Thursday, April 3, 2025

Cholula Extra Hot Hot Sauce Review

Cholula Extra Hot

Finally, the wait, the long long wait, the years, no, decades long wait is at an end and the sauce that early 90s era collegiate me wanted the most, had pined and longed for, has been released (unleashed?) into the world. This was very much a long time coming and was something that was on my personal wish list for a really long time. I’m not so much a Cholula enjoyer these days, but back then...

So, a little story time...though I’ve been a chilehead and interested in the spicier side of things for as long as I can remember, back when I was a mere lad of single digits of age, I was in a desert...metaphorically. Jalapenos were about as hot as things went in the upper Midwest back then, maybe moving slightly hotter if you hit one of the Asian places, like a Chinese or Thai or especially Mongolian joint, but no hotter. So, when I moved to the Southwest in the early 90s, I finally had a treasure trove of sauces, much of which originated in CA, stuff like Tapatio and so on. Eventually, I came across Cholula and it was very much a right place at the right time, as this was one of my earlier runs at fitness and so my lunch every day at college was some sort of salad with chicken and a combination of ranch and Cholula as dressing, a combination I could tolerate repeatedly and still keep me on the very of healthy eating...but, I always wished it was hotter.

There are rare things for me these days that are instant orders and most of them are food-related. New Samyang ramen noodle flavor will get my interest, new beer flavor I haven’t tried yet will often get my money, but this was instantly go time as soon as I saw it and it didn’t sit on the shelf more than maybe a day after I finally got it in my hot little hands (about a month ago, as of this posting date). The big question, of course, beyond is it hot, was did it live up to my much younger man dreams now 3 decades or so removed?

Kind of...it is hotter and the younger me would have appreciated that. For what I was mostly using it for, younger me would not have been bothered by the much more abrasive vinegar hit. However, younger me was not reviewing hot sauces and didn’t have a blog and older me is not so fond of that. The flavor of Cholula is still there, albeit with that slightly more forward than I would like vinegar hit, and I do like Piquin as a pepper, which is where the heat is coming from. It takes regular Cholula from no heat to a slight heat here, but I’m a bit puzzled why they also added the vinegar hit. All they needed to do really was to just make regular Cholula slightly hotter. As it is, this move knocks down the flavor slightly and, though I rarely mention price, as this sauce is twice as expensive as the regular, it also knocks down the value proposition slightly.

Bottom line: I don’t think it’s overestimating to say this is a dream fulfillment for many who love the Cholula flavor but wish it was hotter nor is there a way to overstate just how profound of an effect Cholula itself has, writ large. This is a product, in my estimation, they needed to make and I’m glad they did, but ultimately, I just wish they would have done it a bit better.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 7
            Flexibility: 6
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 5

Overall: 5

Monday, March 31, 2025

2025 Q1 Update

Q1 2025 Update

01.02.25: After the end of year update for 2024, I got to thinking a little bit and decided, since I usually update the file with the end of year post multiple times throughout the year and usually the quarterly posts here and there a few times prior to posting those, I would just start keeping track of when I dip in to add content. Poking in to update the Hot Ones remaining sauce list, for instance, probably shouldn’t really count as an actual update, per se, since I’m mostly just re-aligning the numbers as a running tally, not should edits to phrasing of stuff that’s already there. So, we’re going to do this for a few quarterly updates and see how it goes. Will I remember to do it every time or at all? I suppose that is the larger question...

The month of January seems to have it in for me, if such a thing is possible. Some of this I have written about, but, to wit: January 2020, I was booted (part of an overall layoff) from an existing gig. January 2022, I was booted from the replacement gig (same as the preceding sentence). January 2023 I did not have anything to replace it, which is always its own treat. January 2024 I got COVID and was put on the shelf for a few weeks, with aftereffects I have yet to recover from. January 2025...well, somewhere in there, either NYE or New Year’s Day, my refrigerator decided to give up the ghost. It seemed fine New Year’s Eve, when I threw some stuff in there. I am probably indulgent the majority of the time, truth be told, but NYE I tend to get really indulgent, even though I was flying solo for this one. It wasn’t booze, since I had done a series of challenges and/or very hot adventures and figured I’d give my poor beleaguered internal works a bit of a break, but indulgent in terms of eating a bunch of foods that I don’t normally buy or consume regularly. Anyway, come January 1, when I’m ready to start maybe shooting some more less intensive stuff or at least do some testing for other content, such as perhaps a hot sauce review for these very pages, I reach in and notice a box is soggy.

