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