2K20 Q3 Update

  2K20 Q3 Update

After the last update was posted, it came to my attention that Roger Damptz of Burn Your Tongue, the hot sauce and all things spicy Ambassador of the West, was celebrating 11 years in business as of July 2020. So, a hearty congratulations from TSAAF and FOH, and here’s to many, many more. Roger and BYT have also had a couple of nice write-ups, both in Utah’s own Catalyst paper, as well as on crafthotsauce.com. If you use Facebook, definitely check out his page on Facebook for links to that and a bevy of other good stuff, including posts on some of the 700+ (!) sauces he has on the shelf. I believe he has also been working up a new website, as well, which you can check out at https: //burnyourtonguehotsauces. business.site/ (remove spaces). I am not going to link to Facebook, as they have decided to move to an insultingly stupid format, which I refuse to support, but if you still use it, you can just search from there.

Season 13 of The Hot Ones went up and I’ve posted that as well...yet another season I cannot do 100% and I’m a few more sauces behind now. I will note that by doing 2 particular sauces, it will catch me up on a number of seasons and I have both of those at hand, so I anticipate that gap between how many I’ve done that were on the show and how many left to lessen somewhat, at least in terms of overall seasonal coverage in 2021.

Also found a pretty cool blog by another chilehead named Kendall. I really dig it a lot and it’s one of the better ones I’ve seen, rivaling Scott’s back in his heyday. It’s called “Tasting The Heat.” Check it out at tastingtheheat dot com. He’s a pretty awesome guy, so major shout out to him, and he has wisely pictures of the ingredient panel for the sauces, something I wish I’d thought of when I started doing pictures (but will not be adding now).

I should observe another milestone, actually 4 milestones. The first two are in regards to the FOH YouTube video series. As of August 2020, the FOH series has reached 100 video entries, and I’ve added video support for a sauce in every year of TSAAF’s existence, including 2012, a “year” which had only 4 months. The total FOH content, as of this video, is 112, and 55 of those are in support of full review for sauces. The second milestone is that as of October 1, 2020, the FOH series will be reaching its first anniversary.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out the video series, please do. I have a lot of fun making those, which extend beyond the blog’s intentional focus only on hot sauces, to include other spicy foods, along with various applications of sauce usage and testing, which doesn’t get covered here. Links to the various playlists are in the widgets to the right, as well as in the various reviews themselves, and in the TOCs.

While I’m at it, I should mention that I also doubled my sauces at once (in 2019 I did 6 sauces), in a single mini-review*, but also made it a 2-part video, also the first for that, wherein I went through all the sauces that are in the Book of Pleasure & Pain Hot Sauce Challenge, though inadvertently. For this, I did12 sauces at once, *though 2 had already been previously reviewed. It did help me to test out my preparation a bit (maybe I will work my way to actual heat challenges, if I can get it tuned enough - if so, those will be for the FOH series only), though it was also a lot more challenging than I was expecting when I first thought up the idea. It is the 2nd dual posting between FOH and TSAAF. I also managed to throw in another double review on the blog to boot, though the video for that will be in Q4 sometime, due to the lag right now between the blog and the FOH video series.

Talked about the total posts to the blog for 2020 in the last update a bit and how it relates to previous years. So far, I’ve posted 33 total, which puts it higher than every year but 2013 (52). I also posted (repeatedly) in every month of this year, which has not happened since 2015 and only for 3 of the 8 years this blog has been running. This year will make 4, if I keep that streak running. I don’t see a reason why it wouldn’t.

I should also speak to the 3rd milestone, which is not here as of yet, but is coming soon. That is 200 full sauce reviews on this blog. I’ve already reviewed well over 200 sauces overall and probably tried well over a thousand spicy food things, and I know I said I didn’t think I was going to hit 200 full sauce reviews this year, but now I’m beginning to think I might be surprised if I don’t. I am, as of this writing, at the 196 mark and there is still a goodly amount of time to go in the year. I don’t believe, however, that I will cover that particular milestone with a separate post, as I did with the first 100. These quarterly updates are very extensive as-is.

