Best Hot Sauce 2015 + Recap

As I mentioned earlier in some of the quarterly Updates, this was a sort of nervous-making year, with no strong contenders at all until much deeper into the year. 2015, however, came on very strong towards the end and fortunately, I didn’t wind up having to resort to past years or even look at a lower overall aggregate score than the weighty past victors, something I wasn’t sure would be the case for the vast majority of the year. The pool, however, seemed shallower and I say seemed, but looking back, the sauce for last year, Born To Hula’s awesome Ghost Of Ancho had no competitors at all. 2013 saw Blair’s Pure Death come in and just take over immediately. Once again, there was no competitors to that, either. 2015, then, while weaker overall (maybe in 2016, I will do an average compositing of the aggregate score for the respective years), was the most strongly contested for the highest title since the year of inception. That first year, in 2012, was the Happy Beaver from CaJohns’s edging out the BICH, also from CaJohn’s and the El Yucateco Green, easily the hottest competition this blog has seen (no pun), since all three of those are, by rights, champion-level sauce.

This year, as mentioned, not until very late was anything even remotely in that rarefied air. Then along came October and the Tortuga Hell-Fire. A short while later, the VooDew Honey Doo sauce came racing up behind it and the heat, as Glenn Frey once famously mentioned, was on. Both of these had the same cumulative score, 9, that self-same score of all the previous champions, though the Hell-Fire had the slight edge in heat and flexibility and the Honey Doo the slight edge in flavor. They certainly were not making my decision any easier and I began to debate ways of pitting the two off. Did I choose which one I finished first? The Honey Doo was gone by the 10^th of December, still a decent amount of the Hell-Fire left as of this posting. Did I put both bottles on a counter, blindfold myself, spin around in circles and pick whichever one I closed my fist upon first? Which one I didn’t shatter after dizzily crashing into the counter? Maybe use a coin toss? Best 2 of 3? 3 of 5? Announce a co-winner? 

The Honey Doo, to be frank, has a built-in advantage of being more flavorful, which is the most desirable characteristic in a sauce. It also has the “specialness” of being my 100^th full review of a sauce and it seems fitting that that particular hallmark also be the Sauce Of The Year. I did also finish it much faster, as noted and if I were to pick which I liked better, it would be that one by a slight amount. So, without further need for agonizing, I hereby announce the Voodoo Chile Voo Dew Honey Doo as the 2015 Sauce Of The Year from the TSAAF, joining the other luminaries from previous years, which will immediately follow this paragraph. Before I post that list, though, I do want to take a moment to say I have been very impressed by the other offerings from Voodoo Chile and Tortuga and think that both of them are among the very best companies that the hot sauce world has to offer.

TSAAF Sauce Of The Year winners:

2012 Sauce Of The Year: CaJohn’s Happy Beaver

2013 Sauce Of The Year: Blair’s Pure Death

2014 Sauce Of The Year: Born To Hula’s Ghost Of Ancho

2015 Sauce Of The Year: Voodoo Chile’s Voo Dew Honey Doo

Starting to get a very good statistical backlog here and it was definitely sort of interesting and fun reading for me to go back to the other years where I made similar posts and compare. Obviously, the major change this year was one I had hinted about right around a year ago and that was adding pictures to the various posts. I started that once I hit 100 sauces covered with a full review (if I counted the mini-reviews, I hit that figure long ago, but I don’t count those as that was something I only did in the infancy of TSAAF and abandoned entirely thereafter). It was, in some ways, a long time coming, but an important thing to remember here is that zero of these sauces are sponsored, meaning that I pay for every sauce that appears here fully, 100%.

I am currently at about 42 sauce pics posted out of a possible 106, so roughly 40% there vs. the total, though, again, I will always be a few shy, possibly (probably) more as I find out more info about what’s actually available out there. I basically have 2 more solid locations locally to mine, so my guess is that I’ll probably approach 80 of the already reviewed sauces, but not quite make it. Frankly, many sauces are more trouble than they’re worth to buy just for a picture or even to find a brick-and-mortar to hunt them down for a photo. Then we have the Blair’s Death line and the various Tabascos, which come in boxes, which I won’t be taking pictures of as I will only be posting bottles of the actual sauce, so I basically have to run into them open somewhere (excepting the Pure Death, of course, which I tend to keep on hand). The photos I’m going to be putting up will be those of the bottles only, preferably with at least some sauce still in them. I’m also going back and continuing to clean up some coding errors, but I suspect that particular task will never quite ever fully be done…

The final change to both this and the wine blog (HSC) is to add a TOC page for both. In that process, I discovered some interesting (to me, anyway) artifacts for this blog. The letters currently NOT represented by any sauce in that list are: F, K, N, U, X, Y. Part of my subsidiary goals next year will then be to try at least once sauce starting with those names. The most well-represented sauce line is a tie with CaJohn’s and Blair’s, both with 6 entries. This is entirely coincidence, though and not representative of anything other than a random observation. It does, however, stand to reason as if there are 2 kings, arguably, it would be those two…

My current standby sauces have changed little. They are currently:

