2026 Q2 Update

2026 Q2 Update

For as much time and angst as I’ve spent bemoaning the backlog of content, one of the good parts about it, which is why I do always want somewhat of one, is when something happens. It could be vacation, an extended work project, or, much less fortunately, what it was for nearly all of April, some medical-ish stuff. In this case, it was an old root canal that went really, really south and created all sorts of havoc and misery for nearly the entire month of April and extended into May. On the plus token, I only had a single video to film and I’d be set through June as far as the FOH series went and had a good couple week cushion or so on the blog front. Keeping the scheduled stream of content uninterrupted, even if relatively unimportant in le grande scheme of things, turned out to be a nice saving grace.  

Along the way, this quarter also saw the blog hit 700 overall posts. The 700th overall hot sauce review will be at some point, probably fairly early in the quarter, for Q3. Further, it took around 9 months to go from 100K views to 250K, where it was closing in on the 2026 Q1 Update. As I type this now, if we’re not there already, we’re now closing in on 500K. 

Hot Ones Season 30 had the sauces announced on the Ides Of May and it looked to be yet another onion-heavy season. It added a total of exactly one to the upcoming Hot Ones sauce hit list project, which will be detailed a bit more below. Also, it took until about then for me to get the necessary parts and the weather to start to look to be cooperative enough to kick off grill season, which is probably the latest in the year it’s been in recent memory. Sure is a good thing that fucking up the weather patterns won’t have any future repercussions or anything...the delay was fine, though, given how utterly trashed my appetite was from what I mentioned in the preceding section...although, after replacing the heat tent, I now need to once again re-learn the whims and whys of my increasingly questionable grill. 

That aside, for the last 2 years, I’ve been looking specifically at the most represented sauce makers for full reviews in this blog and if you check the Q2 for both 2024 and 2025, you can see the lists there. This will be the third year and once again, there are changes. Let’s start with where we left off last year, as usual these numbers are not reflective of any sub-lines, such as vanity sauces, co-packed sauces, etc. OR of Mini Reviews.

2025 numbers:

1. CaJohn’s [21] (19 videos posted)
2. Angry Goat [20] (all videos posted)
3. Hellfire [15] (12 videos posted)
4. Silk City [14] (all videos posted)
5 - 7 (tie) Karma* [8] (all videos posted) 
Pex [8] (all videos posted) 
Puckerbutt [8] (all videos posted)
8-10 (tie) Bravado [7] (5 videos posted)
Torchbearer [7] (5 videos posted)
Volcanic Peppers [7] (6 videos posted)

I was not expecting much, if any movement, given what I had planned ahead for the rest of the year, as has been documented a bit in the other Quarterly updates. As has also been documented, I wound up with a lot more flexibility and took a look at a couple of sauce makers I meant to explore more fully. Those were both on my favored nation sauce makers, which was the subject of a different blog post that you can access via the TSAAF SOTY link at the right. The thing here is that if I discover a sauce maker makes a sauce I enjoy, if it is of sufficiently high level, I will be motivated to go through their entire line-up of offerings. This doesn’t necessarily mean I will do that, but the impetus is there. 

With that, let’s take a look at the revised numbers for 2026, which are updated with a new total that I added for funsies of the cumulative rating for each maker, given the sauces I’ve reviewed. This data is near-worthless as it is very skewed, given my proclivities and food intolerances, so take it only as a point of interest reflective solely of the data on the blog, itself also highly subjective. I try to be as neutral as possible, but reviews are opinions and all opinions ar e inherently subjective. The cumulative average rating for the blog, as of December 2025, is 4.64, as a point of reference.

Anyway, the format is [Position]. [Sauce Maker] [Number Of Full Reviews On Blog] (Number of Support Videos Available) {Cumulative Average Rating Across All Full Reviews}:

1. CaJohn’s* [21] (19 videos posted) {5.19}
2. Angry Goat [20] (all videos posted) {5.35}
3. Hellfire [15] (12 videos posted) {5.4}
4. Silk City [14] (all videos posted) {5.71}
5 - 6 (tie) Butterfly Bakery [13] (12 videos posted) {6.15}
Gindo’s [13] (all videos posted) {6.84}
7 - 9 (tie) Pex [9] (all videos posted) {4}
Puckerbutt* [9] (all videos posted) {4.44}
Volcanic Peppers [9] (6 videos posted) {5.33}
10 Karma* [8] (all videos posted) {5}

 
*Does not include any sub-lines, such as specific vanity sauces, the Smokin’ Ed, and/or Hot Ones branded sauces.