Now, if you stick your mitts into a freezer and notice that cardboard is soggy, this is a bad sign and yes, this was definitely a bad thing. The refrigerator still seemed to be working, so I thought maybe the coils were dirty (they were, but not caked), so I cleaned them off, plugged it back in and hoped...to no avail. So, yes, so far into this young year, I’ve had to pitch a couple hundred bucks worth of food. That, in itself, is bad, no question, but here the chilehead thinking kicks in.  I also had maybe a couple dozen or more open bottles of hot sauce, some of which I’ve neither reviewed nor filmed, so it very rapidly became a question to go get ice and a large enough cooler or go buy a temporary refrigerator so I could save the sauce. Most of it is (hopefully) stable at room temperature and it never warmed up to quite that degree, so I think the grace period was probably fine (and yes, I am aware of Ed Currie’s sentiment on refrigeration of open bottles, to which I rather wholeheartedly dissent), but I guess we’ll see in the coming day(s?) when the fridge actually gets replaced. Right now, all of it is hanging out in my garage, which is currently pretty chilly, in a bed of ice in coolers, so if it had to happen, I guess it was good it was in winter. Anyway, while it could have been worse, this is definitely not, by any stretch, what could be considered a good start to the year...

01.03.25: It will be about another week before I get a new fridge delivered, but my impromptu tactics (ice, coolers, unheated garage) seem to be working and it’s not going to warm up anytime within that period to where I’d have to worry about it. The impulse to buy a temporary refrigerator for hot sauce was brief.. Let no one question my dedication to this stuff...or my lack of sanity...or possible stupidity. Anyway, I did not buy one, both because my much less expensive method is working well enough and because all of those attributes I mentioned myself as having do have limits...also, I could not find a unit I especially liked and this is (hopefully) a very temporary situation and I have no real need for another, smaller unit. I am trying to whip through as much sauce as I can to try to reduce the amounts left in open bottles, so this may ultimately wind up in a surge of new reviews, which is typically the case for January anyway in years past, albeit for entirely different reasons.

Obviously, this rather markedly disrupts my weekend heat plans, which is the second year in a row that circumstances have stopped me when I was on a roll. This one isn’t the end of the world, though, as I will just push everything out a week or so and try to just use this weekend to continue building tolerance. After the prior weekend (see previous day’s post), it seems pretty clear that I am in need of that. On the subject of challenges, in one of those videos, I referenced the Paqui One Chip Challenge...today, I learned that Paqui, as a company, was shuttered in late spring of 2024, a casualty of what was frankly their own stupidity (in not age-gating the coffin chips), which wound up with them in a lawsuit. I wrote about this a bit on the Community section of the YouTube page, but today I thought I’d check and see where things wound up.

So, I did a deep dive on the lawsuit, which seems to be a civil suit filed in Boston, but the last update on Justia was September 2024 and I don’t have a Pacer account to look through the court filings for the rest of the case, so no idea where it’s at now. I fully expect that Hershey’s will probably eat the pineapple on this one and be the one to pay the settlement costs, which I doubt will remotely approach the $350mil that the plaintiffs are requesting. Also, suing the minimum age store worker and store manager, when there is no law on the books regarding those products, is pretty dogshit. Look, I beat the shit out of corporations all the time and think we’d generally be better off if most of them were broken up (and the entire stock market didn’t exist at all), but in the name of fairness, I’d also include Walgreen’s as unfairly being defendants, as there was no actual wrongdoing on their part.

As someone who strongly feels that stunt products like this should be age-gated, we need to look at mechanisms for how to do this. We can’t just say, well, fucking Walgreen’s should have just refused to sell it, because they can’t. It’s like refusing to sell candy bars to fat people and that opens up a whole other avenue that they decidedly do not want to walk. We also can’t say, well, Paqui should have insisted that the products be behind a counter, like tobacco, except then retailers are definitely not going to be adding those product SKUs to their stores. You’re asking them to do work at that point, for a very niche product. Also, selling tobacco to an underage person is not legal, which is a highly salient point here. It is entirely legal to sell food items, seasonings say, such as pepper powder or fresh Reaper pods or any of that in stores, to patrons of any age, and a few grocers near me actually have that kind of produce for sale. If a 14 year old buys some Ghost chili powder, say, and it’s too much for them and they have a panic attack exacerbated by an accompanying adrenaline dump and wind up collapsing and/or dying because of it, who are we suing then?

I’m getting off-track here. In order to age-gate these properly, Paqui needs (or needed, I guess) to sell the challenge chips exclusively online, with a disclaimer form, the way every single other online retailer that sells this kind of stuff does OR they can do like Dave’s Hot Chicken does and Houston TX Hot Chicken says they do (though the latter didn’t for me) and make you sign a 18+ waiver to get the product. Now, the question might become, if some kid lies about his or her age and orders a bunch of the hottest fingers and puts themself in the identical situation to the one described after the One Chip Challenge, will that disclaimer actually hold weight? If nothing else, they are putting the warning out there and trying to ensure that people know what they’re getting into and while it won’t serve as absolute protection, probably it will at least absolve them of the responsibility for someone else ignoring the warning and hazard signs.

Also, I’m now having second thoughts about this format, since the last goddamn thing I want to do is to have this turn into something approaching “Dear Diary” entries. I mean, I do these fucking things quarterly and I’m only 3 days into the first month of the first quarter and we’re already at nearly 1600 words. Also, the overarching idea of the blog is as close as I can get to a sort of universal neutral stance, rather than anything directly personal. Enjoy it while it lasts, I suppose...?

