UPDATE: Video support available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhbxtuPzsS8
This is one of the High River sauces that got a pile of nominations for the upcoming Hot Sauce Tourney that Scott Roberts is going to be doing in the near future and with that many nods, even though I think a lot of them, like some of the other sauces, were perhaps staged slightly, I've also heard the accolades about this sauce mentioned elsewhere and have been interested since I first read about Chris Caffery finally getting his sauce to market. Honestly, I dismissed it like I did Dave Mustaine's coffee blend, i.e. as a vanity project, but given that Caffery's name appears nowhere on the bottle, I have re-considered my earlier wrong judgment.
That aside, on to the sauce itself. It was with no small excitement that I cracked open the bottle. As you can tell from reading my reviews, I'm not a huge fan of sauce "nose." If there is one food where smells with often have little to no bearing on the taste, it is in this arena. Frequently, I'll experience adding the sauce to a type of food where the spices in the food will cancel out and negate parts of the sauce. Sometimes that's a good thing and sometimes less so. Point being, sauce is never the main part of anything, it is always an additive. Thus, something that doesn't dazzle me with aroma is not indicative of whether or not I will like the sauce. This one smells ok, nothing too special one way or another.
I also tend to try the sauces straight. This is mostly out of curiosity and I want to get a feel of what the flavor is like solo, which helps me not only determine what effect it's having, but also to use as a predictor for where it might be be used. The taste of this by itself was not what I consider enjoyable. I'm not a big fan of papaya in general and orange Habanero is not ever going to be at the top of my list of favorite peppers, especially in terms of taste. I've had a love/hate relationship with it for a long time and a large part of my consumption of it was the lack, for years, of anything else either hotter or in that range.
Starting the sauce with apple cider vinegar does a nice job of keeping this from being overly sweet, especially considering the peaches and pineapple that high in the list of ingredients, but I found it added an odd complexion that I frequently found distracting. It's a flavorful sauce, but not a taste wonderful enough to stand on its own with whatever it's eaten with. Lighter meats work better with this sauce and it does a very nice job on sides, where the slight amount of heat adds nicely and the flavors, especially if savory in nature, do a good job of meshing together. I love sweet/hot and really wanted to like this, but it's a miss for me.
Bottom line: Sometimes you run into these, these unique sauces, unlike anything else out there, that a lot of thought and design went into, that are decent enough sauces, but just don't work. I didn't hate the taste or anything; it wasn't awful. I just didn't find it hugely compatible with my palate and I tried it on perhaps the widest variety of any food to date. I don't have any instance where I thought it particularly shone and it's hard to see where there would be a place for it.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 6
Flexibility: 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4
Overall: 4
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