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