Wildfire Hot Sauce Review

Motherlode Provisions Wildfire Hot Sauce

This is one I found in a Whole Foods, though unlike the Archer Farms of last week, Motherlode Provisions appears to be an independent company and not an arm of Whole Foods. There were a few different hot sauce flasks on the shelf and I chose this one because it was the spiciest available.

Generally, when buying hot sauce in flasks, one can be fairly certain, with few exceptions, that they won't be particularly hot and this one is not (in a list of about 20 ingredients, no peppers of any kind show up until #7). Generally also, if you see Arbol listed in the ingredients, you can also look more towards expecting a sort of Mexican table sauce, which is probably where this would more closely fit in. With the use of Piquins, one of the most under-used peppers, along with Pepins, I somewhat had my hopes up that I would see a sort of novel or inventive flair to the sauce, but clearly, they were mostly using the Piquins (appearing here in powdered form) to spike the heat level of the sauce upward.

This is essentially a Mexican table sauce, but on the hotter end, as those things go, somewhat slightly, but still noticeably hotter than the Valentina Extra Hot (reviewed elsewhere here). It is a much smoother and tastier sauce than that one and because of the sort of blanket nature of those sauces, this one is very adaptable across a fairly wide variety of foods. It's a good-tasting sauce, but not a great one, probably closer to Cholula in terms of actual taste. Given that it's retailed at Whole Foods, I probably overpaid for it (like nearly everything else in that store), but in terms of the actual sauce itself, it's overall a pretty good value for the money.

Bottom line: If my wife likes this, it might be the Mexican table  or general hot sauce we keep on hand. Most of my stuff is far too hot for her and though she doesn't eat a lot of hot sauce, she does have it often enough that a complaint is raised if we don't have some on hand. Of the Mexican table sauce style, this is probably the one I find most favorable, though far from perfect. Definitely worth a try if you haven't had it before and enjoy that kind of sauce.

Breakdown:

           Heat level: 3
           Flavor: 6
           Flexibility: 6
           Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4

Overall: 5