Volcanic Peppers Red Reaper Mango Hot Sauce Review

Volcanic Peppers Red Reaper Mango

For a while into the bottle, I thought this sauce may have been misnamed. Despite mango being in the name, it was overshadowed by the forceful burning nature of the much more prominent mighty mighty Reapers in it. This definitely has a strong element of the superhot bitter, which is perhaps not helped by the addition of Thai peppers, which I like a lot, but which can be a bit on the bitter side by themselves, and Chia seed. It also has cardamom, which I didn’t notice until just prior to writing this review, and which I find kind of an odd coincidence, given the preceding review.

I think more than anything, this is mostly a sort of non-distinct fruity slightly sweet Reaper sauce. It is a very nice medium thickness and is pretty smooth. It definitely is a very superhot forward sauce, as noted, and given both the Reapers and Ghosties (along with Habanero, to round out the quad of peppers), this is very much a chilehead only sauce. Indeed, it takes a certain degree of tolerance to be able to pick out some of the more subtle flavor notes, particularly on the back end, which does also include very slight passes at mango, without being able to tolerance the immediate blast of the Reapers. Given that Reapers and Habanero are both building peppers as well, this can get to a pretty nice little blaze, though I found heat to be mostly concentrated on my tongue.

It is not a “normal” fruit-based sweet hot, which is both good and bad. Given that it’s sticky, it does hold to food pretty well and the slightly ambiguous flavor nature lends itself well to burgers, as well as chicken. It does need a fairly strong flavor accompaniment for best results, however, as it does tend towards bitterness fairly readily. That sort of non-distinctness in flavor profile also lends it well to things like pizza also, though I did find, given a bit of flavor cancellation, that the sweetness in conjunction with mac and cheese was not desirable. It is pretty fun to play around with, though, and one of the nice things about running this hot, as well as the aforementioned consistency and stickiness, is that a little will go a long way.

Bottom line: Volcanic always tends to have a pretty interesting approach to sauces and this is no exception, though, again, it does take a certain tolerance to Reapers, both in heat and superhot bitterness, for this sauce to be fully enjoyable.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 5

 

Ginger Goat We Got The Beets Hot Sauce Review

Ginger Goat We Got The Beets

I will start this off by saying that this sauce is not for me. I am no fan of Indian flavors particularly, and had I noticed Garam Masala was in there, probably would have skipped it. Further, there are 3 very aromatic spices where I find a little goes a very long way. Those are: cloves, cinnamon, cardamom. Nutmeg is similar, but to a lesser extent, and also present. So, I am not predisposed to enjoy this much and one should keep that in mind with my commentary here.

I do like beets, quite a lot, in fact. I also like pomegranates. Neither of those shows up in sauces a lot. I also really like Ginger Goat’s very adventurous and inventive approaches to sauces, enough that I scanned the ingredient list looking for the presence of onions (none, of course, or you wouldn’t be reading this), but upon not finding them, what was there did not really sink in. Once I got it in hand, I was immediately confused. I expected something different and what was in the bottle was a lot looser than anticipated.

But we keep an open mind, always, and so, after I felt it had sat on the shelf an appropriate time (and I totally didn’t forget I had it or anything), I busted it open and gave it a fair shot...then another, then several more, with steadily diminishing results. This is a sauce that has an odd consistency...the pulps, I assume from the beets and Reapers, tend to collect a bit in the center and the liquid pools off. No amount of agitation seemed to help this. The flavor is very spicy, in a non-piquant way, though I will say, with the mighty Reapers as the heat driver, this was an easy two and had I been able to eat enough of it to enjoy further, it probably would have been pushing a 3. I doubt very much that non-chileheads will find this heat level enjoyable. There are some slight beet and very light pomegranate flavor notes, but this sauce has maybe 20 different ingredients, but it is the fragrant spices that strike me most and I find off-putting.

The thing that I liked best about this sauce had nothing to do with the sauce. You see, prior to filming the video for this, I was not aware Garam Masala was in it, so I thought perhaps, given that I was struggling to pair this sauce and wasn’t super familiar with cardamom, figured that was the issue. So, I did some internet sleuthing to see where cardamom might be used. Coffee came up, which was a non-starter, as I am not fond of that flavor and also, I’m not pouring hot sauce into coffee. Ok, so what else? Well, lamb. I almost never have lamb and don’t really enjoy it, so am not about to start. Next...well, next was this Finnish sort of breakfast roll called nisu (or nissua or pulla). I discovered there are no restaurants or import shops that had this, so I was not able to have that directly, but I did enjoy the sort of deep dive that trying to find where cardamom was used in a food sense provided.

Bottom line: Despite the overall rating, again, this is not by any means a bad sauce, but also very much not a sauce for me. If you like the spice flavors I mentioned above more than I do, and are also a chilehead, this may worth a go, but I suspect that is a fairly shallow pool. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 3
            Flavor: 0
            Flexibility: 0
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 0

Overall: 1

 

Poirier's Louisiana Style (All Flavors) Hot Sauce(s) Review

Poirier’s Original Louisiana Style
Poirier’s Louisiana Style Creole Maple
Poirier’s Louisiana Style K.O. Edition

This trio hits a lot of soft spots with me, which should be apparent as this review goes on. In this case, it is a vanity sauce line, though from a person with whom I’m not familiar, but who is apparently a UFC dude. Also, one or more of these sauces, possibly the entire line, is the UFC official hot sauce or sauces, and at least one or more of the sauces is a direct crossover with Heartbeat, who has not appeared in these pages heretofore as they tend to like to use onions. All of the sauces are made by Heartbeat and may or may not be exclusive to Heatonist and all of them are labeled as Louisiana Style.

The lack of clarity comes because there is a lot of discontinuity in the labels. From what I can tell, the order goes something like this: Original >> K. O. Edition >> Creole Maple, in terms of the ingredients and how the sauces are constructed, with an original base, then a variation on that, then a variation on the variation. The Original has the UFC tag, but the UFC bottle neck hanger thing came on the K. O. Edition, which kind of makes more sense. Two of these are listing as 10 calories per serving and one is listed as zero, which makes no sense, as the ingredients are not that far removed from one another to constitute any kind of difference. 

That oddness aside, the Original is more of what I would refer to as a Cajun than a Lousiana-Style, meaning it is Cayenne, but then also garlic and Habanero and celery, of all things. Those last two modify the flavor profile considerably and while I don’t dislike the celery, I do find it somewhat jarring, mostly because I keep forgetting it’s there and don’t expect it in this kind of sauce. The K.O. takes the original and adds in Ghost Pepper powder. It specifies it as coming from Smokin’ Ed Currie, which, fine, but this addition radically changes the flavor profile and heat. The consistency is thicker than the Original, which is much looser, and also seems to add a lot darker hues and tones to the color. 

The K.O. does a couple things very well. First, it demonstrates amply what I call “superhot bitter,” and this is, by far, the predominant flavor. Secondly, it also demonstrates the trade of flavor in favor of heat. While the Original, even with the Habanero, I’d put as pretty tame, the K. O. Edition, is going to push a lot of non-chileheads and in combination with the flavor, may be too much of an overall package. I gave it a 3 for heat, but it’s more like a 2.5+ and not a 3 outright. It does persist long enough that I gave it the push.

Then we have my favorite of the bunch, the Maple Creole. It has all the ingredients of the K.O., but adds in maple syrup and Chipotle (in adobo) and it makes all the difference in the world. There’s also sage, rosemary, and thyme, but even with the callback to a 70s psychedelic hit jam, those are no competition for any of the other notes. This one reminds me of a somewhat vinegar forward BBQ sauce or a combination of a Louisiana-style and a BBQ sauce, along with some of those sweet, sweet maple notes that show up, but are never overpowering. This sauce exemplifies a stunning display of flavor balance, so long as it’s agitated - all of them need this - and is one of those that stands out and strikes me as special...as well as utterly delicious. 