*Emeritus Everyday sauce: Trappey's Red Devil

*Everyday sauce: Blair’s Pure Death Sauce

*Grilling sauce: CaJohn's Bourbon-Infused Chipotle Habanero (BICH)

 Mexican-style sauce: Arizona Pepper’s Chipotle Habanero Pepper Sauce

*Emeritus Asian-style sauce: Huy Fong Chili-Garlic Sauce

 *Asian-style sauce: Zenso Sweet Chili Sauce

 *Louisiana-style sauce: Irazu Cayenne

 Sweet-hot sauce: CaJohn's Happy Beaver

 *Wife's sauce: DannyCash's Salvation Garlic-Serrano and/or Bottled-Up Anger

 *= Not looking for a replacement

Another subsidiary goal will be to try to get the Mexican sauce more pinned down. While I certainly enjoyed various of the Chipotle-Habanero combinations this year, I haven’t found “the” one quite yet. This has actually been somewhat of an ongoing struggle, since a lot of them seem to like to pollute their sauces with onions, which generally ruins it for me. So, I limp on by with “making do” sauces…

Let’s get to some metrics. This is post 128, which makes 32 this year, compared to 23 for 2014, 61 for 2013 (though I deleted several in that broader clean-up I mentioned and the new total is now 52) and 21 for the last quarter of 2012, which is what was left of the inaugural year of this blog. I’m not going to include them here, but the breakdown for the various sauce reviews is available in the other 3 End Of The Year posts for the respective years, should anyone else be interested in this and so inclined to compare numbers. Maybe if I wind up doing this 10 years, I’ll do a retrospective graph or something.

That aside, more blog numbers:

Total posts (including this post): 128

Total views (as of this writing): 8103

Total single sauce full reviews: 104

Total double sauce full reviews: 1

Total sauces full reviewed: 106

Total mini-sauce reviews: 20

Total sauces reviewed, combined: 126

Total unopened sauces waiting on shelf for review: 13

Total opened sauces waiting for review: 0

Total open bottles in fridge: 13

Door sauces: 8

Back of fridge sauces: 5

Highest viewed review: 345 - Valentina's Extra Hot
Highest viewed article, any type: 345 - Valentina’s Extra Hot

There is, of course, also the wine thing, my blog there, the Happy Sippin’ Companion (HSC), which has now 42 posts, 37 of which are reviews. It has drawn, to date, 449 views. I don’t spend the time there with metrics that I do here, but I’m not going to take the space for it here, either, save to say that I do get into that…fairly heavily, in upcoming Editions in that blog. You can click to that blog from my profile.

Then we have Yelp. My review count is now 977 reviews and 112 updates, which is a total of 1089 reviews, all in. Further, I was "First To Review" 106 times or around 11% of the time.  I also have 643 "Friends" (feel free to add me, if you wish), 18 "Fans", submitted 1 Event, which was one I'm enormously gratified to have been able to take part in (Inland/Outland from Svavar Jónatansson) and created 14 Lists. My distribution of ratings falls in the order of:  45 or ~4.5% at 5 stars, 302 or ~31%  at 4 stars, 480 or ~49 % at 3 stars, 136 or ~14% at 2 stars and 14 or ~1.5% for 1 star, which marks more a development than anything resembling outright change from last year. Further metrics are available on my Yelp page, which you can click to from my widget. Additionally, I also have several on tap that I haven’t gotten around to posting as of yet.

So, as we put another one in the books, as always, thanks for dropping by. If there’s any changes to suggest or sauces you’d like to see me get to, please drop me a line in the comment section of any of the reviews.

Zombie Cajun Hot Sauce Review

Zombie Cajun Hot Sauce

Back a while ago, when I had run myself dangerously low on one of my perennial favorite sauce types, the Louisiana-style, I went hunting and sort of randomly came across this on Amazon. Now, I don't typically buy sauces from there, mostly because it's not free shipping on those things when they build a hefty markup into the price and if I'm going to pay exaggerated monies, I'm going to an actual brick-and-mortar locally first. This (and another counterpart coming in a later review), for whatever reason, struck me as somewhat intriguing, despite my usual disdain for novelty sauces. Sticking the word "zombie" onto a hot sauce label does not strike me as reasonable, in any capacity, so these sauces had everything working against them, yet I went forward with the order anyway.

By the time I got them, of course, I had forgotten I'd ordered them at all, so they were sort of a nice welcome surprise. The follow-up from one Ricky Hooter, who evidently is the mastermind behind all of this, was also a bit unexpected, but a nice touch. All so far, so good and they were yet another company who has apparently gotten the memo and is now aligning with those in the industry pushing flavor far more than any SHU rating.

As to that flavor (and consistency), it's on par with your usual Cayenne-based Louisiana-style hot sauces. I wouldn't put it as high as either Irazu or Trappey's Red Devil, but it's probably right around the TryMe Sunshine(s) range or so, i.e. very solid, but more middle-of-the-road. There's no sweetness here at all, so it definitely stays true to the Louisiana-style motif, which is something I appreciated quite a bit. One thing I do note is that it does have a bit of bitterness I find unappealing when taken straight. Obviously, we rarely will eat sauce straight unless we're just opening the bottle and trying to get a feel for it, but why this matters is that if you over-sauce something, the negative traits can be amplified to the extent of potentially wrecking your food. Overall, this tends to work well with the usual foods, though without a restrictor cap, over-saucing could be a possibility.

