Butterfly Bakery Honey Cantaloupe Hot Sauce Review

Butterfly Bakery Honey Cantaloupe

As soon as I saw the name of this sauce, I was in. I love cantaloupe, especially fully ripened, and it’s an ingredient that I almost never see in hot sauces. Followers of this blog or of the FOH YouTube series (hopefully both) will know by now that I’m ever interested in unusual or exotic ingredients in hot sauces and picking one of my favorites, along with an ingredient more common, but still interesting to me, honey, is almost a surefire way to get my attention. So, it was with high hopes, given that the ace Butterfly Baker sauce makers were at the helm, that I picked this up.

Once I got the bottle, I wasted no time in cracking it open and it was love at first taste. They somehow managed to keep the taste of fresh and ripe cantaloupe, in all of its resplendent glory, along with very nice accents of the salt and vinegar, along with a slight fruitiness and slight backend heat from the red Habs. Honey didn’t play into things too much directly, but was there perhaps more as composite, to reinforce and bolster the cantaloupe, which is the main star. This is probably the best-tasting sauce I will have this year and herein, a bit of my design works to cross purposes a tad.

So, pairing melons to entrees is fairly rare. As part of a fruit tart or dessert, surely, but in terms of an entree...probably as rare of a thing as using those in a hot sauce, which is rare indeed. There are some nice and intriguing suggestions on the bottle, but to be as clear as I can be, I want whatever I use it on to be as unadorned and neutral as possible. For most sauces, I want them to elevate the food and increase my enjoyment of the flavors, but here, I want it to be a vehicle for this utterly delectable sauce and I don’t want flavor cancellation or things getting in the way. So, the various chicken forms, as long as they are not part of something more complex, like a sandwich, all to the good, same with pork chops, but this sauce is so delicious, it seems a shame to me to diminish it in anyway. 

Fruit-based sweet hots are naturally a tad on the less flexible side, moreso when the fruit is a melon. This is by nature, but when the sauce is so delicate and near-flawless in flavor profile that I don’t want to interfere with it in anyway, this also sort of lowers the flexibility, though perhaps a bit artificially. Where I’m going with this is the composite score will take this out of the running for SOTY contention, but it is unquestionably a sauce I love very dearly...and one that makes me, however briefly, reconsider using the 10 scale...

Bottom line: As long as one likes cantaloupe, this sauce is a godsend and a good showcase to show non-chileheads what is possible in the hands of a brilliant and gifted saucemaker.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 10
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 6