01.04.25
: In a way, this new format is a lot of fun, in another way, it runs a very serious danger of this post being hugely excessive in length. Anyway, I thought it bore mentioning that I’m already off-track in the End Of Year post from 2024. Therein, I said that all of the old videos would be posted by the end of March, but then shortly after posting, I bumped one into April, because hey, just one couldn’t hurt. And now I just bumped another into May. I’m also decidedly suspicious of the idea that I will wind up producing less content this year, as I also said was the general plan, but the year is young and jury still out on that one. I didn’t expect the less content thing to happen until after Q2, so we’re still at least on track for that.

01.10.25: Hey, remember that one time a long time ago (end of 2024 blog post) where I said that all of the videos done in the old style would be posted by the end of March...so, I just now pulled my third video out of that time frame because stuff keeps coming up that I want to get posted first, including one thing that I’ve had on the backburner as long as it has existed. There has been a bit of shuffling, including one particular video I’ve now moved three different times since I originally uploaded and scheduled it...

I do also have a spanking new fridge, which is working a charm, although the door configuration for my sauces necessarily had to change and some of the stuff I tried to keep on ice in the unheated garage (as a refrigerator fix only, all the freezer stuff was ruined), I wound up having to toss anyway, but none of the sauces. The delay has also pushed back filming of at least one fairly major (in terms of infrastructure to film it, as well as a greatly extended filming time) video I wanted to do for the weekend closest to this post, but I have enough of a cushion that we should still be in really good shape for that to happen then.

01.11.25: I discovered today that Buzzfeed did indeed find a buyer for First We Feast, who produces The Hot Ones show, which is more and more becoming a licensing juggernaut, and it just so happened to be First We Feast itself and Sean Evans and a few other investors, some named, some not. At least now, as they enter into their 10th year, clearly they will be able to continue the show at their own choosing and you know, more power to them. I think we’d all dearly love to be in that position.  
                    
01.16.25: Season 26 of the Hot Ones had the sauces announced today, so I updated that page. I commented a bit on the Community tab on YouTube, but this looks to be a relatively tame season, as far as heat goes and another that is unfortunately onion-heavy. It is adding 4 new sauces to the hit list, though one of those is the Last Dab Xperience, which will cover a few seasons once I get to it...I’m curious to see what the lineup for subsequent seasons looks like and what will get re-used then.

01.20.25
: I’m finding this new format kind of fun (and also kind of dangerous, considering that, as someone who strong pursued “writing” professionally and was successful at it long enough to consider myself a “writer,” I definitely seem to have the gift(?) of being rather wordy). Today, I was doing some look ahead and I think, barring anything unforeseen, I’m already well tanked as far as this being a year where I’d be making less non-sauce FOH content. As of right now, May is already nearly entirely scheduled and half of June is as well. The new filming change was kind of a good kick in the ass (I think, at least some days, I’m finally closing in on the elusive setup), but also I’m in relatively good health and good spirits, which is a pretty big sea change from the last three years. I’ve resumed exercising again, albeit more fitting it in where I can, as I’m certainly not less busy, and with any luck, perhaps I will be able to resume the gym again, though I doubt I have it in me any longer to be a “rat” again.

01.25.25: For winter 2023/2024, I had some unexpected enjoyment doing some heat-related challenges for the then-newer FOH playlist of Challenges (link to that at right). That was rather substantially derailed by COVID in January of 2024, which, though I happily did not lose any sense of taste or smell, instead almost seemed to reset a lot of things, like capsaicin tolerance, as well as a bizarre litany of weird stuff that took a while to shake out. It has also seemingly permanently changed my relationship to alcohol.

Anyway, because I was enjoying some of the challenges way more than I had thought I would, I figured I should pad out the playlist a bit more and picked up a few others that looked at least somewhat interesting. I can say pretty conclusively that I am not experiencing that same moderate enjoyment in the winter 2024/2025 period and once I finish out the ones I already have and have planned (which is 4 total), the idea of resuming my former stance of largely ignoring challenges entirely, aside for very specific and random one-offs, is holding increasingly greater appeal. If anything, this strongly reinforces my “foodie first” mindset. In an interesting (to me, at least) twist, what I’m experiencing with the ones I’ve shot this winter is what I kind of thought last winter’s would be like. This is just not really the kind of content I like doing.

When I do a challenge, that is literally my entire day. In the morning, after my usual routine, I begin prepping for the challenge. This is via a variety of strategies, all of which are aimed directly at cramping, for which I have no patience, and all of which help, based on a sliding scale depending on my relative tolerance, but are not “cures” in an of themselves. After the challenge, because I don’t purge (and have never tossed cookies from capsaicin and only very rarely from anything over the course of my life), it’s generally a few hours of mitigation, depending on severity of cramping, again in varying degrees based on my relative tolerance and how much of the prep I actually did. I try to time the challenges themselves for right around noon, which works out with my body having enough time to process whatever the challenge was and concluding so that I can get in dinner (and I can tell the process is over when hunger trips, because in the interim, the very last thing I want to do is eat or drink anything). I don’t generally do more than a single challenge in a day, unless whatever I have is not remotely actually challenging.

