Cackalacky Pepper Sauce Review

Cackalacky Pepper Sauce

There have been a number of these sauces through the years of this blog, 13+ years and counting as I write this, and I generally consider “pepper sauce” to be more towards the condiment category we know generally as hot sauces, presuming they do not mean peppercorn sauces, which this one is not. There is also the idea of pepper vinegar, which itself is more or less a variant of hot sauces, I suppose, particularly if one also adds salt and other ingredients. Indeed, the long-running chilehead joke is that Tabasco sauce is a pepper-flavored vinegar, but that is, of course, a conceit, as both things are true. 

For this one, I came across their spiced peanuts when casting about online and saw they also had a pepper sauce, though the application listed on the bottle are at least somewhat in line with where one would generally use a Lousiana-style or Cajun hot sauce, so I threw in on it. The chile peppers used are not defined, but strike me as either Cayenne or possibly red Jalapeno, in order of which I think most likely, but I didn’t dig too far into this. The flavor is very much in line with the two styles I mentioned earlier, along with an interesting array of ingredients. It looks like an entry in those sauce styles as well, with various spice flecks and pepper pieces. Where it begins to make me wonder what they were after with this, and where I considered I may have been wrong in presuming it to be more like a hot sauce, is in the heat, namely there is none.

I suppose, for some, Cayenne-based sauces, such as those two styles, may be too hot, and if they just want the zippy tang of vinegar to balance out things, this could hold a lot of appeal. I would say it is a pretty good tasting sauce, despite the usage of apple cider vinegar, which dances into the flavor here and there but is not overly prominent, happily. The spice combination, whatever it is – they call it a secret Cackalacky blend – works quite well in this setting and helps to set this apart from some of the other contemporaries. While the flavor is nice, I can’t imagine chileheads being anything but disappointed ultimately in the result here. If you look through this blog, you can see many entries with low heat, perhaps even the majority of them, but no heat at all makes the absence a bit acute for me.

Bottom line: This works well in all the applications for the sauce types I mentioned, but the lack of heat is a facet I find myself struggling with a bit on this sauce.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: 7
            Flexibility: 5
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 7

Overall: 5