Bottom line: While I enjoyed playing around with these and thought they were all solid and had something to offer, there’s only one I’d consider getting again, and that is the delightful Creole.

Breakdown Original:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 5
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 7

Overall: 5

Breakdown K.O. Edition:

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

Overall: 3

Breakdown Creole Maple:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 8
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 9

Overall: 7

Captain Mowatt's Fuzz Hot Sauce Review

Captain Mowatt’s Fuzz

I think the best way to describe this sauce is to think of it in terms of savory peach. Generally, we don’t associate fruit-based sweet hots necessarily with the savory or umami, while still retaining a very peach forward flavor, but this sauce has pulled off that trick exceedingly well. Add in a bit of astringency from the vinegar and the citrus and this is kind of a fascinating concoction and, to this point anyway, probably the sauce from Captain Mowatt’s I’ve liked best.

It’s kind of hard to find a really good to great peach sauce, partially because I think we all relate individually to that fruit in different ways. I am, as my good buddy Roger from Burn Your Tongue coined it, perfectly partial to peaches myself and any sauce with them in it has my instant attention, but not all of them are created equally, to be sure. If I were to peg this one as one of those aforementioned ratings, it would probably be the former moreso than the latter, but that is because I always want (and hope) the sauces will be more sweet. Partly this is because of preference, but also partly because those sauces tend to keep the sometimes delicate nature of peach flavor more intact. That this one does, yet is decidedly not a particularly sweet sauce is something of a marvel. It definitely is no dessert sauce.

Heat-wise, we have Red Jalapeno, Cayenne, and Bird’s Eye, so nothing too scorching. It adds a nice little tingle of that old fiery hit, just enough to let you know it’s there, but this is not a challenging sauce and it definitely is there more as accompaniment. For me, I find I don’t like pitted fruits generally a whole lot on pork or pizza, but find them, including this, to be exceedingly nice on the lighter colored bird meats, so both chicken and turkey. Fruit-based sweet hots by nature are a bit on the less flexible side, instead leaning in to do what it does with as much excellence as possible.

Bottom line: I find this overall to be a fairly unique and interesting approach to peach hot sauces, but an exceedingly delicious one with good peach flavor well in hand...or in tongue.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 6

Butterfly Bakery Heatonist No. 3 Hot Sauce Review

Butterfly Bakery Heatonist No. 3 Pink Peppercorn Gin

No matter how many sauces I try and review and sample and so on, I’m always up for being blown away. This one, with its synthesis of high culinary prowess, merges my love for being a food adventurer and foodie (no surprise it’s a spinoff from a bakery, which might wind up on my bucket list for visiting someday) with just a brilliant flash of skill with hot sauce in the flavors of this sauce.

So long as there is a Hot Ones show and sauces exclusive to Heatonist and so long as I keep going with my Hot Ones project, link at right, there will be a need to maintain a wish list there, which also helps me keep track of sauces I still need to cover. There is also this Heatonist numbered series, whereon various sauce makers create something in commemoration of Heatonist and maybe their tasting room, which I envision sort of like a wine-tasting thing. No idea if that is true or not, but if it is, smart idea. Anyway, since those are also exclusive to Heatonist, and since some sauce makers I’ve been impressed with have some entries there, those are also on my wish list.

So, last year, they had a site-wide sale, along with getting free freight at a certain point, and those are always good opportunities to stock up when you’re covering a wide and varied selection of sauces, such as yours truly does, but once I got it in hand, I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around the applications and was not familar with Butterfly Bakery at the time, so I sat it on the shelf for later...and then proceeded to forget for a few months. Once I did have my first BB experience earlier this year, I dug it back out and moved it forward in the on-deck circle.

Not really knowing what to expect, I was initially taken aback by the sort of bright, lively and effervescent nature of this, with the gin coming to the fore, followed by a rich and lovely Serrano and Habanero base. From there, it seemed like there were a lot of umami notes, presumably from the pink peppercorn, with garlic notable, but not very forward or overpowering. There is also horseradish, but I didn’t really get a lot of that in the flavor. This is really a pretty spectacular explosion of flavors, with a lot of delicate balances and hints in there that emerge, depending on where you use it. For me, it was definitely with lighter meats and I liked this enough that I wanted to put it in a setting where it could have its head and be the sort of “star,” so I’d say less rich foods generally will work best here. It would probably also be very nice in drinks, with the cucumber and lime adding a bit of a refreshing aspect. Given the peppers, this is not especially challenging, but it is clearly not intending to be face-melting, but more a “foodie’s” sauce. The more I use it, the more I appreciate it and this is truly a special sauce.

Bottom line: Yet another mind-blowing concoction from the increasingly impressive Butterfly Bakery...the more heavily you’re into the “foodie” side of things, the more you’ll appreciate it.

 Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 10
            Flexibility: 6
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 7

Elijah's Roasted Pepper Hot Sauce Review

Elijah’s Roasted Pepper

I’ve had half an eye on Elijah’s for a good, long, solid time now and I ran into the same problem I’ve run into repeatedly in the past with other companies and sauces, namely the inclusion of ingredients to which I’m intolerant or allergic. Usually, this is onions, all of colors, but quite a number of related things, scallions, chives, etc. as well. Still, Elijah’s is one of the more well-known names in the industry, I think, and I’d always hoped I’d be able to include them at some point.

I finally ran across this sauce and was immediately intrigued by the fire-roasted peppers, though I wasn’t entirely sure if they meant the Cayenne and Jalapeno or if they meant sweet red, as in Bell peppers. Either way, fire-roasted makes my ears perk up and I put this on the list. As it turned out, I was in need of a little bit for shipping once again at the same time they happened to be on a sale, and wasted no time getting it coming and then cracking it open once it arrived, as I coincidentally had just used up the last of the open sauce I had in that category.

The roasting doesn’t really play into things much, that I can tell, other than the pepper and the sauce generally coming across more smoothly than others of this type. This is much more of a Cajun style sauce, I would say, with the garlic very forward in the mix, almost but not quite, to the point of being too much. I prefer the Louisiana-style to Cajun as I like this style uncomplicated, but this does work acceptably in that setting. It is a very solid entry into this style, overall, but I can’t say I felt too strongly about it one way or the other, ultimately. As with most other sauces in this category, heat is quite low.

Bottom line: I think this sauce makes a very good representative example of a Cajun style, as the other ingredients are a bit to the fore and one does not need to brace for a harsh vinegar hit.

 Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 5
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4

Overall: 4

Mythical Meats Unicorn Magic Hot Sauce Review

Mythical Meats Unicorn Magic

Note: It was pointed out to me, for which I'm grateful, that the MM website points this as relabels of Torchbearer sauces. I kind of figured it was a relabel, but seeing that makes a lot more sense. This particular one is the Torchbearer Headless Horseradish, which I reviewed here: https://d-dubtsaaf.blogspot.com/2021/11/torchbearer-headless-horseradish-hot.html nearly 4 years ago. This also raises the question of whether I should just leave that link and call it a review, but I think, for now, I will just leave both up as perhaps expanding on the original review.

Timing on this could not have been much better. Grill season kicked off for me more or less right on time in early April and in fairly short order, I was running out of the mustard (Captain Mowatt’s Sharkbite) I had at hand, mostly because it was quite tasty. So, I was in need and this happened to be on sale at a time when I was on Amazon and also needed some stuff for free shipping. The stars aligned very nicely and all, but if this is a mustard, then why is it on this blog?

Well, you see, Mythical Meats is calling it a hot sauce. It is not. It starts with horseradish, then tosses in some Ghosties, but then reverts back to Dijon mustard before adding in horseradish powder. I am not the biggest fan of horseradish, one might say charitably, and Dijon is not among my favorite mustards, but I was pleasantly surprised as I dug into this one. Heat is a bit punchy for a mustard, both because, one presumes, the horseradish, but also the Ghosties so far forward in the mix. This one can border on the bitter fairly readily, so getting a good ratio of food to condiment is definitely the good move.

