Hot Ones Mini Dab Challenge Gift Set Mini-Review

Hot Ones Mini Dab Challenge Gift Set

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

There are 3 sauces in this set, but we won't be talking about 2 of them in this review. The first of them, the Hot Ones Classic Garlic Fresno has a full review (complete with video link) here: https://d-dubtsaaf.blogspot.com/2023/04/hot-ones-classic-garlic-fresno-hot.html. The second, the Hot Ones Los Calientes Verde, contains onions, which automatically disqualifies it. 

Instead, then, we will be discussing the original Last Dab hot sauce, which was my main interest in this set (though having more of the Classic Garlic Fresno doesn't hurt, either). I have done the Last Dab XXX (full review with video link here: https://d-dubtsaaf.blogspot.com/2024/04/hot-ones-last-dab-xxx-hot-sauce-review.html) as well and this has the exact same components, just with Pepper X as opposed to combined with two other variations. While you don't have to read through that other review, it would be helpful, as much of the commentary there applies here as well.

This one is a lot more vinegary, far more astringent, with a better sense of the Pepper X flavor, along with some slight notes of mustard and turmeric, and happily less of the coriander and cumin. The coloration is not what I would describe as hugely appealing, but the closest analogy is probably a dijon mustard. Consistency is slightly smoother than that and about the same as the triple X version. Beyond flavor, where those sauces most strongly diverge is in the heat level. While the other sauce was a 4, this one is just barely a 3. It is definitely punchy and firmly in chilehead only territory, however. I don't love the flavor of either sauce, but in direct comparison, the original Last Dab I find unquestionably preferable.

Maritime Madness Fire Candy Series Hot Sauce(s) Mini-Review

Maritime Madness Fire Candy Candied Blueberry
Maritime Madness Fire Candy Candied Cranberry
Maritime Madness Fire Candy Raspberry Habanero

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyUKOgfRj4c

These are, to vary extents, applicable of the adage "great in concept, but not so great in reality (and/or execution)." I really like the idea of basing fruit-based sweet hot sauces around the idea of candied fruit and think there is potentially a lot of mileage there. That is not quite what we have here, unfortunately.

All of them share a universal characteristic in that, particularly for something calling itself "candy" or "candied," there is a decided lack of sweetness. Candied fruit frequently will have a concentrated sweetness about it, which none of these have. I think part of it is the issue they all also have in trying to occupy too many worlds. These are listed on the website as hot sauces, which tend, overall, to have a level of astringency to them, and trying to serve that master, which nearly always invariably involves vinegar, sort of spikes the project. In my view, had they tended more in the direction of syrups, with a lot less vinegar, all of them would have been improved. As it is, I just find this line to be mostly confusing.

For the Blueberry, we see the addition of unnnamed spices and hops. I don't know if they were trying to use a blueberry Hefeweizen as inspiration, but the addition of hops makes this just taste...wrong. I don't know of another world to describe the combination of flavors, but they do not feel at all like they belong together. This particular sauce also suffers from the xantham gum jiggle, which makes mouth feel a touch icky and globby. This is also the least hot of the sauces and my least favorite.

For the Cranberry, I love the coloration. It is very bright, lively, vibrant red. What I don't like is the addition of lemon and ginger into the mix, which wore out its welcome quickly. It was sort of interesting seeing how they meshed with the quinine of the cranberry, but maybe I'm just too much of a snob, but I like cranberry sauce to be cranberries and sugar and that's all. This one has a slight degree of heat to it, but nothing major. 

For the Raspberry, this one is more like a thicker and more raspberry forward vinaigrette. I found this one to be the most flexible (and hence my overall favorite) in terms of foods it works with and the heat about the same as the Cranberry. I do wish this one would have been less vinegary, since both the raspberry and Habanero flavors come through and if it were sweeter, I think it could make a potential worthwhile grill sauce.

Crabby Shack Zesty Lemon Pepper Hot Sauce Review

Crabby Shack Zesty Lemon Pepper

Note: This sauce appears on Season 21 of The Hot Ones.

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpKH2J1weyE

Ok, so the Crabby Shack is evidently a restaurant in Brooklyn that also happened to produce sauces, at least for a little while. This is one of them. The other, called "Original Hottie," I believe, I can't find anything about and in fact, on their less than stellar website, can't find any info on this one, either. I actually started wondering if they were still in business, but it seems more like they're concentrating on running the restaurant business, rather than trying to do the sauce sideline. All to the good there, even if the website frustrated me a bit, largely because I liked this sauce so much, I wanted to try other stuff from them.