I was not expecting movement near the top, as Angry Goat was one I made a point to explore and kept tabs on from time to time. CaJohn’s was a larger name during the formative years of this blog, so much of that came from early on, when I was exploring the lineup back when John Hard still owned the company. Today, unfortunately, I feel as if the company has fallen off notably since that time and I don’t know that they’ve introduced any new sauces at all under that nameplate. That top spot is perhaps more inertia than anything. 

I had similarly also explored Silk City, though that company is on my list to return to for some newer stuff at a future point, with the entire line-ups of Hellfire, Karma, Bravado, and Torchbearer being pretty well mined, as far as I was concerned. For Pex, there was a couple of sauces in which I had casual interest, and have a sauce from Puckerbutt at hand, but have not gotten to as of yet. This is all relatively minor movement from what is mostly a point of curiousity list. Volcanic was the only one that had potential to move the needle, but I had (and still have) a pretty solid glut of sauces that are more or less in the Louisiana-style category, so it looked to be a while for those as well. 

Gindo’s, which has the highest composite score by a sizable margin, had been on my list to try and explore in a similar way as I’ve described above for a while. Butterfly was another in that vein in which I was very motivated to dig further into and for both of those, the stars aligned very nicely with some sales in which I was happily able to pick up a slew from each. This has moved the threshold for entry into this into the high single digits rather than the middle single digits as previously, with over half of the makers into double digits. If I had to guess, and as soon as I do, will undoubtedly be proven wrong, but I’d suspect the cap would be at around a couple dozen. 24 sauces from a single brand is quite a lot, I think, given that I am not counting either sub-lines or known relabels. There will probably be a bit more movement for next year as well, as I’ve still got a few Butterfly sauces on tap waiting on the shelf to be opened.

One of the other things I like to do for this mid-year update is to take a look at The Hot Ones project. Let’s turn now to that The Hot Ones sauce coverage project. All of this, as always, is updated on the Hot Ones Sauces page (link at right) as to which sauces are still under consideration and which are not, along with the reasons why not.

The big change here, I guess, is that I finally have, in my grubby mitts, the Torchbearer Zombie Apocalypse sauce, so I guess I will get to that this year, to kind of cement the early seasons. I am now concluded through season 23, barring a single sauce here and there in some of the seasons. By the end of the year, that may wind up being the case through season 25, bringing me ever close to at least closing in on being caught up. This project is still being slow-walked, due to the variety of factors I’ve mentioned in other updates, including the end of the year update from 2025. For now, we continue at the pace of one Hot Ones sauce per quarter, rather than one a month. 

Current to now, the seasons with sauces outstanding are:

Season 3 - 1 remaining (1 at hand)
Season 4 - 1 remaining (1 at hand)
Season 21 - 1 remaining 
Season 23 - 1 remaining 
Season 24 - 2 remaining (1 at hand)
Season 25 - 2 remaining (1 at hand)
Season 26 - 3 remaining 
Season 27 - 6 remaining 
Season 28 - 4 remaining (1 at hand)
Season 29 - 5 remaining
Season 30 - 3 remaining

These are the individual sauces remaining, by slot position on the show:

#1 - 4 remaining
#2 - 2 remaining (1 at hand)
#3 - 3 remaining*            
#4 - 2 remaining 
#5 - 1 remaining 
#6 - fully covered
#7 - 3 remaining (2 at hand)
#8 - fully covered
#9 - 2 remaining (1 at hand)
#10 - 2 remaining

*For one of the #3 slot sauces, it has appeared in other seasons at the #2 position, but they have moved it for Season 30. 

Stanky The Clasico Hot Sauce Review

Stanky The Clasico

I suppose I might be accused of being elitist, perhaps even a bit narrow, in my tastes, to which I would agree to the first characterization and dissent fairly firmly on the second...but there are some areas in which I want something specific and things that fall outside of that, I might find in question. If they fall far outside of it, the odds tend to decrease that I will look on it favorably. Case in point, Mexi-style sauces and astringency. One of the very last things I look for in that style of sauce is pungency. I more want a richness and warmth and a depth of flavor, along with some solid heat, and maybe a tinge of astringency, but not a lot more than that. In this case, there is unfortunately quite a bit more.