The final milestone, which did get accomplished in Q3 with the arrival of the review of both Blair’s Original Death Sauce and the Pain Is Good #218 Louisiana sauce, is that Season One of The Hot Ones now has a review for all of the sauces I am doing and is thus complete. It will be the only season I am looking (or likely) to complete this year.

For Q3, I did a lot of blog maintenance, this past little while, after the last update, fixing some html errors I missed, as well as finally creating a database, so I can more appropriately check on how many reviews I’ve done in a much easier manner than previously, which always had the possibility of me missing something. I have added a few more photos for the full reviews and believe I’m now at less than 20 sauces needing pictures, which is slightly over the 10% mark of total sauces in the full review list. I also needed to teach myself a new way of doing the blog, thanks to Google electing to change how the blog operates. Thankfully, I don’t do anything overly demanding, in a technical sense.

I guess since I’m on the numbers, as I alluded to last update, I may as well start going  through some of them. The average score, across all sauces, is about midway between 4 and 5. This is also, incidentally, skewed higher, as I usually buy sauces I believe I will enjoy. The list currently sits at 13 sauces with an overall score of 0, 14 sauces at 1, 13 sauces at 2, 22 sauces at 3, 26 sauces at 4, 28 sauces at 5, 31 sauces at 6, 26 sauces at 7, 16 sauces at 8, 7 sauces at 9 and NO sauces at 10. This is by design, as I structured the rating system so that no one element would be able to dominate the ratings, and also, to a degree, some of the criteria are in opposition to each other. This means that the odds of having a perfect 10 across the board are exceedingly unlikely.  I have also done video support for at least one sauce of every score level that has sauces in it.

Of the alphabet, all letters are represented, except for K, U, X, Y. I’m going to loosely keep an eye out for sauces/sauce makers starting with those letters, though the only one I’m really surprised about is the “K”. I do have one of those “K” sauces sitting on deck and plan on getting to it before the end of the year, though. As to the rest, I can’t find any makers for either the “U” or “X”, so those look to be waiting a while longer... The best represented letter is “C”, with 20 entries, being carried on the back of the best represented sauce company, CaJohn’s, both on the blog with 12 and on the FOH video series with 5.

Continuing on, as mentioned, I have 196 full reviews on the blog. Of those, at least 24 (I have not gone through every title quite yet) are either discontinued entirely OR have been reformulated and do not match the sauce I reviewed any longer. 55 of them already have videos. Looking over the back catalog, I’m thinking that I probably will go to a ratings cut-off.  There is little point in me going through and buying a bunch of sauces that are rated at 0 - 2, as I will be keeping some of them just long enough to shoot the video, thereby ruining whatever food I put it on, and only to be binned immediately at the conclusion of recording. This range may also be increased to 0 - 3. On that low rating side, there are 21 sauces without video support, only one of which, Zatarain’s, which was a 1, I will consider doing, and that only because I hear fairly regular whining about the actual review.

That is a definite exception, though. This year, for instance, I had the Grace Scotch Bonnet sauce at hand and wound up tossing it entirely and not even filming a video at all. I do have limits. If manufacturers or whoever want to offer up some of those sauces for that purpose, I’ll accept them and at least consider shooting a video, but I don’t see any wisdom in spending my money to do that again, unless this becomes something more than a fun, casual hobby.

So, between the discontinued, the low rated, and the ones already done, I have a playground of around a hundred sauces or so that I could conceivably obtain for the purposes of FOH. I still need to check into availability of a lot of them, but I’ve already identified 15 that will be more of a priority. My suspicion is that once those are concluded, the higher rated ones will be more of a priority, though that will probably take realistically beyond 2021.

On the brighter side, for this year, I have 5 SOTY contenders right now (Private Selection Calabrian, Arthur Wayne Limitless, Monroy’s Death By Kraken, Tonguespank Scotch Whiskey Trinidad Scorpion & Mikey V’s Sweet Ghost Pepper, if you haven’t read them yet and are interested in checking them out), which is a great relief to me, as the last few years it has been nearly right down to the wire. Of those, Calabrian works well with the widest variety of things and was eaten the fastest, Limitless packed the biggest wallop, and the Sweet Ghost Pepper is, by far, the best-tasting).