It's not surprising this is a chef-derived sauce. The combination of ingredients is brilliant. Pairing tomatillos with lemon pepper is something I will readily admit I would never have thought of in a million years, but it makes total sense, given that lemon pepper seasoning is quite nice on tomatoes. A little dash of Habanero to make this thing an actual hot sauce, though heat is very low and quite accessible, and it is brilliant, tasty, wonderful...as long as you like lemon pepper, I suppose. I do, as will be obvious, and especially like how well the notes of cracked black pepper come through, which almost always makes me very happy when it comes in a hot sauce. Lemon pepper can sometimes be a tough bitter and abrasive and the tomatillos do a nice job of mellowing that out a bit, while still leaving those strong flavors more or less intact.

Since lemon pepper has been one of my favorite profiles for as long as I can remember (literal decades now), this sauce made me very happy when I first opened the bottle and I had to dial back so as not to tear into the entire damn bottle before I had a chance to try it on wings. To say I love the flavor profile is perhaps an understatement - I'd put it easily in my top 5 favorite sauces from the show - but I will also note it won't fit everywhere. Citrus, for me, is a square block and food would be a star shaped hole, in that analogy. While I do enjoy it dearly, lemon pepper in particular, in the right places, that is pretty far from universal. 

So, for the things that citrus works well on, such as white meats like chicken and, naturally, given that it's from a seafood restaurant, any of the white fishes, crab, lobster, and shrimp. Where it works, it does so at a near-magical level, again assuming you like lemon pepper, but vary outside of where that flavoring system is nice and you get results that make you wish you had saved the sauce for one of those more magical settings.

Bottom line: An absolute wonder of a sauce and something that is borderline transcendental paired with the right foods, with a heat level that is widely accessible. If you like lemon pepper, this is an absolute must.

Breakdown:

           Heat level: 1
           Flavor: 10
           Flexibility: 4
           Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 6

Two Heads Peach Peri-Peri Hot Sauce Review

Two Heads Peach Peri-Peri

Note: This sauces was provided for purposes of review by Roger Damptz at Burn Your Tongue. Check him out on Facebook.

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYy6o7vvtP8

Peri-Peri (or Bird's Eye) is one of those very small and thin-walled chiles that I think tends to work best in things, such as in powder form and mixed into the batter of a fish fry, for instance, or maybe sprinkled in while greens cook down, or perhaps in a nice chili, so that it can impart the heat while the flavors meld and mesh. Making it the main flavor star of the sauce is a pretty bold move and I'm not there are a lot of sauces where I think it's worked well. This sauce is definitely not the exception to that.

My interest in this was more towards the first word in the name, which is peach. I love me a good peach fruit-based sweet hot and I had high hopes this would be one of those, even if the color of the sauce was "wrong" for that kind of thing. The thinness of the sauce concerned me a bit as well, but nothing ventured, nothing gained and so on, so I opened the bottle and then it sat for quite a while in my fridge door as I tried to come to terms with it. The smokiness of the smoked Reapers is nice and complements the flavor of the peri-peri well, or at least as well as anything can in that setting, but the peach flavor was decidedly absent, aside from a very vague sort of subtle sweet note I caught here and there.

More than anything, I'd put this, as far as usage, definitely not in terms of flavor, more towards a Louisiana-style cayenne or Cajun, as to application. It's fine on creamier dishes and fried foods. I think it would do very nicely indeed in a ramen as well and it does mesh pretty well with food when used. Flexibility is quite pronounced here and there are quite a few places it would do very nicely. When it comes to the flavor of the sauce being front and center, for me it's a bit of diminishing returns, as I don't find the flavor of this sauce solo to be too wonderful, but that's not really how we use sauce most of the time, I'd imagine. Heat-wise, it has enough of a punch that I don't see non-chileheads enjoying this much, so I'd say it's best reserved for chileheads, but definitely, the more complex flavors you can pair it with, the better the end result.

Bottom line: This is a sauce I find to be bold, adventurous, and interesting a bit more than good, but in the right setting, it can definitely contribute well to the increased enjoyment of quite a few and varied foods.

