything right, this was an abysmal disappointment. The sauce, while tasty, was not particularly hot, but while combining with the anemic Bourbon BBQ sauce they offered and some fried jalapeno coins, I got a burger, after topping it with bacon, that managed to make it all the way to acceptable. The idea of them using the "ghost pepper" got me curious, though, and I scoured the internet.
That led me to the site run by the esteemed Scott Roberts and my interest in firing up the blades of spicy foods was re-ignited. Why the blog, though? That's coming...
To back up a step, years before, shortly after I first moved to Utah, a friend and me started chasing heat. We eventually got the the point of using it correctly, after several novice mistakes of ratcheting the heat up beyond the point of it being pleasant to eat. Once we learned the lesson of flavor first, we made a steak marinade with a variety of ingredients that ruined us both for years and years in terms of going out to eat at steakhouse. We had a lovely chicken marinade also (ok, that one was mostly mine), but it was a constant battle to improve and pair it with home-brewed beer, which we also did.
Time change and people fuck off elsewhere out of your life. Everybody knows. I largely abandoned a lot of the heat-chasing, refining myself to tinkering and exploring fresh ginger, curry, mustards and garlic. I still kept jars of jalapenos on hand and a few bottles of my standby sauces (that list in another post) on hand at all times, but no longer would I go crazy buying (and eating) the newest and latest/greatest chilis or sauces. Once my son was born, though I had the itch again, I still laid off, since babies and hot shit are not generally what is considered a great combination.
Red Robin and Scott did me in, though. I found a whole new world that didn't exist when I moved to other things. The hottest pepper back then was the habanero and/or Scotch bonnet. There was no ghost, no Trinidad Scorpion, no Carolina Reaper. All the extract sauces back then tasted like steaming ass and the only time I ever saw them was at parties during drunken macho "bravery" (stupidity) contests. No one used them for cooking or anything like that because they tasted awful and it took a great deal of work to make the fuckers even remotely palatable. Not the case these days.
Why I decided on this blog was that I did a lot of music reviews (over 1,000) easy for a website years ago and I enjoyed that. The reviews of hot sauce (Scott's not included) are sorely lacking online. When I see stupid shit like someone parroting the tagline of Frank's Hot Sauce, as awful a concoction as is out there, about putting that shit on everything, during the course of the review, I automatically think to myself, "fuck that review and fuck that site for hosting that review." Also, I see people discussing their thoughts on the label font, text and graphic and it gives me pause. Is that what readers care about? Maybe, but not me.
So, this blog, if you haven't deduced by now, will be primarily for a review and discussion of hot sauces. I happen to have an intolerance to onions, so that limits dramatically the sauces available to me. I also don't see a value to cost ratio in any of the other online reviews and when you're chucking out buckets of cash for a sauce, it has to be worth it. I'm an elitist by nature, so I will tend towards the incredibly demanding. That is part my motivation, but also that I recently went on vacation and am not finding the groove to get back into the various writing projects I have. I'm hoping this will stimulate that in some way as well.
As for those other posts...they probably will never go live here, but some of them are moderately interesting and may work their way into a book or story of mine someday. I'm primarily a writer and one never knows what comes out the other end after everything finds its way into the hopper atop the grist mill.
- UPDATED CONTENT -
In 9 days, on October 01, 2019, after over 7 years, I have decided to take this blog in a direction I didn't necessarily envision and start doing video accompaniment to some of the written reviews, including 100% of all new reviews from that point going forward. It will launch with a video introduction to the series, but in that way, I can expand a bit more into arenas I have interest in doing, such as reviewing all the available sauces from Taco Bell or expanding more on my Standby Sauce list or trying other spicy foods live. Not all sauce reviews will get that treatment (indeed, not all of them have pictures at this point and some of those never will), but I hope you find what is available to be entertaining. If you look at the "Special Announcement" post of September 2019, you will be able to obtain more information about this endeavor.
As always, thanks for joining me.
What a long, strange life it's been. I'm 41 (as of this writing), yet I can think of no more apt description.
I had in mind, when I first started this blog, to use it as an artistic thing, kinda sorta like what Neil Gaiman does. I cribbed the title from Poul Anderson and then decided that I couldn't quite make the nut of what the fuck it was supposed to do. Part of the problem with blogs is content. If I wrote shit I wouldn't want my wife to read, then it's a diary and those are to be private. However, I've always found those to be dreadfully stupid and boring (such as the pages of any famous person unfortunate enough to have theirs published) and so never had the interest in a diary. I also, despite not putting actual names to anyone, don't want someone to be caused pain because of something I wrote, truthful or no.
So, like my LiveJournal, which was dedicated mainly to a time period when I was doing nothing but literally working myself out of being a disgusting fatass, this blog languished. I had a bodybuilding-type blog, when I had time for bodybuilding, elsewhere. I had a music blog, when I was active in that scene, elsewhere. I didn't want to make a "holy shit I'm a new father OMG this kid is shitting everywhere" type blog, so it meandered from "holy shit I'm a new husband OMFG this woman and her son (not my baby) are shitting everywhere" to let's talk about a season of Top Chef to bitching about the dumbshit online reviewers of the Netflix servers.