I’ve seen this company around for a while and might have gotten them confused with Funky’s and that whole fermented scene, but I vaguely remembered the sauces I looked at from them having onions, so I put them on the backburner for a while...a long while. Eventually, as it turned out, I had some space and figured now might be a good time, despite me finding their name a touch odd - it is a sort of nickname for the last name of the owners, not a reference to something Ike Turner famously told Tina Turner to put on her vocals while in the studio - now being the moment to give them a shot and figured I’d start with the sauce that sounded like sort of a “house” sauce. If companies have one of these, it is often times the most accessible and since this was the introductory sauce from them, I figured it would be a good starting point, despite not really having anything resembling heat in the ingredients.

There are a lot of “from concentrates” and powders here, which gives me a touch of pause whenever I see that, as often that will wind up being reflected in the overall flavor. In this case, there is quite a lot of vinegar and citrus competing for palate space, but I was able to tamp those down here and there, depending on pairing, and then got hit with a fairly abrasive garlic hit. The ingredient list definitely leans pretty strongly into the idea this is meant to be a Mexi-style sauce and given that they’re a Florida company, I assume the inclusion of key lime is meant to be a reference to that, but altogether, it’s just too much and comes across as a bit sour. It is definitely well, well outside of what I want in a Mexi-style sauce, a facet of which is that the sauce needs to be delicious on its own. For me, this one is decidedly not. 

Bottom line: It’s possible I may consider something else from them down the line, but I found this sauce to be quite underwhelming and not something I am going to continue with.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 1 

Splintered Lu'au Pohaku Hot Sauce Review

Splintered Lu’au Pohaku

This is, to my memory, the first time I’ve had the combination of Carolina Reaper and pineapple, but it makes sense. We see a lot of Habanero and pineapple as well as Scotch Bonnets and sometimes we may see a Ghostie floating around, but rarely does this type seem to get too far into the superhots, particularly the upper level. I really liked this idea, given that it was possibly a new spin on pineapple sauces. Pineapple is also one of my favorite fruits, so even discounting the onion powder and garlic powder in the ingredient list, I had high hopes.

Those hopes were temporarily dashed into the rocks when I first opened the bottle at room temperature. The sauce had a foul odor and a fairly unpleasant taste and it seemed directly attributed to those aromatics I mentioned. Sauces of this type almost never have those elements and it’s largely because they’re unnecessary. Here, despite being near the end of the ingredient list, they were quite distracting, to the point I was debating whether or not I was going to do a video. For me not to film a video on a sauce, it has to repel me to the extent that under no circumstances do I ever want to taste it again, even for a video. It’s been a while since that’s happened, so for this to be the case, that’s kind of saying something.

But...as is my wont, I threw it in the fridge to see what it was like chilled. Refrigerating sauces can change the flavor complex, sometimes pretty considerably, so I was hopeful the sauce would be more tolerable colder. It was, almost to the letter, as in I found it tolerable rather than something I disliked, but not much more than that. This was a shame, as clearly pineapple is used in the sauce, as it is quite nicely pulpy and thick. The body of this sauce, in fact, was fantastic. There is a decent pineapple flavor, but despite it being the first ingredient, it is trampled under foot by the aromatics. I also did like the combination of the Reapers and Jalapenos and if those two ingredients I mentioned in the first paragraph were simply absent, this would be a far better sauce.

As it stands, I kind of think this is using the flavors that might be utilized to prepare Kalua pig and tossing them into a sauce, given the Lu’au name for the sauce, but they might have just tried to make a different approach for a very saturated segment of the market. I did find it worked to much varying extents, depending on what it was paired with, so I’m happily more able to come to terms with it, but this is ultimately very against my preferences. Despite the Carolina Reaper, which is paired here with the more flavorful Jalapeno, this is overall a quite mild sauce.

Bottom line: If your tastes for this kind of sauce run to more the semi-sweet and you wouldn’t mind some onion and garlic with your pineapple sauce, this is probably worth a shot.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 3 

Butterfly Bakery Maple Chocolate Ghost Hot Sauce Review

Butterfly Bakery Maple Chocolate Ghost

Reviews like this are among the most challenging to write. Like other Vermont sauce makers Angry Goat and Silk City, Butterfly Bakery is in my favored nation sauce maker list (see SOTY list at right for link to that page) and like those other two, they are very intent on experimenting and presenting flavors that are quite unique in the world of hot sauce. However, like both of those other two, in doing so, they have created a sauce that has missed a bit with me and it is this one right here.