Breakdown:

           Heat level: 3
           Flavor: 3
           Flexibility: 9
           Enjoyment to dollar factor: 5

Overall: 5

Sinaloa Tropical Hot Sauce & Mango Habanero Hot Sauce Mini-Reviews

Salsa Sinaloa Gourmet Tropical
Salsa Sinaloa Gourmet Mango Habanero

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxfveofz4NA

This is another of those finds that I stumbled across wandering around a Mexican grocery store one day. I'd not heard of Sinaloa before and fruit-based sweet hots are a style I favor quite a lot, so it wasn't much convincing for me to take the gamble and roll the dice on these two. Initially, I was going to do these as separate reviews, but once I got into them a bit, they are definitely more alike than not, so it didn't seem to make much sense to separate out two entries for what is essentially the same sauce. While there are differences, to be sure -  they are not, after all, absolutely identical - one of them has pineapple and the other does not, while that other has peaches, whereas the one with pineapple does not. So, there has been a switch in fruits as components, as well as some adjustment in ingredient order, with Habanero being higher in one than the other. Flow, smoothness, color, restrictor cap, and all the other remaining ingredients are duplicated.

In comparing the sauces more directly, we have basically a couple areas of difference, flavor and heat. The Tropical sauce is a very tame one, having just barely enough heat to get to a 1, while the Mango Habanero is probably over a 1 by a bit, but not enough to come anywhere near approaching a 2. That leaves flavor, both of which could be described as vaguely tropical. When I initially opened the bottles, the Tropical reminded me of the idea of taking a pina colada smoothie, despite there being no coconut in the sauce, and making it into a hot sauce, or using it for heavy inspiration. The "aspect," which I will address shortly, is a lot lighter in the profile here, though still present. That "aspect" is the mustard flour, which, despite liking mustard, I find to be a polarizing element. I don't know why it's here, but that, in conjunction with the garlic and onion, presents a sort of chili (the dish, like with meat and beans) or taco flavoring, only with the Habanero rather than Ancho flavoring the chili powder. The "aspect" is more intensely distracting the more forward it is and was not something I was ever able to agitate out. 

Consequently, the Tropical has a more favorable flavor, but much less heat, while the Mango Habanero has precious little mango flavoring (the Tropical does not particularly, either, it is much more pineapple) and is mostly a conflicting sweet flavor colliding with the "aspect" described above. I found the Tropical worked moderately well with things like chicken tendies and here and there with other foods, while the Mango Habanero, which shocked me the first time I tried, I was not really able to successfully pair. It was worth a shot, but I can't say I was particularly impressed with either and the Mango Habanero I did not finish.

El Yucateco Habanero & Chiltepin Hot Sauce Review

El Yucateco Habanero & Chiltepin

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

As part of their 50th year anniversary celebration, El Yucateco made a number of variants. For a while, they were available online only, with the plan to eventually get them to the Mexican market grocers and perhaps beyond. While I was wandering the aisles looking for other stuff, I happened to come across them. Some, such as the coffee one, held moderate interest for me (I may do one or both of the Marisqueras at some future point), but I held some hope for the Ghost pepper one, which regrettably also had onions. After poking around further, I eventually settled on this one.

Immediately, I noticed a sort of off flavor that I couldn't quite place and which never really went away. It's possible this is from the chiltepin, but there is also a number of spices and it could be one of those. Habanero and garlic also come into the mix a bit and, regrettably, so does the acetic acid and lemon. This creates a bit of an issue in that if you don't have something fairly strong-flavored to offset this, it notably detracts from the food. It's not awful or inedible, but is the sort of thing I wouldn't be inclined to do twice. 

Heat is very moderate, so if you wanted to add just a tinge of kick to the food, this might be a good one to go with. I could see this working very nicely in a chili, for instance, where you have a composite of flavors. By itself, it frankly isn't particularly good-tasting and this is somewhat of a problem that cuts down rather notably on flexibility. Most Mexican-style sauces I prefer to keep to that type of food, but the table sauces often will work well on things like pizza and ramen and maybe even mac & cheese in a pinch. That is definitely not the case with this one.

Bottom line: A sort of interesting variation, but for me, the whole is perhaps somewhat less than the sum of the parts and is one I consider sort of a misfire.