Because it is a mustard and I don’t find those particularly flexible overall, this is getting dinged a bit accordingly there. I do like the flavor, but don’t love it, though I will certainly use up the bottle. Mystical Meats is a company better known for, as you might have surmised already, meats, so having sauces that would accompany meats, such as sausages, makes sense, but again, I think it’s fine to call a mustard a mustard and not try to refer to it as a hot sauce, which it isn’t.

Bottom line: Another mustard masquerading as a hot sauce, but if you like horseradish, Dijon mustard, or both, and wish you could have a hotter version, this one is very well done.

 Breakdown:

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

Overall: 3

Monoloco XXX Hot Sauce Mini-Review

Monoloco XXX

I decided that I could not, in all good conscience, rate this in a full review setting. This is not a sauce I was ever likely to be predisposed to like and that is for one simple reason: one of the ingredients is curry. I am not a fan, after many, many repeated attempts, of Indian food and not particularly of curry generally, either. I can tolerate Thai red and Thai green curries, but neither would be particularly my preference. This one reminds me more of the golden curry you can buy in packets to make gravy with. To be perfectly blunt, if you don’t like curry, you won’t like this sauce, even though it is not nearly as forward with this flavor as an actual curry. For me, a little goes a long way and this is well past a little...

I did not acquire this by choice. This was sent to me incorrectly instead of something else I tried to order and I thought I would give it a chance, as it did not have onions. As it was, I gave it a few chances, but this is not a flavor I find at all enjoyable. Obviously, I will neither be keeping the bottle not finishing it out. Heat-wise, despite the goofy label copy warnings and Ghosties being in the mix, this is fairly tame. I would probably give it a 1.

Captain Mowatt's Luscious Hot Sauce Review

Captain Mowatt’s Luscious

A lot of people will note that I “sure must love hot sauce,” when they find out about the breadth and depth of this here blog and the FOH video series or see how I generally will accompany food in a less public setting. To a degree, this is true, however, if you look at the actual grading curve from last year’s Year End Update, you will see that the skewing is definitely not on the higher side, where one might conceivably expect it. I think part of it is because those people are not privy to my actual mindset, which is that condiments and spices and flavorings are more or less tools and just as you would not generally try to remove a bolt with only a hammer, the sauces are fairly use-specific to me.

A fair number of sauces I find myself feeling somewhat ambivalent about, such as this one. It is essentially a fruit-based sweet hot, with tropical fruit notes being the more forward. The peppers are Fresno, Cayenne, and Bird’s Eye, the first two being wonderfully flavored, but they don’t really show in the flavor as this is much more a pungent sauce. Pineapple, one of the two fruits, does show up a bit in the aftertaste, but it is generally not really specific to that.

For me, there is nothing really wrong with this sauce. It tastes fine, heat is very moderate, and most of the time I don’t get too clanged by the apple cider vinegar, lending its distinctive “tang” to the proceedings here, yet it is also not a sauce that I’m particularly wowed by or find especially favorable or notable. My preference is definitely more towards the sweeter side of things, which is perhaps playing into my detachment here, but the sauce is, for lack of better word, fine. It is a take on the fruit-based sweet hots, but I can’t also say particularly that I think it’s what I would call representative of the style and for those unfamiliar, I’d start elsewhere first.

Bottom line: As much as I hate damning things I review with faint praise, that is unfortunately where this one fits best...it’s there and it’s acceptable as a generally tropical fruity very tame sweet hot.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 4

Anderson Pepper One Bad Mother Hot Sauce Review

Anderson Pepper Co. One Bad Mother Pineapple Reaper

This is one I put off getting for a while, both because I had a lot of other stuff on deck (I guess I generally always have a lot of stuff on deck), but also because the verbiage around it sort of pushed the idea it was punishingly hot and I only like to have so many of those open at once. Also, I was not what one would call impressed with the previous entry from this company, the Don’t Touch The Baby hot sauce (reviewed elsewhere here), which did not get a video. If you’ve been around for a while, you know what that means.

This sauce I do like a lot better, but there is one aspect about it that I really dislike and that is the consistency, which is quite loose. If I say the word “diluted,” probably one of the first thing that comes to mind is that something is watered down, which was a pretty common thing for certain bars to do, particularly with the clearer liquids...or at least get accused of doing, I guess I should say...or kids who wanted to pinch some of the stash where their parents kept the liquor, though maybe this is more of a Gen X thing.

Regardless, it is not really something you want at the front of mind in reference to your sauce and here, that is what kind of springs to mind for me. What flavors are there are super nice. I really think the flavor combination of raisin/pineapple/Reaper is an excellent one, but the overly liquidy nature of this makes it a touch hard to pour as well as making me feel like I’m chasing the flavor concentration I want around when eating it...agitation is an absolute must here or you wind up with a slightly tropical vinegary aspect to things, which isn’t bad, but is not really a hot sauce per se, either. I do think the flavor is quite unique and can’t think of anything like it.

This brings us to the heat. It is the mighty mighty Reaper, so there is a blast here and there and it does build up a bit. I wavered between a 1 and a 2, since it sort of falls between them, but figured I’d be generous and give it the push to a 2, but it is a low 2. I don’t think this will challenge too many chile curious and definitely not actual chileheads. The main issue here, though, is that with the consistency as it is, it cuts down on all of the criteria of rating. If it were thicker, this would definitely get a higher score, particularly in flexibility. I always considered that category to be one based mostly in flavor (I mean in type not necessarily quality, by the by),  but I’ve had enough entries sort of defying that with an odd consistency.

Bottom line: If this were more concentrated/reduced down and hence, thicker, this would be a quite good sauce. As it is, it seems slightly unrefined and in need of a bit more development.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4

Overall: 4

Adoboloco Jalapeno Chico Hot Sauce Review

Adoboloco Jalapeno Chico

Note: This sauce appeared in Season 21 of The Hot Ones.

Adoboloco is one of those sauce companies where I like some of their stuff, but find them overall generally favorable, rather than a brand that piques my immediate interest. I think the likelihood that I would have tried out their stuff without doing this little Hot Ones sauce project of mine is pretty low and a few of the sauces I got only because of coverage of that aforementioned project. Still, I will hand it to them that when they get it right, they get it way right.

You may know where I’m going already with this, but I backburnered this sauce for a while, as I found the name kind of baffling. What is the meaning of Jalapeno Boy (or Boy Jalapeno, I suppose, possibly)? I could not fathom what that meant, but this happened to go on sale and I figured it had been a while since Adoboloco had been in the Wing Thing rotation, which their other sauces were generally good enough to hold down the fort there.

I tell you, dear reader, I was not prepared at all for when I opened this bottle and fell instantly in love. One of my most very favorite things is fire-roasted pods in a sauce, but a very close second is smoked pods in a sauce, particularly when done well. Here, it is done to perfection, balanced by the notes of the apple cider vinegar, which have finally met their flavor match and then some. Smoked Ghosties and Chipotle (they call it smoked Jalapeno, but that is literally what Chipotle is) hold court and work together to tremendous effect. There is plenty of yeast in there to add some umami punch and then Scorpion powder, to bring the heat of the proceedings up a bit.

In many ways, I find this to be the perfect gateway sauce to bridge over the chile-curious to full tilt chileheads as this sauce, while it may have some solid punch, also tastes good enough to keep one wanting more. I’ve long said that if you make a sauce with a great flavor, it will be good on nearly everything and that is certainly the case here. They call it a taco sauce (but it is so much more) and it’s indeed good there, but no less good on burgers and pizza and on creamy dishes and burgers and chicken and everything else I threw at it. I, in fact, had to purposely stop eating it or I would have had to buy a second bottle for filming and the Q2 Wing Thing and indeed, will be adding this back to the Heatonist list for whenever the next sale is.