I refer to these sauces with the phrase “more interesting than good,” and it’s not necessarily a knock, as those words mean distinctly different things. They are not mutually exclusive attributes, by any means, but at the end of the day, not everything is always going to hit. Here, I should be pre-disposed to love this sauce. It has my favorite superhot, the lovely Ghosties, presented front and center and backed by the usual mash accompaniments, but also by maple syrup and cocoa. It is herein that I think the problem lies for me. When you use the word “chocolate,” it implies certain things. The chocolate we generally know is created by melding a sugar, usually a lot of it, cocoa powder, and cocoa butter (or possibly another fat). This sauce seemingly has 2 of those 3 things and of the 2, neither is in great amount, at least not enough to greatly influence the flavor profile in comparison to the Ghosties. Calling this one Maple Cocoa Ghost would have been more reflective of what’s in the bottle. 

Every superhot, Ghosties included, have a facet of frequently being intensely bitter. Cocoa powder by itself is quite bitter, as any of us who tried it as a child thinking it was Nestle Quik powder can attest. So, we have bitter amplified by bitter, which creates somewhat of a feedback loop. This is also one of the thickest sauces I’ve had from anyone not named Torchbearer and so it tends to come out in dollops and the dollops tend to hold in place, especially if the sauce is cold, which further reinforces that attribute. 

This results in some difficulty in finding where this sauce fits and with what. There are some suggestions on the label, but for me, it didn’t work on ice cream, even a heavily sweet one with chocolate flakes in it. This is definitely a sauce that works best if you spread it out more, to let it meld with whatever you’re attempting to use it on. I found it best paired with aged cheeses, salty meats, and fruity cheeses, like a bluberry Stilton. The label suggests using on beans, which I’m taking as refrieds, and I could see that working better as you would have both heat and potentially stirring into something, as well as adding to a brownie batter batch, but I think it will take more playing. As this is not a particularly pleasant sauce by itself, and the thickness I mentioned means you will likely get pockets of the sauce by itself. With Ghosties this far forward, it is also probably best reserved for chileheads only, as I don’t see normies enjoying this overly. This does, however, represent the attributes of Ghosties well, in that it ratchets immediately to as hot as it will get, which for me was somewhat over a 2, and then camps there. Additionally, this is one of those where a little goes quite a way, so the bottle should last quite a while...

Bottom line: While I appreciate that the Ghosties are this forward, I think for me, the tuning on this one would need to be both a thinner sauce, as well as a much sweeter one. It did inspire quite a bit of curiousity in me, however, and I will continue to play around with it...

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 3

Gindo's Nashville Hot Pickle Hot Sauce Review

Gindo’s Nashville Hot Pickle

Note: This is the 700th overall post for this here blog.

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qt02EhFr-E 

I’m not really the hugest fan of dill in hot sauces. I definitely like dill as a flavoring and have made many a dill dip and, as a kid, used to chew on the herb raw during the summer months, but I find that I like it only in fairly specific areas. One of the major areas of interest to me with hot sauces is pairing them to foods and when you have a fairly strong herb presence, such as dill, in a hot sauce, that also needs to be paired, in addition to all the other components. So, for all that, traditionally I have found hot sauces using dill to be a bit limited in where I like it. But, like with many other ingredients, put it in the hands of a master and things change. I won’t go so far as to say I’m a believer now, but my eyes are much more open to the light now...

I think in concept that this is a brilliant marriage of flavors. Nashville Hot I’ve had in many ways, or at least in many ways of people calling it that, but heavy Cayenne will generally have my interest and the highly flexible nature of that pepper goes a long way in forgiving tinkering. I should now note that there is no Cayenne, or at least none listed, in this sauce. Also, pickle sauces...so these tie in with my earlier comments on dill and a lot of them seem like nothing more than pureed pickle, to which I always wonder, what’s the point? Why am I buying a liquefied version of that? I can just make that my damn self, but pickle was one of the hotter trends for a while and thanks to places like Popeye’s, I can see more of a value in pickles than previously. Altogether, merging those two flavors, which should be complementary, makes a degree of sense.

But, as I said, leave it to Gindo’s to blow my mind, which this sauce instantly did. Analysis is one thing, but having your head exploded via taste buds is always a welcome experience. Here we have perhaps the ultimate version of what this union could be. This is a medium thick, gorgeous-looking sauce, using at least some of the Gindo’s base that shows up in a lot of the limited run sauces. Habanero is as hot as the peppers go, so this has a nice degree of heat, but nothing challenging. I had to check the ingredients to be sure, but there are no pickles here, just an expert use of fresh dill to create one of the more brilliant and comprehensive taste adventures I think I’ve run across in a while. 