Breakdown:

           Heat level: 1
           Flavor: 3
           Flexibility: 3
           Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3

Overall: 3

High Desert ToMango Habanero Hot Sauce Review

High Desert ToMango Habanero

Note: This sauce was provided for purposes of review by Roger Damptz of Burn Your Tongue. Check him out on Facebook.

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDcYAQxc6CQ

Here we have a bit of an oddity. While I can think of numerous Habanero-mango sauces, and have done quite a few this year as well, I can’t think of any that include tomatoes. Using tomatoes in a sauce will generally tend to make them a lot more flexible, however, in this case, it is sort of the inverse. While I do like that they are fire-roasted, they are a bit on the acidic side and pairing that with the usual vinegar-Habanero-mango combination, particularly, as the mangos here are also a bit on the sour side, we have a lot of astringency to this sauce. It is a pretty unique flavor and I can’t think of anything I’ve had quite like it.   

Heat-wise, High Desert calls this “Sorta Medium,” which is a fine thing to call it. It’s pretty low heat for me and chileheads won’t be challenged at all by it, but there is enough of a charge there for non-chileheads to at least be aware of it before slogging it onto whatever food they want. As to that, while it is a very nicely blended more or less medium thick sauce, I found it worked best when you can let it be the dominant flavor, so think lighter meats like fish, pork, or chicken, as in battered and fried or grilled or roasted.

Bottom line: This is a pretty novel, intensely curious sauce that I like more than I dislike, but finding things to pair with it proved to definitely be somewhat of a challenge.

Breakdown:

           Heat level: 1
           Flavor: 6
           Flexibility: 3
           Enjoyment to dollar factor: 5

Overall: 4

Anderson Pepper Co. Don't Touch The Baby Hot Sauce Review

Anderson Pepper Co. Don't Touch The Baby

Well, it's been a long while since I've had one of these...we'd have to go all the way back, nearly three years, to June 2021 and the Xtreme hot sauce, for the last time this happened, which is a sauce I found so unpleasant that I binned it because I didn't want to experience it again, even for just shooting an FOH video. It comes with the territory of being a food explorer a bit, launching out there into the unknown, with sauce companies you're unfamiliar with, this one being another on Amazon who came up at the right time I needed something else added for free shipping. This one is also a touch on the expensive side for this kind of sauce, ordering it that way.

There is a lot, peripherally, to like. The label design here is fantastic, emphasizing the niftiness of the name, which itself ties back into the company's early days. This is the original sauce as well from the company, the first in the lineup. The color scheme and the font sizing, all of it works extremely well. The color of the sauce is a very nice and quite attractive slightly reddish orange. I found the name amusing and the idea of a nice sweet Habanero sauce to be a good entry point. I've mentioned this before, but onion granulate or onion powder (actual onions in the ingredients are a hard no) is somewhat of a crap shoot. Most of the time, I can tolerate sauces with either of those, as long as they're in smaller doses and with that ingredient listed last here,  I had hopes that would be the case here.

What was in the bottle, however...diplomatically, it wasn't quite what I'd hoped. The initial smell, when I opened the bottle, struck me as it being another sriracha. Not the end of the world, by any means, but I've had quite a few of those over the years and I'm fairly well-tired of that flavor by this point. Once I poured it out and tasted it, however, the sriracha impression ended. The first flavor was a blast of onion (listed as the last ingredient and in powder form) that nearly made me toss the bottle on the spot. Even when sauces are bad, which regrettably is how I'd classify this one, I usually won't toss them out immediately, but will try chilling them and agitating them as I get more space in the bottle. 

I was pretty gun shy for quite some time with this one, as if the flavor of a sauce makes me gag a bit, as this one did, I have little interest in continuing with it. Eventually, I got back to it and the temperature change and intense agitation did not change things. If anything, those elements made it a touch worse. So, regrettably, I had to break a nearly three year long streak and bin this, as I found it unusable and didn't want to go through it again on camera, which, considering some of the sauces I've done over time, is its own sort of statement. Granted, I didn't eat much of it, but of what I struggled down, I didn't find the heat to be particularly prominent. 

Bottom line: While I'm not sure entirely what they were going for here, this strikes me as aiming at a more "everyday" type vibe. Beyond the flavor issues I mentioned, I find it a touch too vinegar-forward for that, but YMMV.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 0