Blazin' Saddles Hot Sauce Review

Dat-'l Do It's Blazin' Saddles Hot Sauce

If you've read through this blog at all, you've probably noticed that I like to mine "familiar" places, such as grocery stores and Big Lots for sauces. To me, even if you get a crap sauce (the range is from ok to substandard most of the time), you're still only gambling with a buck or two at a time and if you find a winner, then you've hit the jackpot sauce goldmine, so to speak.

Take the case of Blazin' Saddles. It announces in large letters on the front that it has Tabasco peppers and those, of course, we all know from the ubiquitous sauce that introduced many of us to the concept of hot sauce, but also Louisiana-style sauces and perhaps, like my case, turned you off of "hot" sauces for a good long while. Frankly, in fact, I still find Tabasco mostly unpalatable and back when I could still tolerate ketchup, I used to mix the two together on a delicate layer of some very crispy fried hashbrowns at IHOP and that was the extent of its usefulness to me.

Back to the Blazin' Saddles, though, we have here a sauce that is Tabasco-oriented combined with Habanero. Scott Roberts once reviewed a sauce called "Tabanero", I believe and while I never had it, I'm guessing that was the ideal that they were going for here. This sauce is at once creamier and not only notably hotter than Tabasco (probably not over maybe 5 - 8K, though), but far tastier, too. The Tabasco pepper is a fairly dominantly tasting one, however and if there is a prominent taste here, it is that slightly sweet taste, of which I'm not particularly a fan.

Bottom line: This is by far the best sauce I've tasted that has used that particular pepper, but even at $1.25 for a 3 oz. bottle, I just don't see any need to have this on hand. It is yet another entry in an increasingly long-ish list of Lousiana-style sauces that utilize different peppers (I can't think of any "major" pepper that I haven't tried in the form of Louisiana-style sauces -- for my money, Cayenne is still far and away the best there) and if I needed a sauce on short notice, it would do in a pinch, but there are far better sauces. It's overall a pretty much middle-of-the-road sauce, not bad, but not great, either.

Breakdown:

      Heat level: 4
      Flavor: 5
      Flexibility: 7
      Enjoyment to dollar factor: 7

Overall: 6