Silk City Mango Madness Hot Sauce Review

Silk City Mango Madness Hot Sauce

Note: This sauce was provided for purposes of review by Roger Damptz of Burn Your Tongue. Check him out on Facebook or, better yet, head on over to his new online outlet where you can shop the widest selection available anywhere, www.burnyourtongueonline.com.

UPDATE: Video support now available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8Bljtd29tw

To the sauce, even though I don't really wind up using them for piles of stuff, mainly pizza here and there, the ubiquitous chicken strips, fish sticks and maybe some pork here and there, I always harbor the thought that there are never quite enough fruit-based hot sauce. What I mean by that really, though, is there are not enough good fruit-based hot sauces. Part of this, I think, is the challenge of driving up heat, while also retaining the flavor signatures and profiles of the various ingredients. The best pepper jellies, indeed, will allow you to both taste the flavor of the peppers as well as get a slight heat charge. Certain peppers and fruits lend themselves better to this partnership than others, with the most famous perhaps being the raspberry chipotle combination.

Mango overall is one of the hardest fruits to use in a sauce, I think, because the fruit itself walks such a fine line. Too unripe and you get a lot of astringency and tartness to it, that is not really possible to counter and that effectively makes it a pointless ingredient and too sweet and it can easily, like nearly all tropical fruits, tend towards cloying. Pineapple in the mix further compounds this type of problem as well.

Here we have a sauce with not only both of those, but brown sugar in there as well. The heat comes from the Habanero, which works here to great effect, leaving us with an actual good fruit-based sauce. In fact, this is one of the better ones I've had overall. It is notably, but not greatly hot, so while it won't give any chilehead pause, they will find much to like in the flavor. It may be edging up there a bit for other folks, though, so one should probably want some heat with their sauce here. This one works pretty well in a variety of settings, as long as one is sticking generally to those foods I mentioned earlier.

Bottom line: Definitely on the higher edge of fruit-based sauces, combining excellent flavor and a respectable, enjoyable heat.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 4
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 5
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 7


Overall: 6

Hot Winter Hatch Chile Hot Sauce Review

Hot Winter Hot Sauce

Of note before I get to the review outright, among the continuing changes, as first started last year, I have decided to accept product for review, this sauce coming from the esteemed Roger Damptz of Burn Your Tongue in Ogden, UT. Where it is the case that a sauce is one that has been provided, I will include both a brief mention as well as something marking the origination, in this case, the BYT logo as well as strongly suggesting you head over to his new online outlet where you can shop the widest selection available anywhere, www.burnyourtongueonline.com. 

*UPDATE* Video support now available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40H2R7JQMxs 

On to the sauce proper...actually, before I get to that, I should note that the actual name of this sauce is denoted by the chile shape on the bottle label. I'm not a great big fan of that, as I find the practice perhaps a bit over-cutesy. It does list, in much smaller letters, on the bottom, what the pepper the sauce is based on is, but I'd prefer it something more quickly legible.

Anyway, that aside, what we have here is somewhat of a classic green sauce, a sort of chile verde sauce, if you will. Indeed, many of the components of a classic chile verde are here and present, though, naturally modified into a hot sauce variation. It feels and looks a lot like a puree, which, again, hearkens to that chile verde motif.

Flavor-wise, there is a lot of earthiness here, mostly from the apple cider vinegar, which is used sparingly enough and in conjunction with various other elements that it doesn't quite approach the overbearing "stinky foot" issue that apple cider vinegar can easy lend to proceedings. It has a freshness that reminds me a bit more of a tomatillo sauce, though without either tomatillos or cilantro.

I'm reluctant to call this a hot sauce, though, as "hot sauce" at least strongly implies some degree of heat and it is nearly entirely absent here, as it does, featuring the wonderful tasting, but overall quite mild Hatch chiles. This is cited as a medium level sauce, which is using a scale quite beyond my understanding. It works quite well with Mexican dishes featuring either lighter colored meats, such as pork or chicken, or even cheese enchiladas. It works notably less well on redder meats and not especially well outside of that context, unless one really likes green chile flavoring a great deal. I suspect my wife will enjoy this sauce quite a bit more than I did, but it is quite well-made and the blend of ingredients is solid enough that I may check out further offerings from Hot Winter.

Bottom line: Very accessible and quite mild green sauce, which will appeal most to lovers of that sort of flavoring dynamic but offers little of interest to chileheads.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: 4
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3

Overall: 3