You won't have to worry about rendering it too hot to tolerate, though, even if you do over-sauce. Heat is mostly non-existent, another shared attribute with Red Devil. Frankly, I could have definitely used a higher charge with this and given that the last few bottles of the Louisiana-style have tended to have a greater degree of spike to them, I found myself missing that attribute. It's definitely on the lower side of what I usually like, but I think they designed it more for accessibility.

Bottom line: It's a fine, perfectly acceptable sauce, no more, no less. I don't know that I would get it again, due partially to availability. Amazon's price point definitely makes future purchases of this a struggle, but frankly, there are other sauces in this segment I prefer more.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 8
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4

Overall: 5

Jak Jeckel Gourmet Hot Sauce Review

Jak Jeckel Gourmet Hot Sauce

This has nothing to do with the actual sauce, of course, but Jak Jeckel just might have the coolest website of any sauce manufacturer I've seen. Here, we have a healthy section devoted to the "Flavor Travel" of each respective sauce, as well as a much lengthier "Flavor Profile", which I think is supposed to be basically tasting notes and a kinda sorta ingredient list. Oddly, though, one of the major components of the flavor of this sauce, the Chipotle pepper, is entirely absent from that back panel ingredient list on the bottle itself.

That flavor is dominant in a good way, much like the Chipotle Tabasco and much like that other sauce, this one more resembles a BBQ sauce. It is not, however, an actual BBQ sauce anymore than that other, but the similarities are remarkable. This is clearly a very skillfully crafted sauce, though, relying not at all on vinegar or even so much as using it, in an effort to allow the peppers to be fully experienced. This is, after all, a company that takes pains to pointedly observe that they are "flavor first", above all...as am I, of course and so goes the TSAAF, naturally. So...more of a foodie approach for this relatively new company.

None of that matters if this sauce isn't any good, of course. It is, I'm pleased to say, quite good. So good, in fact, that the makers do something I normally consider a heinous sin and state emphatically that is not a hot sauce on the website...I'm leery now and it gets worse when I look at the label where they bury what could very well be a vast cornucopia of ingredients in a couple nondescript blends of both "Jerk Seasoning" and "Jak Jeckel Seasoning Blend". There is definitely cracked pepper in it, the second most dominant flavor behind the Chipotle in the sauce. Since I love cracked pepper, this is by no means a bad thing.

However, I'd almost say that this, in addition to the Habanero Salt also listed, is far too many dry ingredients, but the results are fairly stunning and definitely tasty, so it gets a pass. This seemingly "kitchen sink" approach does result in both one of the most accessible as well as most flexible sauces I've run across, so what they're doing is clearly working.

Bottom line: Jak Jeckel is going to be one to watch and this is a fantastically flavorful sauce. There is precious little heat there and like the Tabasco Chipotle, this probably won't wind up in regular rotation, especially given the higher price point. Very enjoyable while it lasts, though.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 3
            Flavor: 9
            Flexibility: 8
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6

Overall: 7

Phoenix Hot Sauce Review

Voodoo Chile Phoenix Super Sauce Hot Sauce

While I do not recall 100% fully, I believe this is the first sauce I've had with Smokin' Ed's Carolina Reaper, the current reigning highest SHU pepper in existence. I do, however, know for sure that this is the first one based on a "super food" detox drink mix, that being the Voodoo D-Tox. Now, clearly, the drink is not likely to use the Carolina Reaper and truth be told, there's precious little of it here also (they bury it in a "secret" mix of a few other peppers, so no idea the actual amount, but it's not hot enough to really have much...just enough to keep things interesting, I'd say). The bottle itself rates the sauce as "medium hot", which is probably fair. It's definitely enough to take notice, but not enough to run for the double chocolate chunk or whatever your favorite frozen dairy poison is.

The taste is curious as it does evoke thoughts of a smoothie, albeit a much spicier one than normal. That might be a bad description, actually, as it is nowhere near super sweet or anything, yet there is a very definite and pronounced fruit aspect to this. What we have here is stuff like cranberry, apple, blueberry, black cherry, pomegranate, all of which blend nicely. Flavor falls about in the middle as far as fruit-based sauces. This is a well-blended sauce, so you're not spiked with any one dominator and everything seems to play nicely together, but I've had considerably tastier fruit-sauces and, of course, much worse as well.

As with most sweeter sauces, this works well on lighter-colored meats. Truth be told, though, there's a lot I'd rather eat and this is more an intriguing sauce than an especially flavorful one. Once the novelty wears off, it will be curious to see how well it stands up, long-term.

Bottom line: This is a sauce that wouldn't be bad to have around, one that is interesting on a few levels. It's not necessary and there's no particular pointed need, but it would do well as the sauce you kind of keep around just to have a change of pace or when you want a flavor far from the norm.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 4
            Flavor: 7
            Flexibility: 5
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6

Overall: 6