Brotaco Pineapple Habanero Hot Sauce Review

Brotaco Pineapple Habanero

I sometimes wonder if I’m going to wind up doing every single sauce of this type without onions, as I’ve done a lot of them. Both fruit-based sweet hots generally and pineapple sweet hots particularly remain pretty high in my interests as I’ve always loved pineapple and can never quite seem to have enough of this kind of sauce on hand. Lately, I’ve noticed that some makers are tossing lime in, to varying success, but I’m not always sure if it’s part of a trend or if there is some specific purpose. For this sauce, I think it’s the latter and I will say that tropical and citrus can be a decent combination.

This sauce, given the name of the company making it, along with the inclusion of cilantro in the ingredients, seems to me pretty pointedly aimed at tacos. Lime doesn’t go with red meat tacos, generally, so it seems more pointed at the lighter meat tacos, with particular focus, perhaps, on seafood tacos and/or al pastor. I have found it also does nicely on fried fish as well as fried chicken, to a lesser degree, but the lime does create a bit of a dilemma in that the food one is using this sauce on must also accommodate citrus. I do feel this could also work very nicely in a salad or as part of a mixed drink, so it’s not as if it’s entirely unusable, just perhaps a bit less flexible than if there was no lime in it at all. It is definitely bright and lively, though, and that part also seems by design. This is only Habanero, so not particularly hot, but it is a very firm 1 and accelerates to that level fairly rapidly.

There is some curious elements to the packaging. While I always like a good level stripe with the label, this is a fairly thick, somewhat pulpy (and gorgeous-colored) sauce, so putting a restrictor cap better suited to a Louisiana-style sauce is both unnecessary and annoying. The label has a lot of small text copy in white on a yellow background and all of that should also be reworked, as it is way more trouble than it’s worth to try to read it.

Bottom line: A kind of an interesting entry into this kind of sauce. While it didn’t work on everything for me, where it did work, it worked wonderfully.

Breakdown:

           Heat level: 1
           Flavor: 7
           Flexibility: 3
           Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4

Overall: 4