Waste of space? Hard to argue against it. There's enough noise on the internet, so I forgot about it...until now. A week and a half ago, I had the distinct displeasure of being hammered in the ass by the bill at Red Robin for very mediocre and substandard foodstuffs, most particularly the pizza I ordered for the baby, which was so noxious I had to spit it into a napkin. I really wanted to go find a construction site, steal a jackhammer, dig up their parking lot and bury that putrid, wretched pile of cheese-covered shit, but my disdain for a pointless jail sentence got the better of me and I elected to not pursue that particular course.
During that dinner, however, I noticed they were offering a sauce based on the Bhut Jolokia pepper, the so-called "ghost pepper," and since I hadn't a chance to try a food with a heat rating that could earn someone a trip on a speeding white truck to the nearest emergency room, I was all for it. Since chain restaurants generally cannot do anything right, this was an abysmal disappointment. The sauce, while tasty, was not particularly hot, but while combining with the anemic Bourbon BBQ sauce they offered and some fried jalapeno coins, I got a burger, after topping it with bacon, that managed to make it all the way to acceptable. The idea of them using the "ghost pepper" got me curious, though, and I scoured the internet.
That led me to the site run by the esteemed Scott Roberts and my interest in firing up the blades of spicy foods was re-ignited. Why the blog, though? That's coming...
To back up a step, years before, shortly after I first moved to Utah, a friend and me started chasing heat. We eventually got the the point of using it correctly, after several novice mistakes of ratcheting the heat up beyond the point of it being pleasant to eat. Once we learned the lesson of flavor first, we made a steak marinade with a variety of ingredients that ruined us both for years and years in terms of going out to eat at steakhouse. We had a lovely chicken marinade also (ok, that one was mostly mine), but it was a constant battle to improve and pair it with home-brewed beer, which we also did.
Time change and people fuck off elsewhere out of your life. Everybody knows. I largely abandoned a lot of the heat-chasing, refining myself to tinkering and exploring fresh ginger, curry, mustards and garlic. I still kept jars of jalapenos on hand and a few bottles of my standby sauces (that list in another post) on hand at all times, but no longer would I go crazy buying (and eating) the newest and latest/greatest chilis or sauces. Once my son was born, though I had the itch again, I still laid off, since babies and hot shit are not generally what is considered a great combination.
Red Robin and Scott did me in, though. I found a whole new world that didn't exist when I moved to other things. The hottest pepper back then was the habanero and/or Scotch bonnet. There was no ghost, no Trinidad Scorpion, no Carolina Reaper. All the extract sauces back then tasted like steaming ass and the only time I ever saw them was at parties during drunken macho "bravery" (stupidity) contests. No one used them for cooking or anything like that because they tasted awful and it took a great deal of work to make the fuckers even remotely palatable. Not the case these days.
Why I decided on this blog was that I did a lot of music reviews (over 1,000) easy for a website years ago and I enjoyed that. The reviews of hot sauce (Scott's not included) are sorely lacking online. When I see stupid shit like someone parroting the tagline of Frank's Hot Sauce, as awful a concoction as is out there, about putting that shit on everything, during the course of the review, I automatically think to myself, "fuck that review and fuck that site for hosting that review." Also, I see people discussing their thoughts on the label font, text and graphic and it gives me pause. Is that what readers care about? Maybe, but not me.
So, this blog, if you haven't deduced by now, will be primarily for a review and discussion of hot sauces. I happen to have an intolerance to onions, so that limits dramatically the sauces available to me. I also don't see a value to cost ratio in any of the other online reviews and when you're chucking out buckets of cash for a sauce, it has to be worth it. I'm an elitist by nature, so I will tend towards the incredibly demanding. That is part my motivation, but also that I recently went on vacation and am not finding the groove to get back into the various writing projects I have. I'm hoping this will stimulate that in some way as well.
As for those other posts...they probably will never go live here, but some of them are moderately interesting and may work their way into a book or story of mine someday. I'm primarily a writer and one never knows what comes out the other end after everything finds its way into the hopper atop the grist mill.
- UPDATED CONTENT -
In 9 days, on October 01, 2019, after over 7 years, I have decided to take this blog in a direction I didn't necessarily envision and start doing video accompaniment to some of the written reviews, including 100% of all new reviews from that point going forward. It will launch with a video introduction to the series, but in that way, I can expand a bit more into arenas I have interest in doing, such as reviewing all the available sauces from Taco Bell or expanding more on my Standby Sauce list or trying other spicy foods live. Not all sauce reviews will get that treatment (indeed, not all of them have pictures at this point and some of those never will), but I hope you find what is available to be entertaining. If you look at the "Special Announcement" post of September 2019, you will be able to obtain more information about this endeavor.
As always, thanks for joining me.
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