Hog's Ass Hot Sauce Review

Sauce Crafter's Hog's Ass Garlic-Habanero Hot Sauce

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz0rlgeJm_U

I don't know who did it first, but the Garlic-Habanero type sauce seems to be almost a new category. I'm definitely a fan of it, though I'd hesitate to call that style sauce a staple. To my mind, it works well with lighter meats, such as fish and chicken and much less well with everything else, depending on the prominence of the garlic. Case in point, the Original Zakk Wylde Berzerker sauce from Blair (reviewed elsewhere here). It's heavy, heavy garlic makes it useful on pizza and seafood and fried foods in general, yet strip the garlic aspect and slight heat and ratchet up the astringency through the lime and what you are left with is the Q Heat Chipotle Slam, which is fantastic on fish tacos, but sort of ends there.

Hog's Ass is a similar style sauce, but instead of using limes, it uses oranges. The astringency is turned down, the heat is slightly up from either of those other two, but the garlic, while present, seems locked in a mortal battle with the Habanero. It's not overpowering to the extent of the El Yucateco Red, though this sauce itself very quickly can be, but rather like if you took the El Yucateco Red and combined it somewhat with that Berzerker and hit it with a dash of OJ. Of all the Garlic-Habanero sauces I've tried, this one probably is my favorite, both in terms of flexibility and taste. The company's tagline that this is the best-tasting G-H sauce has yet to be determined, of course, but unlike some sauces where I've struggled to finish the bottle (I truly hate waste in general), this one I'm trying to reserve for a fantastic crab sandwich from a deli down the block because I think that sauce would be spectacular on it. Sad to say, there's probably not enough left for more than half a sandwich at this point, though.

Of some amusement also is the sort of vulgar nature that populates both the label and marketing scheme behind this sauce (clothing that states "you can bite a hog's ass if you don't like my cooking", a play on the slogan of the sauce "you can bite a hog's ass if you don't like our sauce") and the entire line. 

Bottom line: If you're looking to check out a Garlic-Habanero sauce, you could do worse than to start here. This is the best representative of that sauce class I've found so far and it is a well-rounded and overall quite tasty sauce, though like many of the other sauces in that class, flexibility is not particularly high. It's not enough to make me want to add Garlic-Habanero to my list of staple sauces, but I wouldn't hesitate to buy this again at some point in the future.

Breakdown:

     Heat level: 1
     Flavor: 7
     Flexibility: 5
     Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8

Overall: 5