Bottom line: Not only the best sauce Adoboloco has done, by a wide margin, this is one of probably the top 2 or 3 best sauces on The Hot Ones show and, as might be expected, another contender for Sauce Of The Year.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 10
            Flexibility: 10
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 8

Irish Spike’s Smoked Ghost Beeer Mustard Hot Sauce Review

Irish Spike’s Spike Of Life Smoked Ghost Beeer Mustard

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6IinjItkI8 

The second of the two Irish Spike sauces, also another that is very kitchen-sink in approach, but this is by far the better of the two. Here we have a very clever use of a beer wort to accompany the mustard, tomato, and the Ghosties, all of which complement each other wonderfully into a sauce that is very much its own distinct thing, but retains enough flexibility, to an extent well beyond what I find most hot sauces that incorporate mustard into the mix normally do.

To be sure, while this is not a mustard calling itself a hot sauce, by any means, it does well with a good portion of the foods where you’d normally want a mustard. It is quite chunky, with bits of minced garlic, among other elements, in the mix, so I don’t see that it would work well in something like a potato salad, for instance, but if you wanted to amp up a brat or a sandwich or especially a burger, this is a quite good choice. I do find the texture a bit off-putting, and so, while I did enjoy it on chicken tendies from a flavor perspective, I did not enjoy the mouth feel of the sauce that directly.

Another minor complaint is that this is in far too thick of a plastic for the bottle. I assume they meant it to be a squeeze bottle, but the plastic is stiff to begin with and not very helped by being refrigerated. There’s a reason that most squeezable bottles are either fairly thin-walled or have a rubberizer component and it is to retain that flex. This has almost none and the mouth is far too thin to pour, so one winds up flipping the cap and trying to shake out however much sauce is desired, which is kind of annoying. It does flow fairly readily, which is good, but this is just the wrong containment choice for this (and probably any) sauce.

Heat-wise, we are basically at Ghosties and they work a charm here. A lot of people have at least a sliver of doubt cross their minds when I tell them I think Ghosties are a fine-flavored chile, even if they are a superhot, and nowhere is this more evident than in a sauce like this, where they are used to fine effect. I think this may challenge some non-chileheads a bit, but it is more than tasty enough to make up for that.

Bottom line: One of the more interesting hot sauces I’ve had from a flavor perspective and quite delicious, even if the mouth feel is a bit dicey for me. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 6
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 7

Overall: 6

Walkerswood Fire Stick Hot Sauce Review

Walkerswood Fire Stick Pepper Sauce

Of note, this is my 600th overall sauce review.

Walkerswood is a company I’ve seen around for a while. As they are a Jamaican company, a lot of the product line is oriented around jerk products and to what seems a lesser degree, more general Jamaican/Caribbean-themed sauces. I wasn’t aware they had actual hot sauces until just recently when, once again, I was poking around Amazon to find something to tag on for free shipping. I should have looked more closely, as for an extra $2, one can get a bottle double the size I got. If you decide to get this, do not make the same mistake I did.

If you’re a fan of Lousiana-style sauces or Cajun or Caribbean generally, you do probably want to decide to get this. The vinegar here is far less subtle than the hammer that is most sauces, tempered as it is by the sugar, but this is also a wonderfully flavorful sauce. I can’t be sure what peppers are in here, as it is not delineated and I didn’t bother to ask the company directly, but unless I miss my guess we probably have some Cayenne, some Scotch Bonnet or Habanero, mainly for the heat, and possibly some red Jalapeno as well. The heat, it should be noted, despite the “warnings” dotting the label copy, is quite low.

The flavor is very pepper forward and the seasonings behind it are used well. It harkens to mind certain pepper sauces I’ve had that manage a depth of flavor that reminds me a bit of a tomato-based sauce and I find this is one of the more accessible sauces I’ve come across. This naturally extends the flexibility as well, though I think the best uses are where one would use those other styles I mentioned before, but unlike those other sauces, this is one I can and happily did use on pizza. As with a lot of other sauces that I’m always happy when I come across one, I found myself both using this a lot and wanting to use it more. Part of this is because I only got a 100ml bottle, but part is because I’m also having a lot of fun playing with it. Both preceding sentences are also hallmarks of Sauce Of The Year candidates, of which this is my second for this year.

Bottom line: If you want a sauce with a less harsh vinegar hit, but still retaining some of the flavor characteristics of a Louisiana-style, Cajun, or Caribbean style sauce, that also delivers a bit more heat than those normally might, this is an absolutely delicious must.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 8

Butterfly Bakery Taco Vibes Only Hot Sauce Review

Butterfly Bakery Taco Vibes Only

Note: This sauce appeared in Season 20 of The Hot Ones.

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMMF2dJoiGY

I don’t typically start reviews like this, but I will say upfront and directly that this is a chilehead only sauce. It comes roaring out of the gate, with a burst of heat followed by the lively and vibrant Reaper tones and, since that is a building pepper, which has both the pods and powder representing things here, only builds from there. There is certainly an attempt at flavor, much more than a half-hearted stab and indeed, red Serranos, which are wonderful, are the first chile, but they too fall more than a bit under the blistering blaze of the Reaper. As if that were not enough, Ghosties are also in the mix, presumably to help the Reapers a bit and to dull the edge of the superhot bitterness, but there is no getting around it, even if that tamping down does achieve a very nice effect overall, in terms of flavor.

There is a host of other flavors, lime, coriander, garlic, cumin, but none of them really read particularly strongly, aside from subtle aftertaste notes here and there, hence the name, one supposes. This is much more a very chile forward sauce and I liken it more to perhaps a Cajun or Louisiana style, at least in terms of usage. It does have a good solid vinegar hit as well, so for me, it doesn’t work particularly well on tacos, for instance, and while I thought it was interesting on pizza, which, given its sort of medium thickness, I thought I’d attempt, it was a touch overly vinegary there as well. I didn’t dislike it, by any means, but would rather other sauces for that. If you stick to the applications where you might reach for a Cajun or Lousiana-style, you’ll probably be fine, so long as you are a chilehead and moreso if you also like the flavor of Reapers.

I will also note this has a quite appetizing color as well, a very lovely reddish sort of orange. There are some bits of grit in here, definitely from seeds, but possibly also pod skin, which I didn’t find enjoyable, but those only come up here and there.

Bottom line: I’m not entirely sure what they meant for this sauce in terms of flavor, but it is very Reaper intensive. Further, while it’s not quite a mouth full of blast furnace out the gate, it definitely packs a decisive wallop.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 3
            Flavor: 7
            Flexibility: 6
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8

Overall: 6

Samyang Buldak Original Hot Sauce Mini-Review

Samyang Buldak Original

I’ve seen this out for quite some time and it’s a very smart move by Buldak to put this out in bottles, thus extending their brand name and the flavor profile of perhaps the main progenitors of the so-called Korean Spicy Chicken Noodle craze. I thought of it more as a Buldak sauce, which is a barbeque sauce, more or less, to my knowledge, or maybe as a ramen sauce, but when I got the bottle, it is describing itself as a hot sauce, so, fine.

As with other makers who bottle stuff under the description of hot sauce that I don’t necessarily agree is an appropriate categorization, I will treat it as one, but since I bought this mainly to try on some Chinese ramen noodles that I rather adore, I had no plans to do the usual hot sauce testing I put the others through for the full reviews. I did try it on some chicken tendies, and it was good there, but that was expected, both because it is a barbeque sauce more than anything at heart and because it is a quite good tasting sauce as well, doing a pretty capable job of disguising the awful taste of extract. This was the entry level of heat for Samyang and I’d put it firmly in the middle of their current slate of offerings, with stuff both below and above it in terms of heat. It does present a very flavorful example of extract heat and how it affects the mouth and while it may be a bit on the intense side for non-chileheads, I don’t think it will be hugely challenging.

While I do not feel it ultimately is an actual hot sauce, I do think that it presents a lot of opportunity to add some Korean fusion to various dishes that may be cooked, particularly those involving meats. It is a sauce that really needs to be in the right setting, though, and I think it’s fairly inherently limited in that respect. One needs to be judicious in pairing, to be certain, but where it works, it works well.

