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

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 

Yin Yang Hot Sauce Review

Yin Yang

Yin and yang, the forces that contrast and complement to create a unifying whole, a very old observation of balance and the concept of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. In this regard, I think the sauce is a success at living up to its name. We have some astringency from the vinegar, some light sweetness from the raisins, some minimal heat and smokiness from the fire-roasted Habaneros, and a scant amount of umami as well to sort of round it out and bring it all home, though for me, it could have used a lot more of it. What I will say is that it’s hard for me to describe this as a hot sauce.

I think it’s a fairly daring choice to use raisins. Hot sauces do not generally do that and I suppose on the surface, in a strictly literal sense, you can make any sauce “hot” by adding peppers, in some form or other to it. Spicy ketchup, for instance, could qualify. Yes, ketchup is more or less a sauce and if you add in, say mighty mighty Reapers, it will also be hot. But, if we’re talking about the condiment more colloquially known as hot sauce, it strongly suggests other things.

The reason why I called the usage of raisins a daring choice, other than the fact that I rarely see grapes being used, at all, in hot sauces, whether desiccated or otherwise, is the thought that grapes are rarely used for any sauce and as a flavor, do not really lend themselves especially well in terms of integrating into food. There are limited exceptions, to be sure, but overall, not so much. That is the smaller element here, though. The bigger one is that one of the most well-known brands of condiments utilizes them fairly extensively and has captured the minds and taste buds of people to such a degree that using them will immediately call to mind the comparison. I am, of course, referring to A1 Steak sauce. 

Indeed, in many ways, this reminds me of a much less flavor density, slightly smokier, and somewhat hotter version of that condiment, a familiarity that I find it hard to shake. This is even more strongly reinforced when, despite trying it on a variety of things other than grilled darker meats, I found it kind of baffling. Once I put it on the right food, things locked in and we got some of that food harmony that itself is a callback to the sauce name, particularly those umami-rich foods...which also bolsters the idea that this would do well to have more umami.

Bottom line: I’m not going to directly call this a mislabeled steak sauce, so much as noting that it worked better there than on everything else, where it didn’t work particularly well at all. I really like the concept, but think this either needs further refining or maybe reworking, or just a rebranding as an actual steak sauce. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 5
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3

Overall: 3

 

Maritime Madness Giv'er Hot Sauce Review

Maritime Madness Giv’er 

One of my more favorite things about Canada is the strong enthusiasm for Candians to come up with the most quaint and deliciously eclectic colloquialisms and there are many. While I don’t have a particular favorite, it was kind of entertaining to learn, from this hot sauce, as I’ve not heard it from any Canadians that I know directly, that “Giv ‘er,” which is evidently meant to be a shortening of “give her.” I don’t know how long it’s been in use, but I suspected the meaning was perhaps either from or similar in meaning to famous Canadian James Doohan and his character Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott’s famed phrase of “I’m giving her all she’s got, Captain,” from the Star Trek Original Series. As a long-time fan of Star Trek TOS, I like that idea immensely and will not readily part with it, but I have no idea if that is the case or not. The sentiment, of putting forth maximum effort, or in this case, an allusion to maximum heat, seems to be around the same sentiment.

Now, do I think this is anywhere near maximum heat? No, and evidently neither did Maritime Madness, as they came up with an Ultimate Giv’er sauce, which adds Reapers, if I’m remembering right. I may get to that someday. I also may not, as I think this sauce falls a bit in the middle for me. Because the hot peppers, Ghosties, in this case, are front and center as the first ingredient, what heat this has goes full tilt from the jump. I think it is enough to probably be off-putting to normies, but it also tapers fairly quickly and most chileheads won’t be challenged. Along with it comes the usual superhot bitterness, which is pretty prominent. The rest of the ingredients, the vinegar, salt, and garlic, all play second fiddle to this attribute. While grace notes of the latter two will show up here and there, depending on what you use it on, the vinegar, after the initial hit I mentioned, will make its presence known, but this is not a hugely astringent sauce. Give than the ingredients are more along the lines of a Cajun sauce, this is kind of interesting.

For me, who is not a huge fan of bitter as a flavor element, a little of this goes a pretty long way and perhaps that’s what they intended. However, this also reduces its flexibility a bit, as I didn’t find it too enjoyable outside of either creamy sauce dishes or perhaps on fairly stronger-flavored and more complex foods, like a fast food chicken sandwich, for example. I didn’t dislike it, to be sure, when I used it where the taste would be relatively unaltered, such as say for chicken tendie dipping sauce, but it is not the pairing I really wanted nor would I reach for this past something else. It definitely has its uses, but I think it needs to be matched well.

Bottom line: Definitely the hottest of the Maritime Madness sauce I’ve had, but more towards the middle of the pack in terms of what I enjoyed.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4

Overall: 4

La Perrona Original Hot Sauce Review

La Perrona Original

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEjUeMMZUJg 

Very often, Mexican style sauces will have a certain sameness to them. Certainly it is with good reason, as the combinations of flavors are a very tried and true combination, but it’s also nice to both reference that style and break out of it a bit. This is more or less what this sauce does, by sort of moving away from the richness and earthiness of some of the other entries and dialing the astringency up a bit and going with a couple of very flavorful peppers, the Arbol, which is near-ubiquitous, and the Chiltepin, which was used less, but has recently become sort of a darling and is cropping up everywhere. It brings a nice degree of heat while retaining a very solid flavor balance, so small wonder that it’s gaining in popularity.

“La Perrona” can either refer to a large canine or possibly, in a slang. colloquial sense, to something that is “kick ass” or otherwise denotation of a positive impression. I would imagine that both senses are meant by this name, but there is also a picture of a dog on the label up front and that is the more literal meaning, so if I were to have to forcibly defer to one, it would be that. 