So, if I’m not getting particular enjoyment out of it, while it’s nice to have content and sometimes fun to film with a timer, I’ve essentially just wasted an entire day, not to mention what was probably an overpriced product to obtain in the first place. I also don’t pre-run them or sample them off-camera, so when I film them is my very first exposure to whatever that product is. I am, in essence, going in blind, so to speak. I might have a guess, but have no real idea if that is even slightly accurate for most of it going in.

01.28.25: Just did some quick math after some stuff I’d ordered but forgotten came in and if I kept a normal posting schedule to previous years, I wouldn’t have to film any more non-sauce FOH content...for the entire year. So, definitely that less content thing I was talking about in the end of the year post in 2024 is almost definitely out the window entirely for this year and along with it, the idea of not doing more goofy “holidays,” which I’m doing a bunch of this year also. Further, chances are pretty good I will go past 1000 FOH videos (somewhat related, this blog is on a trajectory to also finally exceed 100K views). Interestingly, while the number of FOH videos continues to run past this blog, at a pretty dramatic rate, the blog is outpacing the YT channel rather considerably, something I find both curious and a bit mystifying. We’ll see how long it holds. It’s kind of funny...when I was a kid, I was heavily into baseball, like really really into it and the wryly amusing thought strikes me that we’re awfully early to be saying “there’s always next year,” but...that is exactly what I’m saying.

02.19.25
: Seeing very limited fast food and restaurant offerings in the space so far this year, with several fast food places sort of shrinking down what they formerly offered. There is still not a shortage of stuff on my side, though, and I’ll likely breeze through this year, unless something stupid happens with the current political turmoil. I did have to cut short my grand winter experiment (and didn’t get to the backups at all) due to eggs being prohibitively expensive to continue doing that. If you saw the video for the Smokin’ Ed’s Chocolate Strawberry sauce, you probably know what the experiment is, but if not, it will go live on Memorial Day this year. Almost certainly, though, I will be producing a lot less FOH content next year overall because I’ve covered so much stuff and am now scrounging a bit. I will say that I was a bit under the weather earlier in the month and it was nice not to have any pressure to have to create content and could give myself whatever break I wanted. Same with this blog, actually, where scheduling it out is working very nicely to give myself the same break. I don’t know that I will always have this backlog of stuff where I can do that, but I’m definitely enjoying it while it’s here.

It also dawns on me that this post will either be outright or be right around the 600th post overall for the blog and at some point this year, probably in April, I will hit 600 sauces covered overall.  Typing this got me thinking a bit. As I type this, I have 586 full and mini reviews. I have another 6 sauces waiting on deck to be posted here, which makes 592. I have another 6 open bottles in the fridge, waiting to be reviewed and filmed, for 598. On the shelf is maybe another 20 or so unopened bottle, so, in fact, possibly, even likely, by the end of Q2, this blog will hit that 600 overall hot sauce review number.

02.22.25: Today, I filmed back to back challenge videos, leaving me with a single challenge product remaining and a second product of that caliber that was not intended per se as a challenge product, but I’m going to try to treat in that way for filming. The actual challenge product will need an on-screen timer, but not the other. Both of those will be waiting until March to attempt, however. Unless one or both of those is a lot more fun than the vast majority of challenges I’ve attempted this winter season, I’ve probably quenched my generally moderate interest in partaking of any more of those products. My interest was piqued a bit from the prior winter and I thought it might be nice to pad out the Challenges playlist a bit, but the latter goal is accomplished and interest back to previous minimal levels, so I’m not sure of any further point. Not helping things was me battling allergies for some of the challenges and one of those I lost thanks to a sneezing fit in the middle of it. Since it was timed, there was no real way to continue with the cadence and since I found the challenge design kind of lazy as it was, I called a halt to it rather than trying to finish the product, but failing a challenge has no bearing on this.  Mostly it’s a sense that I’ve had my fun with the dalliance and am now facing diminishing returns.

02.27.25
: One of my very favorite things about the new upgrade to the software is that not only can I film in higher definition, but also I’m no longer time-locked for making content. In the past, as I relied nearly entirely on natural light for the videos, I would have a window in which to film whatever I wanted and I’d have to hope that it wasn’t stormy or overcast or my light would sometimes even then be entirely sunk. Now, happily, even though setup for the new process takes considerably longer than the older one ever did, I can film nearly any time of the day, so my window went from 6 - 9 hours, depending on the time of year, to something closer to 20 hours, on any given day. It is an aspect I’m still adjusting to, even now, after 5 months of having the tech upgrade.

