Melinda's Fire-Roasted Garlic & Habanero Hot Sauce Review

Melinda’s Fire-Roasted Garlic & Habanero Pepper Sauce

The very last of the newer Melinda’s line recently released that I picked up, part of their larger push to take over shelf space in various grocers and Wal-Marts across the country. Like the others, this one has several strong attributes, but also doesn’t quite make it all the way across the finish line. If done right, the combination of fire-roasted Habaneros, the very best way to have Habaneros and peppers generally, combined with garlic, can be a fantastic one, full of rich and wondrous flavor. The echoes of that are within this sauce, but they have to play against the much more forceful astringent notes of citric acid and ascorbic acid and vinegar and lime, and much is lost in that dynamic. 

They do a lot right, from the packaging to the choice of bottle and cap and nozzle system, nice slick label, but when it comes to the sauces, they make decisions that are confusing, at best. For this type of sauce, it would normally go on Mexican-style or Southwest foods, but one of the easiest ways to have a sauce not be good with that food type is for it to go heavily on the astringent side. The flavor of this underneath all of that is quite good, but the vinegar hammer is pretty pronounced. This leaves one with a sauce that is not bad enough to toss but definitely not good enough to eat if there is a better alternative or to replace once the bottle is gone.

This is quite a pity, as the sauce looks gorgeous, but if it’s not something one wants to use, even though these sauces can be stellar deals at the price point for the amount of sauce you get, then it seems more and more that they’re wandering down roads to destinations at which no one really wants to arrive. Some of their other products are worse at this characteristic than others. This one sort of falls more in the middle, where has strong promise and just falls flat. Of course, if you like that characteristic in this style of sauce more than I do, this might be more up your alley, but for me, I find it jarring and a tad annoying to have to very delicately find out how much sauce will work with the food instead of overpowering it under an astringent deluge. Fortunately, with the dispensing system of the bottles, you can control the amounts fairly readily. Heat-wise, given this is only Habanero, it’s fairly moderate and I suspect more fault will be found with the flavor profile than with any attendant heat. 

Bottom line: Another misfire of a sauce, and line, that showed much promise. Definitely not the best representation of this style of sauce. 

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 4

Dawson’s x Mike Jack Eats Heat Tropical Fury Hot Sauce Review

Dawson’s x Mike Jack Eats Heat Tropical Fury

Dawson’s continues their long line of collabs with one of the foremost names in competitive chilehead stuff, apparently not merely content to do League Of Fire challenges, but all the way to holding several Guinness Book records. Regardless of what you think of the Guinness Book generally, that is something very few people can lay claim to doing. I admittedly know little of him outside of that, being no more than casually familiar with his name, but in that respect, if his name and likeness are going to be on a sauce, as they are here and on two other sauces, assuredly, there is going to be some fire inside the bottle.

I don’t know how the other sauces rank in the scale of things, but here we have a combination of Habanero and Ghost, which is a pretty good combination in my book. I love Ghosties and with them, you tend to get an immediate superhot push and I think some flavor assistance with Habaneros, which can often take shape in a way I’m not always fond of. Here, the Ghosties are back a bit, but still manage to bring a decent fire, to the point where I suspect this will be right on the line for many normies, though I don’t expect any actual chileheads to be too challenged by it. Instead, I imagine most of them will be like me and find a nice satisfaction from the heat level.

Despite the sauce leading off with pineapple, the flavor is not overwhelmingly of that fruit and instead, it, along with the Habanero, lends more of a tropical by way of the Caribbean vibe to things. Using Habaneros as a flavor component can often backfire, but here it does very nicely, perhaps because the garlic adds a nice umami note to the proceedings. This does tend to be a somewhat bitter and astringent sauce, bordering, but not quite going all the way over into sour, so despite the fruit, it is not particularly a sweet hot. Like most Dawson’s sauces, there is the use of olive oil, so we have a nice smoothness and heft to things, with a texture I’d say is medium-thick. 

As with fruit-based sweet hots generally, flexibility is down a tad and here, it is down even moreso by dint of the bitter and astringent notes. This a very curious approach for a sauce, I find, but it is also one that I don’t think plays well with foods generally. I do think it does very nicely on fried foods and meld well with mayo in something like a sub sandwich, but in some of the other places I might be inclined to use it, such as on a pizza, I didn’t find the results pleasurable. 

Bottom line: A very aptly named sauce as the flavor profile is generally tropical and definitely, this does have a nice round punch as well. 

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 4

Earthquake Spices Peary Blazed Hot Sauce Review

Earthquake Spices Peary Blazed

I saw this, of course, as I do so very many things in this here blog, on the hallowed shelves of one of the Burn Your Tongue location and I was intrigued, for here was a sauce that utilized pears, that delectable fruit with one of the more delicate of flavors. Part of the mystery for me was how they were going to retain any sense of pear flavor amidst the usual heavy flavor hitters that tend to get roped in when making a hot sauce. I almost never see pears get used in hot sauces and that aspect is probably a large part of the reason why. Also, the name was kind of weird, in that I couldn’t quite fathom what it was meant to mean. Blazed sort of makes sense in the context of piquancy, given the idea of hot peppers, though we only go Fresno and Habanero here, so the heat is definitely quite moderate, but the peary part...it’s just off-kilter enough to stick in the mind, I think. 

Anyway, as far as the sauce goes, the pear gets pretty thoroughly knocked about here, as one might expect. There are grace notes of it here and there, but it was never going to really stand up well against vinegars and salts and garlic and lime juice and those aforementioned peppers. What did wind up happening here is a sort of balancing act, wherein there is a hint, thanks largely to the cinnamon, towards a dessert sauce, such as a lovely pear tart or perhaps apple pie, but it never quite gets near enough to being sweet enough for that. It is a very nice amalgamation of various flavors, hints, and suggestions, but is very much its own thing.

The consistency is definitely closer to applesauce and the color is more like a darker version of that, a very appealing lightish brown with flecks of red in it, presumably the Fresno. Like most other fruit-based sweet hots, its flexibility is a bit low, but given that there is such a fragile harmony in the flavor notes, this is best suited to those things where you would either want (or wouldn’t mind) some subtle dessert nods. I found it very nice on chicken tendies and imagine it would work wonderfully on some nice pork chops, but didn’t love it on pizza. Part of my thought with this sauce was on the quinoa things that I regularly keep on hand and eat and the fruitiness of this does quite marvelous there as well.

Bottom line: Very mild-mannered sauce that does a nifty tightrope act of balancing several different flavor directions, all while being consistently delicious.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 7

Overall: 5