Djablo Original & Power Jab Hot Sauces Review

Djablo Original
Djablo Power Jab

Note: Djablo Power Jab appeared in Season 22 of The Hot Ones.

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIPuCu-RD4M

There is a very long and convoluted story about the Power Jab, of which the Original is also a part (and the Smoked would have been also, if I could have found it). Much of this will be covered in the accompanying video, but suffice to say that I loved the name “Power Jab” and earmarked it for the next available quarterly Wing Thing (those videos have their own playlist at right). When I opened the bottle, I was so taken with the flavor, which I found a fascinating spin on things, that I immediately looked up all the other sauces Djablo made. Seeing there were only three and they seemed related, I might just as well track down, if possible, some Filipino food, in a way similar to what I did in the Turmeric Bomb (reviewed elsewhere here) video. This, however, sent me on a bit of a rabbit hole journey and was far from clear cut.

To the sauces, the Power Jab both did and didn’t live up to its name. It is certainly hotter than the Original, which has precious little heat to speak of, but it also used the Scorpions in a way that accentuated the flavor nicely, no mean feat considering the floral nature, for which I have a general healthy disdain. This has a good balance of the peppers and garlic and some of the more herbaceous notes of the Original. It also flows very nicely, whereas the Original is quite thick and a bit grainy overall. All in all, I think the Power Jab is decently approachable.

Both of them are very interesting approaches to sauces, but for me, who is not so in love with herbs generally, the rather green and vibrant nature of the Original, which reminds me quite a bit of a green curry, is of considerably less interest. They are, all in all, dramatically different sauces, so combining them into one (partially because it was a bit of a struggle to find some Pinoy cuisine at all) review made a lot less sense once I got into the video filming and did them head to head, but by then it was far too late to turn back. The Power Jab I not only liked better, but found a lot flexible, as it not only worked well on most meats I threw it at, it was flavorful enough that it provided an interesting flavor note to several other foods as well. I don’t know that I would make either of these a “regular” per se, but I did enjoy the adventure aspect considerably.

Bottom line: I don’t know enough about Filipino food to comment on how these relate, but the Power Jab, as long as one likes garlic, is a quite excellent and distinct approach.

Breakdown Original:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: 5
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3

Overall: 3

Breakdown Power Jab:

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

Overall: 6

Cholula Extra Hot Hot Sauce Review

Cholula Extra Hot

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDjvbnp1Ns8

Finally, the wait, the long long wait, the years, no, decades long wait is at an end and the sauce that early 90s era collegiate me wanted the most, had pined and longed for, has been released (unleashed?) into the world. This was very much a long time coming and was something that was on my personal wish list for a really long time. I’m not so much a Cholula enjoyer these days, but back then...

So, a little story time...though I’ve been a chilehead and interested in the spicier side of things for as long as I can remember, back when I was a mere lad of single digits of age, I was in a desert...metaphorically. Jalapenos were about as hot as things went in the upper Midwest back then, maybe moving slightly hotter if you hit one of the Asian places, like a Chinese or Thai or especially Mongolian joint, but no hotter. So, when I moved to the Southwest in the early 90s, I finally had a treasure trove of sauces, much of which originated in CA, stuff like Tapatio and so on. Eventually, I came across Cholula and it was very much a right place at the right time, as this was one of my earlier runs at fitness and so my lunch every day at college was some sort of salad with chicken and a combination of ranch and Cholula as dressing, a combination I could tolerate repeatedly and still keep me on the very of healthy eating...but, I always wished it was hotter.

There are rare things for me these days that are instant orders and most of them are food-related. New Samyang ramen noodle flavor will get my interest, new beer flavor I haven’t tried yet will often get my money, but this was instantly go time as soon as I saw it and it didn’t sit on the shelf more than maybe a day after I finally got it in my hot little hands (about a month ago, as of this posting date). The big question, of course, beyond is it hot, was did it live up to my much younger man dreams now 3 decades or so removed?

Kind of...it is hotter and the younger me would have appreciated that. For what I was mostly using it for, younger me would not have been bothered by the much more abrasive vinegar hit. However, younger me was not reviewing hot sauces and didn’t have a blog and older me is not so fond of that. The flavor of Cholula is still there, albeit with that slightly more forward than I would like vinegar hit, and I do like Piquin as a pepper, which is where the heat is coming from. It takes regular Cholula from no heat to a slight heat here, but I’m a bit puzzled why they also added the vinegar hit. All they needed to do really was to just make regular Cholula slightly hotter. As it is, this move knocks down the flavor slightly and, though I rarely mention price, as this sauce is twice as expensive as the regular, it also knocks down the value proposition slightly.

Bottom line: I don’t think it’s overestimating to say this is a dream fulfillment for many who love the Cholula flavor but wish it was hotter nor is there a way to overstate just how profound of an effect Cholula itself has, writ large. This is a product, in my estimation, they needed to make and I’m glad they did, but ultimately, I just wish they would have done it a bit better.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 7
            Flexibility: 6
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 5

Overall: 5

2025 Q1 Update

Q1 2025 Update

01.02.25: After the end of year update for 2024, I got to thinking a little bit and decided, since I usually update the file with the end of year post multiple times throughout the year and usually the quarterly posts here and there a few times prior to posting those, I would just start keeping track of when I dip in to add content. Poking in to update the Hot Ones remaining sauce list, for instance, probably shouldn’t really count as an actual update, per se, since I’m mostly just re-aligning the numbers as a running tally, not should edits to phrasing of stuff that’s already there. So, we’re going to do this for a few quarterly updates and see how it goes. Will I remember to do it every time or at all? I suppose that is the larger question...

The month of January seems to have it in for me, if such a thing is possible. Some of this I have written about, but, to wit: January 2020, I was booted (part of an overall layoff) from an existing gig. January 2022, I was booted from the replacement gig (same as the preceding sentence). January 2023 I did not have anything to replace it, which is always its own treat. January 2024 I got COVID and was put on the shelf for a few weeks, with aftereffects I have yet to recover from. January 2025...well, somewhere in there, either NYE or New Year’s Day, my refrigerator decided to give up the ghost. It seemed fine New Year’s Eve, when I threw some stuff in there. I am probably indulgent the majority of the time, truth be told, but NYE I tend to get really indulgent, even though I was flying solo for this one. It wasn’t booze, since I had done a series of challenges and/or very hot adventures and figured I’d give my poor beleaguered internal works a bit of a break, but indulgent in terms of eating a bunch of foods that I don’t normally buy or consume regularly. Anyway, come January 1, when I’m ready to start maybe shooting some more less intensive stuff or at least do some testing for other content, such as perhaps a hot sauce review for these very pages, I reach in and notice a box is soggy.

Now, if you stick your mitts into a freezer and notice that cardboard is soggy, this is a bad sign and yes, this was definitely a bad thing. The refrigerator still seemed to be working, so I thought maybe the coils were dirty (they were, but not caked), so I cleaned them off, plugged it back in and hoped...to no avail. So, yes, so far into this young year, I’ve had to pitch a couple hundred bucks worth of food. That, in itself, is bad, no question, but here the chilehead thinking kicks in.  I also had maybe a couple dozen or more open bottles of hot sauce, some of which I’ve neither reviewed nor filmed, so it very rapidly became a question to go get ice and a large enough cooler or go buy a temporary refrigerator so I could save the sauce. Most of it is (hopefully) stable at room temperature and it never warmed up to quite that degree, so I think the grace period was probably fine (and yes, I am aware of Ed Currie’s sentiment on refrigeration of open bottles, to which I rather wholeheartedly dissent), but I guess we’ll see in the coming day(s?) when the fridge actually gets replaced. Right now, all of it is hanging out in my garage, which is currently pretty chilly, in a bed of ice in coolers, so if it had to happen, I guess it was good it was in winter. Anyway, while it could have been worse, this is definitely not, by any stretch, what could be considered a good start to the year...