Speaking of SOTYs, here is the current breakdown: There have been 8, as I write this, in the history of this blog. Of those 8, 3 are discontinued. Of the 5 remaining, 3 have had videos done. Of the 2 remaining, 1 of them I’m going to try to get to this year, but it may not make it (Happy Beaver). The other one I bought with the intention of doing a video, only to find it has been reformulated. That is the Born To Hula Ghost Of Ancho. As that sauce is based on the Habanero Ancho from them, and which has evidently also been reformulated, the result is a sauce that would be pushing to break a 5 and nowhere near any SOTY criteria for me. They took what was a delectable sauce and utterly ruined it, to the point where it is very nearly an unpalatable abomination. If you’re interested in the exact mechanism, it appears they scrambled the ingredients order (amplifying the astringency notably with the lime) and moved from onion powder to actual onions. So, needless to say, I will not be doing a video of that, as it is no longer the same sauce, nor will I be consuming it again, beyond what I tried before I noticed that awful change. I have noticed this with some of the other sauces in the backlog, so I now will need to directly review everything, as in at least 2 different online sources for the ingredient list OR bottle in hand,  for any of the past sauces, a prospect which pleases me about as much as you might expect. Cumulatively, of the 8 SOTYs for this blog, 4 are no longer available, either at all, or in their reviewed form.

As always, if you have any suggestions on anything you could care to see in the world of spicy foods, drop me a line and I’ll definitely try to get to it.

Pain Is Good Batch #218 Louisiana Hot Sauce Review

 Pain Is Good Batch #218 Louisiana Hot Sauce

Note: This sauce appears on Seasons One and Two of The Hot Ones.

NOTE: Video support available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnOaSUtrAN0

I had a lot of reservations about this sauce and passed it up, literally for years, because I disliked the Cayenne version from this company (which also makes the Pain percentage line and the Da' Bomb line) so intensely. Indeed, I have liked literally nothing they've produced thus far, so to say this wasn't even on my radar at all would be a gross understatement. Of course, then cue Roger at BYT for the rejuvenation of this blog last year, in the course of which, I came across The Hot Ones. I had not heard of it before that, but once I did, given the prominence of it in the industry, it made sense to take a look at the various sauces appearing that I had not done, one of which was this one.

Like the Cayenne sauce, this one has no idea what it actually wants to be. Calling it Louisiana-style is ridiculous and flatly false. If it came from the state, I could maybe give this a pass, but the company is out of Kansas. If they called it Cajun, they might be closer, as that style allows for a lot more elements than just Cayenne, salt, and vinegar, but this one is chock full of a lot of stuff that you would more normally expect to find in a barbeque sauce. This one is hotter than nearly every barbeque sauce I've had and I don't think there is quite enough sugar content in there for it to be a proper grilling sauce, but the smokiness and the tomato elements leads one there readily.

I am going to attempt to grill with it before the season closes down for the year, but have not as of this writing (the results will be in the video support, when that goes up), and instead have tried to use it as I do both Cajun and actual Louisiana-style. It works pretty well as a dipping sauce, acceptably in ramen, but the overall resemblance always harkens back to a poorly made, though somewhat hot, barbeque sauce. I do like that they used the Habanero mainly for heat and not flavor. The Cayenne is definitely the dominant pepper flavor, but spends a lot of time trying to fend off all the other competing flavors. I would anticipate it will probably work well as a wing sauce, but grilling could go either way, honestly.

As to heat, I would put this one slightly above a 3, but not enough to give it the push to 4. It definitely is enough to give non-chileheads pause, though no chileheads will be challenged by this. 

Bottom line: A very odd sauce, with a somewhat confusing taste profile, that bears little to no resemblance to the type of sauce indicated on the label. This is one that I'm not upset I bought, though it was mostly due to The Hot Ones inclusion, but would also have been ok with not ever having. Also, I will not be replacing once the bottle is done.