03.19.25: Finished out filming all of the challenge stuff I had, as well as a product I will call challenge-adjacent involving Pepper X, yesterday and barring anything coming along of high interest, I’m probably done screwing around with challenge stuff entirely. As I mentioned in that video (which will be posted sometime summer 2025 - I’m current scheduling stuff into August, at this point for the FOH YT series and nearly through April for blog reviews), Pepper X is relatively new enough that I’m still coming to terms with it. As far as current pods go, the mighty, mighty Reaper remains the one that seems to react the worst with me, in terms of cramping down the line, unless I’ve built a tolerance specifically to it. Tolerance at the moment is probably towards the middle of things, if I had to guess - the current level is of decreasing interest to me, so I can’t really assess properly - and the Pepper X thing gave me a rather sharp 10 - 15 minute cramping session about an hour after I’d finished the product and then largely subsided. This is in contrast to the Reaper, which generally is less sharp but perhaps more intense and tends to be of longer duration, as well as more repetitious. The Reaper also, to this point, has made waste excretions generally more burning, but, again, Pepper X is relatively new to me and testing still continues.

To challenges specifically, the idea that one gets high from this kind of activity is lost on me. While I’ve been high many times *ahem*, I have never had a “runner’s high,” despite being a gym rat for quite a few years and actively somewhat aggressively biking for longer. In the case of these challenges, I don’t get any kind of high but a post adrenaline bump crash, which tends to leave me exhausted and crashing for the rest of the day. This effect can be minimized with enough tolerance, but the problem then becomes maintaining tolerance, which is somewhat difficult for what I actually do and the content output I provide. I don’t find challenges particularly interesting or engaging and usually not very tasty most of the time, so returning to my earlier stance of those being occasional, if at all, definitely strikes me as the good move here.

03.23.25: A beautiful spring day here and it naturally is making me think of grilling season...still a bit too cold to launch that just yet, but I don’t imagine it’s more than a couple weeks away. Now that I have someone to whom I can pass along open sauces I don’t like well enough to finish or to hand off ones where I discover previously unknown onions, in combination with pulling out entirely and relocating the sauces earmarked for the Wing Thing videos, I’ve managed to clear some door shelf space, but it is more limited in this refrigerator than in the prior one, so I have to keep an eye on it. Just out of curiosity, as this quarter ends, I’m at (not counting the ones I’m holding strictly for the Quarterly Wing Thing FOH videos), 22 unopened bottles on the shelf and 13 open bottles in the fridge door, 4 of which still need to be reviewed and filmed. I’m trying to make a concerted effort this year to keep the open bottle count lower, particularly since I no longer have the space for it. This week and going forward, since I will be leaving my current job at the end of this week, I’m going to make more of a concerted focus to use up a lot of the bottles just hanging out in there, even though the fridge dying earlier in the year did a decent job “helping” with many of those. Also, after being under the weather for seemingly all of February and most of March, I’m finally looking at resuming the workouts that I was doing at least a decent job of getting to in January.

Tuesday, March 25, 2025

Heatonist x Stranger Things Hellfire Club Hot Sauce Review

Heatonist x Stranger Things Hellfire Club

Often crossovers or “collabs” seem to blur the line between an actual intentional product that’s meant to stand on its own in the respective marketplace, perhaps both as collectible and viable product, and that of a strictly collectible novelty type item. I’m genuinely not sure which this is, as I don’t know if people collecting Stranger Things stuff is an actual thing, but there also seems to be enough design and care put into what the product actually is in the bottle that it moves away from being a blatant novelty type item. This was also part of a set with two other sauces (which I have no interest in, as they are both onion sauces), so if forced to choose, I would say it’s more meant to be an actual legitimate sauce.

If so, it is quite a strange one. Starting with mango as the first listed ingredient, but which does not show up particularly in the flavor profile, to Scotch Bonnet, one of the more underrated peppers in my book, possibly because it keeps winding up in sauces like this, which do nothing to showcase the majesty of the pod and are ultimately a bit on the iffy side. Both of those aforementioned flavors are flooded out by mustard, turmeric, and ginger powder, all of which combine to make an odd and bitter-flavored concoction. It is not quite a mustard and here and there bits of sweetness win out, but I’m not sure the ultimate aim here...possibly a Caribbean sauce of some type.

Without having a distinguishable flavor anchor (and I disregard any suggestion from any maker to put it on “any and every thing,” as that type of idea is just total laziness), it’s hard to know where to pair this, as the flavor gives no real indicator. This is not mustardy enough to go on foods where that condiment would normally be used, thanks to the ginger kind of skewing things, but it also is not really ideal for things like chicken tendies. It’s not bad, per se, but perhaps more unfinished than anything else, as you do have to account for the mustard, but it is far enough away from a mustard not to work in those places much, either. I guess you can say it is certainly unique, but I find more and more that is not an especially good attribute for condiments, especially in terms of pairing. Heat-wise, it’s only a Scotch Bonnet, so there won’t be too much challenge here.

Bottom line: All in all, this is kind of a lost sauce, in that it’s quite unclear who and what this is meant for. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 3
            Flexibility: 0
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 0

Overall: 1

Thursday, March 20, 2025

Motley Crue The Most Notorious Hot Sauce Review

Motley Crue The Most Notorious Hot Sauce

Vanity products are always kind of fun, but also always, a mixed bag. So, too, with this one, which is collectively the band sauce. Initially part of a 5 sauce set that also featured a nifty box and 4 other sauces for each individual band member, these have since been broken out and sold individually, which is nice, as this was the only one that did not have onions. My suspicion is this is probably something from the CaJohn’s line, as United is having it produced for them. It reminds me of the CaJohn’s NOLA, also reviewed elsewhere here, just nowhere near as black peppery, much more bitter, and notably hotter. For having Habanero as the hottest pepper, this is a fairly punchy sauce, surprisingly so, and it will probably push non-chileheads a bit.

