Barnacle Foods Habanero Hot Sauce Review

 Barnacle Foods Habanero

I’ve mentioned before, how my good friend, the wise and sage Roger Damptz of Burn Your Tongue, not only saved this here blog, but also kickstarted the FOH video series on YouTube. Back some time ago, a few years, probably, I was kicking around the aisles of one of the BYT locations and we were able to catch up. He was showing me some of the various sauces, and he pointed out this brand, as having a very unique ingredient that didn’t often show up in sauces, as well as being out of Alaska, itself a rarity. At the time, Peri-Peri, the pepper in the other sauce (review coming in the future) wasn’t too high on my radar and Habanero definitely wasn’t, as it has taken me a long time to come to terms with the flavor of it, though I can at least somewhat appreciate it more these days. Anyway, point being, I took a pass on it and went with other stuff, but figured, since it did not contain onions, I’d get to it at some point.

Lo and behold, I just kept right on forgetting...and forgetting...and forgetting, until finally picking it up in another different shopping trip to another BYT location (which did not exist at the time he introduced me to the sauce), where I want for something else entirely, but predictably wound up leaving with about twice as much as I was expecting to get going in. *ahem* After looking more closely at the ingredient list, I got real interest real fast and cracked it open, only to find myself faced with yet another entry to a category of foods I’ve dubbed “kick me,” meaning that having it makes me want to kick my own ass for not having it sooner. 

What we have here is a very nicely umami-forward sauce. Habanero is pretty up front as well as a flavor and there is a background of some tartness from the vinegar and here and there some sweetness, which vacillates between the tropical sweetness of the mango and the desert sweetness of the agave. This is a combination I would never have thought of and this is just one aspect of this meticulously well-crafted gem of a sauce. It is a tad on the thin side, which might need to be accounted for in usage, but there is not a single thing I tried it on where it didn’t work, until I eventually just gave up trying to find something where it wouldn’t work. This sauce reinforces something I’ve said here before: if you make a great-tasting enough sauce, it automatically drives the flexibility higher. That is definitely the case here, but furthermore, given how umami rich and with Habanero, it’s a tad light on the heat side, this is the perfect sauce to give someone who says they don’t like hot sauce.

Bottom line: This is very much, if not obvious by now, another Sauce Of The Year candidate for 2025, making this the first year with 5. An absolute stunner of the sauce and one of the few that I strongly recommend everyone try...and will probably enjoy.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 8