01.03.25: It will be about another week before I get a new fridge delivered, but my impromptu tactics (ice, coolers, unheated garage) seem to be working and it’s not going to warm up anytime within that period to where I’d have to worry about it. The impulse to buy a temporary refrigerator for hot sauce was brief.. Let no one question my dedication to this stuff...or my lack of sanity...or possible stupidity. Anyway, I did not buy one, both because my much less expensive method is working well enough and because all of those attributes I mentioned myself as having do have limits...also, I could not find a unit I especially liked and this is (hopefully) a very temporary situation and I have no real need for another, smaller unit. I am trying to whip through as much sauce as I can to try to reduce the amounts left in open bottles, so this may ultimately wind up in a surge of new reviews, which is typically the case for January anyway in years past, albeit for entirely different reasons.

Obviously, this rather markedly disrupts my weekend heat plans, which is the second year in a row that circumstances have stopped me when I was on a roll. This one isn’t the end of the world, though, as I will just push everything out a week or so and try to just use this weekend to continue building tolerance. After the prior weekend (see previous day’s post), it seems pretty clear that I am in need of that. On the subject of challenges, in one of those videos, I referenced the Paqui One Chip Challenge...today, I learned that Paqui, as a company, was shuttered in late spring of 2024, a casualty of what was frankly their own stupidity (in not age-gating the coffin chips), which wound up with them in a lawsuit. I wrote about this a bit on the Community section of the YouTube page, but today I thought I’d check and see where things wound up.

So, I did a deep dive on the lawsuit, which seems to be a civil suit filed in Boston, but the last update on Justia was September 2024 and I don’t have a Pacer account to look through the court filings for the rest of the case, so no idea where it’s at now. I fully expect that Hershey’s will probably eat the pineapple on this one and be the one to pay the settlement costs, which I doubt will remotely approach the $350mil that the plaintiffs are requesting. Also, suing the minimum age store worker and store manager, when there is no law on the books regarding those products, is pretty dogshit. Look, I beat the shit out of corporations all the time and think we’d generally be better off if most of them were broken up (and the entire stock market didn’t exist at all), but in the name of fairness, I’d also include Walgreen’s as unfairly being defendants, as there was no actual wrongdoing on their part.

As someone who strongly feels that stunt products like this should be age-gated, we need to look at mechanisms for how to do this. We can’t just say, well, fucking Walgreen’s should have just refused to sell it, because they can’t. It’s like refusing to sell candy bars to fat people and that opens up a whole other avenue that they decidedly do not want to walk. We also can’t say, well, Paqui should have insisted that the products be behind a counter, like tobacco, except then retailers are definitely not going to be adding those product SKUs to their stores. You’re asking them to do work at that point, for a very niche product. Also, selling tobacco to an underage person is not legal, which is a highly salient point here. It is entirely legal to sell food items, seasonings say, such as pepper powder or fresh Reaper pods or any of that in stores, to patrons of any age, and a few grocers near me actually have that kind of produce for sale. If a 14 year old buys some Ghost chili powder, say, and it’s too much for them and they have a panic attack exacerbated by an accompanying adrenaline dump and wind up collapsing and/or dying because of it, who are we suing then?

I’m getting off-track here. In order to age-gate these properly, Paqui needs (or needed, I guess) to sell the challenge chips exclusively online, with a disclaimer form, the way every single other online retailer that sells this kind of stuff does OR they can do like Dave’s Hot Chicken does and Houston TX Hot Chicken says they do (though the latter didn’t for me) and make you sign a 18+ waiver to get the product. Now, the question might become, if some kid lies about his or her age and orders a bunch of the hottest fingers and puts themself in the identical situation to the one described after the One Chip Challenge, will that disclaimer actually hold weight? If nothing else, they are putting the warning out there and trying to ensure that people know what they’re getting into and while it won’t serve as absolute protection, probably it will at least absolve them of the responsibility for someone else ignoring the warning and hazard signs.

Also, I’m now having second thoughts about this format, since the last goddamn thing I want to do is to have this turn into something approaching “Dear Diary” entries. I mean, I do these fucking things quarterly and I’m only 3 days into the first month of the first quarter and we’re already at nearly 1600 words. Also, the overarching idea of the blog is as close as I can get to a sort of universal neutral stance, rather than anything directly personal. Enjoy it while it lasts, I suppose...?

01.04.25: In a way, this new format is a lot of fun, in another way, it runs a very serious danger of this post being hugely excessive in length. Anyway, I thought it bore mentioning that I’m already off-track in the End Of Year post from 2024. Therein, I said that all of the old videos would be posted by the end of March, but then shortly after posting, I bumped one into April, because hey, just one couldn’t hurt. And now I just bumped another into May. I’m also decidedly suspicious of the idea that I will wind up producing less content this year, as I also said was the general plan, but the year is young and jury still out on that one. I didn’t expect the less content thing to happen until after Q2, so we’re still at least on track for that.

01.10.25: Hey, remember that one time a long time ago (end of 2024 blog post) where I said that all of the videos done in the old style would be posted by the end of March...so, I just now pulled my third video out of that time frame because stuff keeps coming up that I want to get posted first, including one thing that I’ve had on the backburner as long as it has existed. There has been a bit of shuffling, including one particular video I’ve now moved three different times since I originally uploaded and scheduled it...

I do also have a spanking new fridge, which is working a charm, although the door configuration for my sauces necessarily had to change and some of the stuff I tried to keep on ice in the unheated garage (as a refrigerator fix only, all the freezer stuff was ruined), I wound up having to toss anyway, but none of the sauces. The delay has also pushed back filming of at least one fairly major (in terms of infrastructure to film it, as well as a greatly extended filming time) video I wanted to do for the weekend closest to this post, but I have enough of a cushion that we should still be in really good shape for that to happen then.

01.11.25: I discovered today that Buzzfeed did indeed find a buyer for First We Feast, who produces The Hot Ones show, which is more and more becoming a licensing juggernaut, and it just so happened to be First We Feast itself and Sean Evans and a few other investors, some named, some not. At least now, as they enter into their 10th year, clearly they will be able to continue the show at their own choosing and you know, more power to them. I think we’d all dearly love to be in that position.  
                    
01.16.25: Season 26 of the Hot Ones had the sauces announced today, so I updated that page. I commented a bit on the Community tab on YouTube, but this looks to be a relatively tame season, as far as heat goes and another that is unfortunately onion-heavy. It is adding 4 new sauces to the hit list, though one of those is the Last Dab Xperience, which will cover a few seasons once I get to it...I’m curious to see what the lineup for subsequent seasons looks like and what will get re-used then.

01.20.25: I’m finding this new format kind of fun (and also kind of dangerous, considering that, as someone who strong pursued “writing” professionally and was successful at it long enough to consider myself a “writer,” I definitely seem to have the gift(?) of being rather wordy). Today, I was doing some look ahead and I think, barring anything unforeseen, I’m already well tanked as far as this being a year where I’d be making less non-sauce FOH content. As of right now, May is already nearly entirely scheduled and half of June is as well. The new filming change was kind of a good kick in the ass (I think, at least some days, I’m finally closing in on the elusive setup), but also I’m in relatively good health and good spirits, which is a pretty big sea change from the last three years. I’ve resumed exercising again, albeit more fitting it in where I can, as I’m certainly not less busy, and with any luck, perhaps I will be able to resume the gym again, though I doubt I have it in me any longer to be a “rat” again.

01.25.25: For winter 2023/2024, I had some unexpected enjoyment doing some heat-related challenges for the then-newer FOH playlist of Challenges (link to that at right). That was rather substantially derailed by COVID in January of 2024, which, though I happily did not lose any sense of taste or smell, instead almost seemed to reset a lot of things, like capsaicin tolerance, as well as a bizarre litany of weird stuff that took a while to shake out. It has also seemingly permanently changed my relationship to alcohol.