Where this sort of falls down is in the flavor department. This, as mentioned, is a fairly bitter sauce, somewhat unpleasantly so. The addition of lemon extract reads a lot more forward than I wish it did, but unless there is something unlabeled, the culprit is probably the Habanero powder. Habanero is not particularly present as a flavor, which is also kind of odd. There is sometimes a back end note of garlic, but the overall tone is abrasive and unpolished. Perhaps that is intentional.

I find it closest to a Cajun sauce, which is where I’ve been mostly using it, but admittedly, this is more a sauce I’m trying to get through rather than enjoying much. It’s not bad enough to toss, but it also isn’t an experience I readily relish. It is, more or less, my current entry in the Lousiana-style family category, and while certainly far from great, it is mostly fine enough to continue with it, particularly since there is that nice bit of a heat push as well.

As is often the case with many vanity/novelty products, the goal is not necessarily to make a high quality end result, but rather that of marketing and for interested people to collect. Sometimes the product will also be good, but this is definitely one that I think is more to sell the band’s name on the label than anything else.

Bottom line: An ok at best Cajun sauce, albeit a rather bitter and somewhat hotter one.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 4
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 2

Overall: 3

Thursday, March 13, 2025

Dawson’s x Iris Lune Eclipse Hot Sauce Review

Dawson’s x Iris Lune Eclipse

This may sound stupid, but every once in a while a sauce comes along that is so fantastic in just one aspect that it “breaks” my rating system. Ironically, this is one of the ways I can tell that it is sound because a sauce like this, that is near transcendent in execution and perhaps even in design, is not a sauce of the year candidate, even though it is probably the best-tasting sauce I will have all year and one which I enjoy immensely. It is because my rating system is incapable of truly encapsulating a sauce like this, is wholly inadequate to the task, that it confirms to me that I can stop debating if I should (or should have, rather, at this point, probably) add another dynamic for rating criteria.

Dawson’s seems to really like doing crossover sauces, as they also did one with the Heat Hot Sauce Shop (which I’ve reviewed elsewhere here), and also appear fairly regularly on The Hot Ones show, with entries in 5 seasons as of the time of this writing. While I liked some of their other sauces a good fair bit, it wasn’t really until this sauce that I was blown away by anything from them, but to say blown away is almost an understatement. This is one of the more well-crafted and executed sauces I’ve probably ever had and the design borders on genius. In many ways, this is a foodie’s hot sauce.

I rarely talk about color, unless it is something really striking, either positively or negatively, but I would be remiss not to talk about the color, as the gorgeous and lush nature of the sauce is reflected all the way down to the beautiful pastel yellow hue. It reminds me almost of a nice cream butter or perhaps even a honey butter and I’ve seen very few of those I haven’t liked. This also uses Vietnamese Red Chilis, which I’ve had a lot in pod form from dating a girl from Vietnam years ago, but don’t recall ever seeing in a sauce before. While this does mean generally low heat, they do work exceedingly well in this setting, with the garlic and peach.

Even though peach is the first ingredient, this is not hugely a peach-forward sauce. This is not to say that it doesn’t show up, but is more one of the flavors rather than the star. This is definitely a composite sauce, with the yellow peppers, as well as the aforementioned garlic, playing a substantive role, all on the silky base of the extra virgin olive oil. With fruit-based sweet-hots, which this is, though it is not particularly prominently sweet, I find they often work best when paired with specific foods and this is no exception. There is the additional element of the oil, which adds a richness to this that points it to working best at drier meats where one might want peach, such as chicken. It is actually quite fantastic there. I could also see this doing nicely on pork and if it’s around when grill season hits, will be trying it there as well, though not as a grill sauce, as it is nowhere sweet enough for that. Given its richness, as well as fruit-based sweet hots (which this is, mostly) by nature are lower in this, flexibility is a bit low, but I will say that I didn't dislike it on pizza, though I also would not say that is the right application.

Bottom line: This is a superb, stellar entry and not only the most impressive sauce I’ve had from Dawson’s, but I’d put in the upper 10% of all the sauces on this blog.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 6

Saturday, March 8, 2025

Lola's Family Reserve Hot Sauce Review

Lola’s Family Reserve

After being generally unimpressed with the other 5 sauces I’ve done from this company, I wasn’t really expecting a lot out of this one. I bought it on a whim, same time as I bought the Mango one (reviewed elsewhere here) on vacation in Minnesota last summer, figuring that with the extra expense they put into the packaging (not pictured, but it came in a cardboard box, similar to how Tabasco used to), this might be a better, or at least hotter, sauce.

