Torchbearer Headless Horseradish Hot Sauce Review

Torchbearer Headless Horseradish

Note: This sauce appears on Season 10 of The Hot Ones.

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbVcR92Bp5Y

Back to back sauces from The Hot Ones, which is the first time that's happened on this blog, if memory serves...

In many ways, this sauce reminds me a lot of the Garlic Reaper (reviewed here elsewhere). There are a number of shared components from the garlic, the canola oil, used here as an emulsifier so they can continue their all-natural sauce status, even down to the usage of mustard. Here, it is a dijon mustard, there a mustard powder. The more obvious difference is the usage of Ghost peppers here vs. the Reaper and the difference is apparent immediately, with a loss of the very bitter aspect of the Garlic Reaper, which allows the mustard and garlic to shine through much better. It is notably less hot as well, of course.

I admittedly had very little interest in this, as I am not really a fan of horseradish and am happy to note that once I got into the bottle, despite horseradish being the first ingredient, I don't get a lot of horseradish flavor in this sauce, for which I am eminently grateful, though part of me is curious how that would go, if it had. Like the Garlic Reaper, this one took me quite some time to get a handle on as well. With the ability of more flavors to shine through, this one works better with chicken. It is frankly a much better, more well-rounded sauce, as far as I'm concerned. A lot of restaurants serve horseradish with prime rib, so I thought steak would be a good direction for this, but I found the results a touch underwhelming. I will say I think it would be marvelous on a cheesesteak sandwich and am sorely tempted, as I write this, to make that the video once I get to filming that. I think you could also do very nicely trying this in a nice creamy Alfredo sauce, which is another idea I'm liking a lot. However, like many of the various Torchbearer entries I've tried, it doesn't seem to have a natural food entry point.

I hesitate to just leave this as Garlic Reaper-Lite or a better version of that sauce, and I don't know which came first, so I may have the order reversed, but this seems like nothing so much as another version of that sauce, or vice versa. These don't strike me as having an identity independent of each other, aside from me liking the Headless Horseradish considerably better. Heat-wise, it is solid, given the presence of the Ghost fairly high in the list, but not overwhelming and, more importantly, it adds rather nicely to, rather than detracts from, both the flavors of the other ingredients and the food.

Bottom line: If you've tried the Garlic Reaper and thought they might be onto something good here, but that sauce wasn't it, this is well worth a go. Very solid garlic sauce, with several grace notes. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 3
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 7
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6

Overall: 5