Anyway, because I was enjoying some of the challenges way more than I had thought I would, I figured I should pad out the playlist a bit more and picked up a few others that looked at least somewhat interesting. I can say pretty conclusively that I am not experiencing that same moderate enjoyment in the winter 2024/2025 period and once I finish out the ones I already have and have planned (which is 4 total), the idea of resuming my former stance of largely ignoring challenges entirely, aside for very specific and random one-offs, is holding increasingly greater appeal. If anything, this strongly reinforces my “foodie first” mindset. In an interesting (to me, at least) twist, what I’m experiencing with the ones I’ve shot this winter is what I kind of thought last winter’s would be like. This is just not really the kind of content I like doing.

When I do a challenge, that is literally my entire day. In the morning, after my usual routine, I begin prepping for the challenge. This is via a variety of strategies, all of which are aimed directly at cramping, for which I have no patience, and all of which help, based on a sliding scale depending on my relative tolerance, but are not “cures” in an of themselves. After the challenge, because I don’t purge (and have never tossed cookies from capsaicin and only very rarely from anything over the course of my life), it’s generally a few hours of mitigation, depending on severity of cramping, again in varying degrees based on my relative tolerance and how much of the prep I actually did. I try to time the challenges themselves for right around noon, which works out with my body having enough time to process whatever the challenge was and concluding so that I can get in dinner (and I can tell the process is over when hunger trips, because in the interim, the very last thing I want to do is eat or drink anything). I don’t generally do more than a single challenge in a day, unless whatever I have is not remotely actually challenging.

So, if I’m not getting particular enjoyment out of it, while it’s nice to have content and sometimes fun to film with a timer, I’ve essentially just wasted an entire day, not to mention what was probably an overpriced product to obtain in the first place. I also don’t pre-run them or sample them off-camera, so when I film them is my very first exposure to whatever that product is. I am, in essence, going in blind, so to speak. I might have a guess, but have no real idea if that is even slightly accurate for most of it going in.

01.28.25: Just did some quick math after some stuff I’d ordered but forgotten came in and if I kept a normal posting schedule to previous years, I wouldn’t have to film any more non-sauce FOH content...for the entire year. So, definitely that less content thing I was talking about in the end of the year post in 2024 is almost definitely out the window entirely for this year and along with it, the idea of not doing more goofy “holidays,” which I’m doing a bunch of this year also. Further, chances are pretty good I will go past 1000 FOH videos (somewhat related, this blog is on a trajectory to also finally exceed 100K views). Interestingly, while the number of FOH videos continues to run past this blog, at a pretty dramatic rate, the blog is outpacing the YT channel rather considerably, something I find both curious and a bit mystifying. We’ll see how long it holds. It’s kind of funny...when I was a kid, I was heavily into baseball, like really really into it and the wryly amusing thought strikes me that we’re awfully early to be saying “there’s always next year,” but...that is exactly what I’m saying.

02.19.25: Seeing very limited fast food and restaurant offerings in the space so far this year, with several fast food places sort of shrinking down what they formerly offered. There is still not a shortage of stuff on my side, though, and I’ll likely breeze through this year, unless something stupid happens with the current political turmoil. I did have to cut short my grand winter experiment (and didn’t get to the backups at all) due to eggs being prohibitively expensive to continue doing that. If you saw the video for the Smokin’ Ed’s Chocolate Strawberry sauce, you probably know what the experiment is, but if not, it will go live on Memorial Day this year. Almost certainly, though, I will be producing a lot less FOH content next year overall because I’ve covered so much stuff and am now scrounging a bit. I will say that I was a bit under the weather earlier in the month and it was nice not to have any pressure to have to create content and could give myself whatever break I wanted. Same with this blog, actually, where scheduling it out is working very nicely to give myself the same break. I don’t know that I will always have this backlog of stuff where I can do that, but I’m definitely enjoying it while it’s here.

It also dawns on me that this post will either be outright or be right around the 600th post overall for the blog and at some point this year, probably in April, I will hit 600 sauces covered overall.  Typing this got me thinking a bit. As I type this, I have 586 full and mini reviews. I have another 6 sauces waiting on deck to be posted here, which makes 592. I have another 6 open bottles in the fridge, waiting to be reviewed and filmed, for 598. On the shelf is maybe another 20 or so unopened bottle, so, in fact, possibly, even likely, by the end of Q2, this blog will hit that 600 overall hot sauce review number.

02.22.25: Today, I filmed back to back challenge videos, leaving me with a single challenge product remaining and a second product of that caliber that was not intended per se as a challenge product, but I’m going to try to treat in that way for filming. The actual challenge product will need an on-screen timer, but not the other. Both of those will be waiting until March to attempt, however. Unless one or both of those is a lot more fun than the vast majority of challenges I’ve attempted this winter season, I’ve probably quenched my generally moderate interest in partaking of any more of those products. My interest was piqued a bit from the prior winter and I thought it might be nice to pad out the Challenges playlist a bit, but the latter goal is accomplished and interest back to previous minimal levels, so I’m not sure of any further point. Not helping things was me battling allergies for some of the challenges and one of those I lost thanks to a sneezing fit in the middle of it. Since it was timed, there was no real way to continue with the cadence and since I found the challenge design kind of lazy as it was, I called a halt to it rather than trying to finish the product, but failing a challenge has no bearing on this.  Mostly it’s a sense that I’ve had my fun with the dalliance and am now facing diminishing returns.

02.27.25: One of my very favorite things about the new upgrade to the software is that not only can I film in higher definition, but also I’m no longer time-locked for making content. In the past, as I relied nearly entirely on natural light for the videos, I would have a window in which to film whatever I wanted and I’d have to hope that it wasn’t stormy or overcast or my light would sometimes even then be entirely sunk. Now, happily, even though setup for the new process takes considerably longer than the older one ever did, I can film nearly any time of the day, so my window went from 6 - 9 hours, depending on the time of year, to something closer to 20 hours, on any given day. It is an aspect I’m still adjusting to, even now, after 5 months of having the tech upgrade.

03.19.25: Finished out filming all of the challenge stuff I had, as well as a product I will call challenge-adjacent involving Pepper X, yesterday and barring anything coming along of high interest, I’m probably done screwing around with challenge stuff entirely. As I mentioned in that video (which will be posted sometime summer 2025 - I’m current scheduling stuff into August, at this point for the FOH YT series and nearly through April for blog reviews), Pepper X is relatively new enough that I’m still coming to terms with it. As far as current pods go, the mighty, mighty Reaper remains the one that seems to react the worst with me, in terms of cramping down the line, unless I’ve built a tolerance specifically to it. Tolerance at the moment is probably towards the middle of things, if I had to guess - the current level is of decreasing interest to me, so I can’t really assess properly - and the Pepper X thing gave me a rather sharp 10 - 15 minute cramping session about an hour after I’d finished the product and then largely subsided. This is in contrast to the Reaper, which generally is less sharp but perhaps more intense and tends to be of longer duration, as well as more repetitious. The Reaper also, to this point, has made waste excretions generally more burning, but, again, Pepper X is relatively new to me and testing still continues.

To challenges specifically, the idea that one gets high from this kind of activity is lost on me. While I’ve been high many times *ahem*, I have never had a “runner’s high,” despite being a gym rat for quite a few years and actively somewhat aggressively biking for longer. In the case of these challenges, I don’t get any kind of high but a post adrenaline bump crash, which tends to leave me exhausted and crashing for the rest of the day. This effect can be minimized with enough tolerance, but the problem then becomes maintaining tolerance, which is somewhat difficult for what I actually do and the content output I provide. I don’t find challenges particularly interesting or engaging and usually not very tasty most of the time, so returning to my earlier stance of those being occasional, if at all, definitely strikes me as the good move here.

