El Yucateco Black Label Reserve Hot Sauce Review

El Yucateco Black Label Reserve Chile Habanero Sauce

NOTE: Video support available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOGwoRN9qm8

Ahhh, the "reserve" tag, which is frequently used to market things as "special" or of limited quantity, usually hopefully to receive a better price. Pricing is the same on this, but I don't know why they'd call it a reserve, especially, as there is nothing particularly special about it and the "black label" part only serves to really set it aside from their more common market entries.

El Yucateco is a sauce manufacturer I've always sort of struggled with a bit as their sauces are inconsistent in terms of cost per ounce with a lot of their competitors in the market yet the quality is nowhere near enough to get it in the leagues with a lot of the more specialty makers. They have some interesting sauces, but aside from El Yucateco Green, which is a true taste marvel (despite that odd bright green coloring), they are just not really overall at a high level.

I do love that Green, however and when this came out, I was hoping for a much more amplified version of that sauce. What we have here, though, is more coloration problems. This one is thick, oily, sludgy-looking and maybe the most unappealing, unappetizing and borderline nauseating sauce I've yet seen. Taste-wise it is much better, but my immediate impression was a mouthful of ash. My love for fire-roasted things is well, well documented, both in this blog and elsewhere, but like everything else, only when it contributes positively to the flavor. Here it does not. Additionally, the flavor here has a sort of off-beat to it, which adds to the oddness and heat here is much milder, maybe half of the Green, maybe even less than that.

Bottom line: Although I was initially happy to discover it there, this is not at all another Wal-Mart gem. Instead, this is as near a total misfire as a sauce can get. It has limited availability, which is ultimately a blessing here, since this seems very unlikely to catch on.


Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 1
            Flexibility: 1
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 0

Overall: 1