It turned out to be both better and hotter. If you picture the Valentina Black Label, with a substantial boost of heat, yet sharing some of the flavor characteristics of the Arizona Gunslinger sauces I’ve done (particularly with how overly salty they are), and steered more at being an everyday style sauce, you’ve about got it. This one does seem slightly thinner than the Valentina, but the color and texture are much more in line with that. It doesn’t seem like they were trying to make a Mexican-style sauce so much as an everyday sauce and the results were successful in that regard.

For a good everyday sauce, it needs to basically run the gamut of non-specialized food types (and by my reckoning, Asian foods and desserts would be considered specialized) and at least work acceptably in those scenarios and this one does, up to and including Mexican food. Considering the lineage - there are many references to the Original (also reviewed elsewhere here) on the label - it is small wonder. I wouldn’t say it’s as good as the Tamazula Black Label (yes, also reviewed elsewhere here), which is my current go-to in that regard, but it does work decently. So too on pizza and chicken tendies and on the wide variety of other sundries one might reasonably expect from a good, solid everyday sauce.

In addition to this reading as overly salty (enough to drag down the Flavor rating a bit), it also lists the mighty mighty Reaper as the first ingredient. Also included in the fun are Jalapenos and Habaneros, but it is those two that seem to constitute most of the flavor, with some notable heat, probably right at the line a non-chilehead would consider too much, but with no accompanying Reaper or bitter superhot flavor element, which I admittedly find kind of puzzling. Lime is also listed, but thankfully it does not factor prominently into proceedings here.

Bottom line: This is easily the hottest and best sauce Lola’s has produced and by my accounting, the only one really worth bothering with from them.


Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 10
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6

Overall: 6

Tuesday, March 4, 2025

Captain Mowatt's Blue Flame & Fireberry Hot Sauce(s) Review

Captain Mowatt’s Blue Flame
Captain Mowatt’s Fireberry


A new (to me) sauce company hailing from Maine, more or less halfway between Boston and Bangor and damn near to Canada, one could argue, where the sauces all come in generous 8 fl. oz. bottles. I don’t now remember how I stumbled across it, but they had a few sauces that seemed pretty interesting, so I took a shot at ordering some delectables along with those sauces to sample and these are the first two I’ve gotten to. They are not, I should hasten to add, despite both using Red Jalapenos, Cayenne, and Birds Eye as the chiles in the mix, particularly similar sauces, but because I can’t get it out of my head when I see berries, I immediately think of desserts, as I did for both of here.

This was an error on my part. They are not really dessert sauces, not sweet enough, I would say. The Fireberry (raspberry) is slightly sweeter and the Blue Flame (blueberry) somewhat more umami in nature, but neither really lends itself well to desserts per se. Overall, in fact, I found they worked better on as a less sweet dipping sauce for things like jalapeno poppers and in the case of the Blue Flame, as accompaniment to breakfast foods, pairing with maple syrup a bit. I didn’t find them to stray outside of that greatly, but have considerable plans to put these to the fire when grill season rolls back around on things like burgers and chicken, at least for the Fireberry. I suspect at least one will make a pretty interesting grill sauce.

This is not to say I don’t enjoy them. I do think both of them have an excellent flavor, though I do favor the blueberry a bit more. Part of that comes down to the idea that I think blueberry lends itself well to sauces and syrups a bit more readily than does raspberry, which I generally prefer to be raw, from a flavor standpoint. I am having some fun trying these out on different things, but I can’t say that I’ve discovered any particular new and exciting combination...yet, anyway. Heat wise, neither of them is particularly hot, which is to be expected given the peppers involved.

Bottom line: A more savory approach to berry forward fruit-based hot sauces, which I find an interesting approach, but ultimately more middle of the road as a final result for both.

Blue Flame Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: 5
            Flexibility: 2
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6

Overall: 3

Fireberry Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6

Overall: 4

Saturday, March 1, 2025

Bohica Hawaiian Lava Hot Sauce Review

Bohica Pepper Hut Hawaiian Lava

I was unfamiliar with the usage of "bohica" and so found a lot of the verbiage on the label kind of strange, but upon finding the sort of vulgar pretext for what seems to be military slang, it seems more fitting. It doesn't really apply to the sauce, but it is less nonsensical now, if that makes sense, and no I'm not describing it here. You can look it up if you don't already know and are interested.

That aside, this is another sauce in which I’m tempted to do a very short review and call this “just another” pineapple-forward fruit-based sweet-hot with one pepper subbed out for another, which is true, but there is an entire litany of ingredients, including three separate fruit juices and a host of spices. While I think that it is mostly the case that this is a fairly uncomplex sauce, in terms of flavor, and a lot of pineapple flavor and pulp doing most of the lifting, there is also a fairly notable pepper presence, probably from the combination of the yellow Bells and the yellow 7-Pot Primos.

I don’t think I’ve had either a yellow 7-Pot Primo or a pineapple sauce with any 7-Pot, at least not in memory if I have, but the main difference here is a slight bitterness whereas the sauces with Scotch Bonnet or Habaneros tend more towards the fruitier side of things. The Reaper sauces have a foot in both worlds and that is mainly how those read out. This one, like many other pineapple sauces that tend to be on the pulpier and pale yellow side, is not anywhere near as sweet as some others I’ve had, which is a bit of a shame, as that is my preference, but it’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with some good pineapple puree and pulp in the proceedings, to be sure. It also falls more or less in the middle of the pack in terms of thickness, with a bit of looseness, but no actual separation, happily.