03.23.25: A beautiful spring day here and it naturally is making me think of grilling season...still a bit too cold to launch that just yet, but I don’t imagine it’s more than a couple weeks away. Now that I have someone to whom I can pass along open sauces I don’t like well enough to finish or to hand off ones where I discover previously unknown onions, in combination with pulling out entirely and relocating the sauces earmarked for the Wing Thing videos, I’ve managed to clear some door shelf space, but it is more limited in this refrigerator than in the prior one, so I have to keep an eye on it. Just out of curiosity, as this quarter ends, I’m at (not counting the ones I’m holding strictly for the Quarterly Wing Thing FOH videos), 22 unopened bottles on the shelf and 13 open bottles in the fridge door, 4 of which still need to be reviewed and filmed. I’m trying to make a concerted effort this year to keep the open bottle count lower, particularly since I no longer have the space for it. This week and going forward, since I will be leaving my current job at the end of this week, I’m going to make more of a concerted focus to use up a lot of the bottles just hanging out in there, even though the fridge dying earlier in the year did a decent job “helping” with many of those. Also, after being under the weather for seemingly all of February and most of March, I’m finally looking at resuming the workouts that I was doing at least a decent job of getting to in January.

Heatonist x Stranger Things Hellfire Club Hot Sauce Review

Heatonist x Stranger Things Hellfire Club

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tD0lMtYQ10 

Often crossovers or “collabs” seem to blur the line between an actual intentional product that’s meant to stand on its own in the respective marketplace, perhaps both as collectible and viable product, and that of a strictly collectible novelty type item. I’m genuinely not sure which this is, as I don’t know if people collecting Stranger Things stuff is an actual thing, but there also seems to be enough design and care put into what the product actually is in the bottle that it moves away from being a blatant novelty type item. This was also part of a set with two other sauces (which I have no interest in, as they are both onion sauces), so if forced to choose, I would say it’s more meant to be an actual legitimate sauce.

If so, it is quite a strange one. Starting with mango as the first listed ingredient, but which does not show up particularly in the flavor profile, to Scotch Bonnet, one of the more underrated peppers in my book, possibly because it keeps winding up in sauces like this, which do nothing to showcase the majesty of the pod and are ultimately a bit on the iffy side. Both of those aforementioned flavors are flooded out by mustard, turmeric, and ginger powder, all of which combine to make an odd and bitter-flavored concoction. It is not quite a mustard and here and there bits of sweetness win out, but I’m not sure the ultimate aim here...possibly a Caribbean sauce of some type.

Without having a distinguishable flavor anchor (and I disregard any suggestion from any maker to put it on “any and every thing,” as that type of idea is just total laziness), it’s hard to know where to pair this, as the flavor gives no real indicator. This is not mustardy enough to go on foods where that condiment would normally be used, thanks to the ginger kind of skewing things, but it also is not really ideal for things like chicken tendies. It’s not bad, per se, but perhaps more unfinished than anything else, as you do have to account for the mustard, but it is far enough away from a mustard not to work in those places much, either. I guess you can say it is certainly unique, but I find more and more that is not an especially good attribute for condiments, especially in terms of pairing. Heat-wise, it’s only a Scotch Bonnet, so there won’t be too much challenge here.

Bottom line: All in all, this is kind of a lost sauce, in that it’s quite unclear who and what this is meant for. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 3
            Flexibility: 0
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 0

Overall: 1

Motley Crue The Most Notorious Hot Sauce Review

Motley Crue The Most Notorious Hot Sauce

Vanity products are always kind of fun, but also always, a mixed bag. So, too, with this one, which is collectively the band sauce. Initially part of a 5 sauce set that also featured a nifty box and 4 other sauces for each individual band member, these have since been broken out and sold individually, which is nice, as this was the only one that did not have onions. My suspicion is this is probably something from the CaJohn’s line, as United is having it produced for them. It reminds me of the CaJohn’s NOLA, also reviewed elsewhere here, just nowhere near as black peppery, much more bitter, and notably hotter. For having Habanero as the hottest pepper, this is a fairly punchy sauce, surprisingly so, and it will probably push non-chileheads a bit.

Where this sort of falls down is in the flavor department. This, as mentioned, is a fairly bitter sauce, somewhat unpleasantly so. The addition of lemon extract reads a lot more forward than I wish it did, but unless there is something unlabeled, the culprit is probably the Habanero powder. Habanero is not particularly present as a flavor, which is also kind of odd. There is sometimes a back end note of garlic, but the overall tone is abrasive and unpolished. Perhaps that is intentional.

I find it closest to a Cajun sauce, which is where I’ve been mostly using it, but admittedly, this is more a sauce I’m trying to get through rather than enjoying much. It’s not bad enough to toss, but it also isn’t an experience I readily relish. It is, more or less, my current entry in the Lousiana-style family category, and while certainly far from great, it is mostly fine enough to continue with it, particularly since there is that nice bit of a heat push as well.

As is often the case with many vanity/novelty products, the goal is not necessarily to make a high quality end result, but rather that of marketing and for interested people to collect. Sometimes the product will also be good, but this is definitely one that I think is more to sell the band’s name on the label than anything else.

Bottom line: An ok at best Cajun sauce, albeit a rather bitter and somewhat hotter one.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 4
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 2

Overall: 3

Dawson’s x Iris Lune Eclipse Hot Sauce Review

Dawson’s x Iris Lune Eclipse

This may sound stupid, but every once in a while a sauce comes along that is so fantastic in just one aspect that it “breaks” my rating system. Ironically, this is one of the ways I can tell that it is sound because a sauce like this, that is near transcendent in execution and perhaps even in design, is not a sauce of the year candidate, even though it is probably the best-tasting sauce I will have all year and one which I enjoy immensely. It is because my rating system is incapable of truly encapsulating a sauce like this, is wholly inadequate to the task, that it confirms to me that I can stop debating if I should (or should have, rather, at this point, probably) add another dynamic for rating criteria.

Dawson’s seems to really like doing crossover sauces, as they also did one with the Heat Hot Sauce Shop (which I’ve reviewed elsewhere here), and also appear fairly regularly on The Hot Ones show, with entries in 5 seasons as of the time of this writing. While I liked some of their other sauces a good fair bit, it wasn’t really until this sauce that I was blown away by anything from them, but to say blown away is almost an understatement. This is one of the more well-crafted and executed sauces I’ve probably ever had and the design borders on genius. In many ways, this is a foodie’s hot sauce.

I rarely talk about color, unless it is something really striking, either positively or negatively, but I would be remiss not to talk about the color, as the gorgeous and lush nature of the sauce is reflected all the way down to the beautiful pastel yellow hue. It reminds me almost of a nice cream butter or perhaps even a honey butter and I’ve seen very few of those I haven’t liked. This also uses Vietnamese Red Chilis, which I’ve had a lot in pod form from dating a girl from Vietnam years ago, but don’t recall ever seeing in a sauce before. While this does mean generally low heat, they do work exceedingly well in this setting, with the garlic and peach.

Even though peach is the first ingredient, this is not hugely a peach-forward sauce. This is not to say that it doesn’t show up, but is more one of the flavors rather than the star. This is definitely a composite sauce, with the yellow peppers, as well as the aforementioned garlic, playing a substantive role, all on the silky base of the extra virgin olive oil. With fruit-based sweet-hots, which this is, though it is not particularly prominently sweet, I find they often work best when paired with specific foods and this is no exception. There is the additional element of the oil, which adds a richness to this that points it to working best at drier meats where one might want peach, such as chicken. It is actually quite fantastic there. I could also see this doing nicely on pork and if it’s around when grill season hits, will be trying it there as well, though not as a grill sauce, as it is nowhere sweet enough for that. Given its richness, as well as fruit-based sweet hots (which this is, mostly) by nature are lower in this, flexibility is a bit low, but I will say that I didn't dislike it on pizza, though I also would not say that is the right application.

Bottom line: This is a superb, stellar entry and not only the most impressive sauce I’ve had from Dawson’s, but I’d put in the upper 10% of all the sauces on this blog.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 10
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 6