One issue I do kind of have with this sauce, aside from it being slightly more astringent than is my preference in this style of sauce, is that it appears to be made from dried peppers that were reconstituted to make the sauce. This is a fine, well, and good practice, and can result, as it does here in a fairly concentrated and pepper-forward flavor, but it also is prone to introducing bits of hard pepper, which can lead to a certain gritty aspect, as this one does. It is not egregious, but I do find it off-putting every time I encounter it, which is frequent with this sauce. Again, this is, I suppose, another differentiator, as most sauces of this type tend to be much smoother and refined. If anything, this reminds me somewhat of the house sauces that Mexican restaurants will sometimes make. 

Bottom line: This overall is a very solid, middle of the road entry into things, a good “change of pace” sauce, if you’re tired of the other Mexican style sauces you may keep on standby, with enough heat to be notable, but not so much as to be overbearing. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 5
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 6

Palo Alto Firefighters Habanero Pepper Sauce Review

Palo Alto Firefighters Habanero

I can’t remember how I came across this one initially, but I stuck it in a wish list and there it sat for quite a while, just hanging out, waiting... Eventually, I wound up needing another for shipping, though I was looking more for sweet hots at the time, and tossed it in because I’d only initially been curious but had seen it enough times that my idle curiousity was getting a tad more pronounced over time. This is not uncommon for me, as I keep lists of lots of stuff, but the ones that aren’t quite red burning hot will get shuffled to one of the cooler burners in the back, still there, but more just being there until the mood strikes.

Anyway, I didn’t know quite what to expect with this one, other than I expected it to be mild, as the ingredients were fairly non-descript. One of those, “spice,” is doing quite a bit of work and encompasses, at minimum, some cumin, onion powder, and garlic powder, meanwhile paprika is specifically named out. The first two ingredients here are the red Jalapeno, always a great choice, and the Habanero, which is there to be the heat driver, so as a pepper sauce, peppers are fairly forward.. There is a notable degree of tang and tartness from the vinegar, which is a touch strong for my preference, and I could have done with a lot less of the cumin.

What this reads as is a hotter version of the Ortega or La Victoria hot sauce bottles you can see pretty readily on grocery store shelves. For many of us, these were among out first introductions to hot sauce, with a fairly low key and mild flavor, being perhaps akin to liquified taco packet seasoning, which, for better or worse, is around where I would put this. Given the Habanero, it is notably hotter than anything I’ve had from either of those two companies, but also given the Habanero, nothing I consider particularly challenging. Unless I miss my guess, they were definitely aiming more at a table sauce here, but I suppose because my memories are too tied into those foods I mentioned, taco seasoning packet tacos and so on, this seems much more in line with that than with a more universal table sauce. Even down to the color itself strikes me as much more in that vein. 

Bottom line: While a tad too cumin-heavy and vinegar-forward for my personal tastes, this is a very nice smooth, slightly runny, hotter and ultimately higher end taco sauce. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 4
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6

Overall: 4 

Smokin' Ed's Pepper X Mustard Dill Hot Sauce Review

Smokin’ Ed’s Pepper X Mustard Dill

When I initially saw this, I put it on my list, but on the longer range side...after cussing myself out a bit as I hadn’t noticed it when I was buying during a sale and surely would have just added it for the discount, had I observed it then. It waited quite a while, as I’d gone through, at the time, most of the sauces from both Puckerbutt and Smokin’ Ed’s that were of interest to me or had them coming on the way already. In any event, I figured it was probably another mustard being mislabeled as a hot sauce, and was kind of hoping for that, if I’m being honest, as I like to keep a mustard on hand and newer ones have been kind of in short supply, at least the ones more easily in convenient reach, that is.

As it was, when I opened the bottle, it did not seem at all like this was a mustard masquerading as a hot sauce, but indeed, a mustard-based hot sauce...it was also one of the sourest sauces I’ve had in a while. If you’ve followed me for a while, you know that sour sauces are not at all near my favorites...in fact, generally quite the opposite. However, this was initial opening, at room temperature, etc. and I figured that as there became more space in the bottle and it was chilled, it might swing the needle a bit. Indeed, I do, like actual mustard, much prefer this sauce chilled.

Even chilled, though, it is still quite sour. It smells very pungent, but the flavor is not really that of vinegar or mustard, but of something tending towards unripe. I will state that Smokin’ Ed Currie has forgotten more about peppers than I will ever know, but I am quite familiar with both unripe fruits and vegetables and the attendant sourness is quite distinctive. I found this to be fairly reminiscent of that aspect. 

I was able to buffer some of that out by adding salt, which made it much more towards an actual mustard, and separately, by adding a sweetener, which brought forward the Pepper X flavor and heat quite notably, but that’s me tinkering. As-is, unfortunately, I don’t really find this usable particularly. The flavors, when they can push through that sour wall, are pretty interesting and I find myself intrigued by the sauce this could have been and plan on experimenting with it, as when those flavors do make it through, I do like them...but much of the time, they don’t. This definitely cuts down the flexibility, along with flavor, substantially. Heat-wise, as this is Pepper X, the reigning hottest pod on the planet, it’s definitely a punchy sauce and in that respect, will likely push non-chileheads pretty hard.

Bottom line: If you like sour sauces more than me, this may be up your alley, but for everyone else, I guess be prepared to tinker with it to suit it to your particular palate. 

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 2

Barnacle Foods Habanero Hot Sauce Review

Barnacle Foods Habanero

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvavyqvau7A 

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