Breakdown:

Heat level: 3
Flavor: 6
Flexibility: 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4

Overall: 5

Pallotta Hot Habanero Fire Hot Sauce Review

Pallotta Hot Habanero Fire Hot Sauce

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

I get some degree of amusement at the naming conventions of this company and sauces. It is not Pallotta; it is Pallotta Hot. The sauce is not simply mere Habanero. No, no. It is instead Habanero Fire Hot. The overuse of the descriptor hot in everything tends to make this a bit confusing, though, and a bit unnecessary. I had to go to their website to get it sorted and discovered those things I mentioned as well as their backstory, which I enjoyed reading quite a lot. I like it when companies do that and wish more of them did. 

I also enjoyed this sauce quite a lot. There is a freshness that is palpable from the word go. I'm not sure chileheads are going to find it "fire hot," but this pushes to the border of where "normies" will be interested, and then past it with a very nice low key lingering burn, exactly the type Habaneros are known for. I greatly enjoyed that part. 

Flavor-wise...the brightness of the sauce was a pretty welcome change of pace. Somehow I've gotten myself back on the Mexican sauce trail search, which winds up with me slogging through a lot of disappointing stuff, at least in terms of filling the vacancy in my Standby sauce list. Happily, it is also leading me to really hone in on some aspects I really want to have and those are: either a smokiness and/or fire-roasted something. This one, alas, has neither, but one can really taste both the genius and thought that went into making this. 

It is very heavy on Habanero, using that as the main base, and then it filters in some Jalapenos, which adds that brightness I mentioned, without stepping on the flavor. A bit of garlic and tomatoes also have glimmers here and there, to help smooth things out, but really, you are dealing with Habanero at one of its finest moments, in one of its better settings. This massive demonstration of skill has me interested in their entire line and I foresee me going through all of the sauces that do not have unfortunate ingredients. 

Bottom line: While it's not quite what I have in mind for my Standby list, this is a somewhat surprising and very enjoyable sauce that works astoundingly well on a variety of Mexican/Southwest dishes. May be a bit scorchy for non-chileheads, however.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 7

Angry Irishman Olive It! Jalapeno + Olive It! Habanero Hot Sauce Reviews

Angry Irishman Olive It! Jalapeno Hot Sauce
Angry Irishman Olive It! Habanero Hot Sauce

NOTE: Video support available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbfnpruxEs8

I have decided to do another double review for these, as there is very little different in anything, except for a slight coloration difference (more towards beige for the Habanero and more towards olive green for the Jalapeno) and the Habanero being the only one that has even a slight edging towards piquancy.

At first, these looked to me to be basically pureed green olives, which seemed an intriguing base to start a hot sauce. I love green olives dearly, but it had never occurred to me that they might make a good sauce component, though I've eaten more than my fair share stuffed with everything imaginable, bleu cheese, garlic, Jalapeno, Habanero, Jolokias, and so on, even once, memorably, with a stab at bacon cheddar, which went about exactly as well as you might expect. For all that, my money is still with the pimento-stuffed, which is where this sauce is at, as well. So, all to the good there.

My expectation of it being pureed olives basically, was bolstered by the label, which listed Spanish olives as the first ingredient. I checked out the website a bit for where such a sauce might have some recommended usage and saw pizza. I've long been an adherent of green olives and pepperoni as my go-to pizza of choice at a certain local pizza eatery, so it seemed we might be kindred spirits in thought. They also mentioned dirty martinis (I'm off drinking for the time being, so no test there) and egg salad, which I did test, among other things. I was, I should say, a bit apprehensive also, though, as green olives have a pretty strong flavor and I've found most people seem to reside snugly in the "love" or "hate" categories, with little room between. Making a sauce with that ingredient, without also having it be overpowering, seemed like a nifty trick, if it could be pulled off.

As it is, though, they do not appear to have tried. These "sauces" are basically pureed Spanish olives, with some minor additional components added, the flavors of which very little show up. Certainly not the Jalapeno at all, the garlic slightly, the olive oil not at all (I assume this to be meant as an emulsifier, which didn't work great - both sauces need to have constant agitation and both not only separated, but clotted up the bottle neck), and the Habanero very little, though it did impart a slight degree of heat. This also makes a very thick sauce, quite sludgy, and nearly impossible to pour, as one might expect. 