Given the 7-Pot, one might expect this sauce to be a bit on the roaring side, but it is not. Indeed, it is far, far from it, with the sauce overall being rather tame, despite the odd label intimation. This does allow one to get more of a read on the ingredients and try to pick up the grace notes, but by far, the more prominent flavors here are the pineapple and the pepper combination.

Bottom line: I don’t mean to damn it with faint praise, but this is, when all is said and done, a sort of middle of the pack entry into one of the more established sauce types.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 5

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Black-Eyed Susan Cannonball Crush Hot Sauce Review

Black-Eyed Susan Captain Clyde’s Cannonball Crush

Rather lengthy title for this one, which I find a touch curious, as, nautical/pirate theme aside, I’m not sure what the actual cannonball is. I’d imagine it’s the garlic, which is by far the most forward and dominant flavor here, although the label text alludes to “citrus,” of which there is only orange and only from a juice concentrate and only really present in grace notes that show up here and there. The avocado oil also adds a lot of smoothness and silkiness to things, a bit reminiscent, even to the color, of some of the Torchbearer stuff. It is definitely not as generally chunky and clotty as those products tend to be, though.

This one does glide pretty considerably, in a sort of medium thick way. The oil also helps to suspend things a bit, though agitation certainly doesn’t hurt anything. It also doesn’t really change things a whole bunch, though. The Ghosties are here mainly to provide heat, though I can’t say it is quite a lot of it. This is a relatively tame sauces as far as that goes.

This sauce is really dependent on how much you like garlic and how much what you want to use it on will accommodate an influx of a fairly rich very garlic-forward sauce. I think it would be interesting to mix into a pesto or another sauce where you might want a bit of both a heat and garlic punch and once it warms up, I plan to tinker with it on the grill towards some garlic burgers. It does work very nicely in a garlic bread application, though admittedly that is a pretty simple application that has a very low bar to succeed. I did try it on tendies and it’s just too much of a garlic punch for me there. You could potentially use it to flavor some nuts and then bake them a bit in the oven or possibly try to carmelize these on some chicken wings, where the garlic really comes to life with the Maillard effect. I do like the flavor overall but I find this one somewhat hard to use out of the bottle.

Bottom line: This is much less a hot sauce and much more a straightforward creamy garlic sauce, with occasional slight citrus notes. 

 Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 5
            Flexibility: 2
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4

Overall: 3

Thursday, February 20, 2025

Angry Goat Aurora Berryalis Hot Sauce Review

Angry Goat Aurora Berryalis

I had finished up all of the entire Angry Goat lineup, at least of sauces I wanted to do, i.e. those without onions, some time ago and then noticed this gem popped up last year. I loved the label and it is probably one of my favorites from them, though most of them I view pretty favorably. Since Angry Goat is a sauce company I admire quite a bit (see the list of my favorite sauce companies in the SOTY list - link at right), so, after first checking the ingredient list, I put it on my list to get acquire ASAP. It took a while longer than expected, but I finally got my grubby little mitts on it. Once I did, I wasted no time in cracking it open and diving in.

Douglah peppers, as a superhot, are one that I have decided mixed feelings about. I have had them in places where I thought the flavor worked, but for the most part, they come across as way too sour for me to enjoy much. I figured if they were going to be in the optimal setting, it would probably be in those steely Angry Goat hands. I generally find most berry sauces to be intriguing, but berry sauces in general tend to be a bit on the lower flexibility side. Where they work, such as on red meat and pork, they work spectacularly well and decidedly less well elsewhere.

This one I put through its paces, with a bevy of tastes covering nearly everything I could think of, from the Arby’s Poppers (not sweet enough for that), to ice cream and desserts (way not sweet enough for that), to tendies and burgers and roast beef sandwiches and so on. The smell was very much superhot and the combination of Douglah with Ghosties was kind of a smart one, as in taking a questionably flavored chile and pairing it with the glory of Ghosties. There was also some tempering here with the berries, though I think they do get lost a bit, and maple syrup and black garlic powder, to dial down the sourness a bit, but there was still, for me, ultimately just a touch too much of it. There are a lot of interesting grace notes to be had and this is absolutely one that benefits from frequent agitation.

Douglahs are unquestionably superhots. Ghost peppers are unquestionably superhots. There has been a lot of discussion that the chocolate versions of chiles generally are the hottest varietals. I don’t know if that is true or not, as I’m not a pod guy, per se, but this sauce is absolutely chilehead only territory. It smells of superhot and tastes mainly of superhot and it’s hard to imagine normies enjoying this much.

Bottom line: One of the more blazing entries from Angry Goat, that both earns the bear on the label and delivers yet another quite intriguing flavor prospect, albeit a very chile forward one.

 Breakdown:

            Heat level: 3
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8

Overall: 6