La Preferida Louisiana Style Hot Sauce Review

La Preferida Louisiana Style

For quite some time, every year, I’ve taken to haunting the Wal-Mart holiday section from Halloween on, looking at what might be coming for a given year’s hot sauce sampler collection. While most of them are very clearly aimed at being novelty sauces and not much more, in essence, buying labels and packaging, in some years, there have been some decent sauces. Many of them are covered in the Mini- Reviews section either way, whether they are or not.

For most of them, it’s just throw any old colored liquid that looks like a hot sauce into a bottle, shrink it, and call it a day, as they’re not trying to sell sauce or tap a new customer base, per se, but are interested in that one sale, in that “customer knows [x] person in relation to them who likes spicy food, so here’s an easy gift,” in short, perhaps pandering to laziness. For those that aren’t that good, they all have a sort of commonality to them, what I refer to as a flavor of “the cheap,” that more high quality sauces don’t have.

The taste here, while recognizably Cayenne-adjacent, is kind of like a less aggressive and worse-tasting version of Crystal. It almost has a staleness to the taste and a bit of a sourness to the vinegar, to a kind of weird point. It was still generally usable, but I started to wonder if it was a bad batch, as it was kind of hard for me to picture this end result being the actual intention. This is just not a very good product overall. While this type of sauce generally doesn’t pack a huge heat punch, this one has basically none. The “bite” is very much only from the astringent vinegar. It is also slightly salty. While the watery consistency is right, the color is much more pointed towards the orange spectrum of things.

Bottom line: While I’m pretty far from impressed with this sauce, it is also not the worst of this type that I’ve tried...though it is definitely near the bottom.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 2