Now, obviously I'm a fan of the flavor, but I will also say that part of my enjoyment of eating those olives comes from the bit of firmness and mouth feel when eating them. There is none of that here, just the flavor, but it was a flavor I did not find particularly enjoyable in egg salad, without the accompanying mouth feel. There, you just have a mouth of mush, though a tasty mush. On pizza, it was slightly better, but, again, I was missing the mouth feel. I suspect this would probably work better in a drink, but one of my favorite bits, again, is eating the olives after downing the martini (and I prefer mine extra dirty).

Where all this is going is that this is an interesting idea, though how much you will want to throw in on it depends on how much you like the flavor of green olives. If you're like me, and you also like the heft, the mouth feel, the bit of chew to the olives, that aspect is missing here and will feel missing as well with usage. If you are a dirty martini drinker (and I might save these, for if I happen to resume drinking at some future point), these might be of use, assuming you just want the flavor (and with the Habanero, maybe a slight spark of heat). Other than that, it's hard to see getting these when you can easily make this yourself with a jar of high quality Spanish olives and a Magic Bullet.

Bottom line: Not sure of the target audience, but this seems to me to be sauces of both limited appeal and usage. I definitely will eat them both entirely, as I'm fond of the flavor of green olives, but also won't be replacing either of these.

Breakdown (Jalapeno):

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 6
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6

Overall: 5

 Breakdown (Habanero):

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

Overall: 5

Hell's Kitchen Tacocat Hot Sauce Review

 Hell's Kitchen Taco Cat Hot Sauce

UPDATE: Video support available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4-TBLH2W-s

When I first read on the Burn Your Tongue Facebook feed (be sure to check that out) that Roger was bringing in this sauce in both left-to-right reading and also right-to-left reading labels, I was intrigued. It's been a while since I've seen collector's edition sauces and maybe that's just what 2020 needs...a little fun and frivolity as a respite from the otherwise Hellish nature of the year. I marked it down mentally and when I got there, I managed to score a major win and snag the last bottle of the ambidextrous-reading label, which reads both left-to-right AND right-to-left (picture attached). 

In amidst some of my other thoughts, I did find it also curious that the sauce company had seemingly taken the name of a fairly well-known tv show from Gordon Ramsay, so I thought possibly he was involved, despite his seeming disinterest in hot sauce and chilehead-type stuff. The name seems more a reference to a specific area of New York City, where the company is based, however. The sauce itself is an exclusive to some sort of video game bar/restaurant there called Barcade, as well...or maybe was an exclusive or was created exclusively for them at one time or something along those lines.

It probably doesn't matter, and you can look into it more, if that particular backstory interests you, but for me, I'm STILL on the search for a Mexican-style sauce, something that I've been trying to track down for years and that has been the sort of quest that is taking on a hallowed nature, almost along the lines of a sacred search for a particular grail cup...I'm happy to say that I'm narrowing down the things I want, but it is almost more an elimination of things I don't want. Obviously, onions and excessive heat are things I don't particularly want in that kind of sauce, but heavy garlic and citrus I also find myself disliking as well. 

For this one, heat is about right, fairly moderate, not enough to punish, but definitely enough of a presence to let you know it's there. This one has a bit more citrus than I would prefer and the taste of both Habanero (ok) and cumin (much less ok) are fairly prominent, so the end effect is something I found to be just ok. Obviously, flexibility with most Mexican-style sauces is out the window, as they don't really lend themselves to application too far removed from that style of cuisine and that is definitely the case here as well. My overriding thought when using this was that I really really would have preferred some smokiness here and throwing in some chipotle would have gone a long way. Smokiness is one of the factors I do strongly desire in a Mexican-style sauce and here would have been a stunning grace note. 

Bottom line: Pretty solid, relatively inoffensive Mexican-style sauce. Definitely enjoyed the bottle, but also definitely will not be replacing it or adding it to my lineup.

Breakdown:

Heat level: 2
Flavor: 5
Flexibility: 4
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 5

Overall: 4