It also sort of defies pigeon-holing. I’ve tried it on a lot of things. Some I expected it to be good and it was, but in other arenas, I was less sure and the results were sometimes good and the sometimes clashy with other strong flavors. That is, I suppose, the blessing and curse of dill, but it was absolutely a joy and great fun to experiment. This joins the Deane’s crossover sauce in the list of me wishing I had gotten multiple bottles, but if you can get a hold of this gem and like pickle-flavored products, this is an absolute must.

Bottom line: Another frankly genius and often surprising elixir from one of the greatest talents we have in the hot sauce world.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 9
            Flexibility: 7
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 7 

Buffalo Trace Hot Sauce Review

Buffalo Trace

Yet another stealth B & G Foods sauce, a facet of which I was unaware until after I’d already received and opened the bottle, and another I found on the Amazon because I needed to add a couple of bucks for free freight. This reminds me a lot of the Four Sixes hot sauce I reviewed earlier in the year (check TOC at right), only with the heavy addition, as one might reasonably expect, of bourbon. While I think liquor, booze in general, can work in hot sauces, I find it’s a lot like extract in that most of the time it does not and it’s for a similar reason. Many of the times makers using one of those components gets very heavy-handed with the addition. In the case of this, it smells and tastes considerably of raw bourbon.

This creates a considerable problem for what is ostensibly a Lousiana-style Cayenne style. For other styles, if the liquor comes across as raw and unrefined, an application of heat to cook that off can often save the sauce. I generally will wind up sending them to the grill, particularly if they have enough sugar to help caramelize things. Given the vinegar-forward nature of this style, that is not really an option, as you will lose one of the defining characteristics of the sauce along with it. I do think the idea is potentially workable, but the bourbon needs to be much further back in the flavor mix. I’ve been saying bourbon here because in an oddity, the label says the flavor is “inspired by Buffalo Trace,” and the ingredients list bourbon and not Buffalo Trace specifically. So...why is Buffalo Trace on the label? 

I don’t know, but I can’t imagine it is any more complicated than mere branding. It’s hard to see this sauce winning over any fans, unless there is a market for a collector’s item. This is the kind of sauce you could ostensibly make by taking the aforementioned Four Sixes sauce and dumping some bourbon into it. That might be what they, in fact, did. Certainly the heat levels are similar, specifically not existent in either. 

At times, the Cayenne will try to peek its head out, but rather than being useful in restoring balance to heavier dishes, something the Louisiana-style is quite adept at, this one sort of degrades and diminishes the dishes, largely by wafting the smell of raw bourbon into your face when you bring the sauced food towards your face. It’s not outright horrible, not even the worst sauce I’ve had that has used liquor, but is also definitely not what I want in any sauce. 

Bottom line: Liquor in a sauce can work if handled carefully and gracefully. This one is a good example of when that doesn’t happen. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: 2
            Flexibility: 1
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 1

Overall: 1 

El Yucateco Habanero & Grilled Pineapple Hot Sauce Review

El Yucateco Habanero & Grilled Pineapple

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsPwC4hYm40 

I was pretty amped when El Yucateco came out with some new flavors a while back. I’ve had my fair share, and then some, of their regular ones and anything they do will always be of strong interest. They are frequently the next step in hot sauces for many chileheads when they get tired of the lower heat mass market stuff that tends to popular the market in the Mexican-style. 

I was amped and then I couldn’t get my greedy little grubbins on them without some major ordeals...and I noticed the word “onion” in the ingredients, which always gives me pause. I also had a number of other sauces in that style ahead of it, so I backburnered these until that fabled “someday,” but always intended to get to at least some of them. I don’t recall this one specifically, but when I saw it on the grocery store shelf where I normally shop, I figured I’d pick it up right then before they changed their minds.

As it turned out, I had recently gone through another sauce, which will be coming AFTER this both on the blog and in the video series, because that’s how I’m rolling I guess, and it was a bit more on the savory side. I had a really neat video idea in mind, but it needed the sauce to be somewhat sweeter, which this one kind of is. It definitely calls to mind both churrascos, where they do the grilled pineapple on a trompo, but even more where it might go with an al pastor type setting, or possibly chicken done in that way rather than pork. So, it didn’t quite work as I had in mind with that dish and I’m still searching, but this is overall a quite nice sauce. 

Unusual for sauces with pineapple, the Habaneros come in front of the pineapple and there is a quite forward amount of that flavor as well as some of those al pastor leanings.  Pineapple is present, to be sure, but it is a very different take on the style and probably not meant at all to live in the space where those other more fruit-forward ones we’re more familiar with does. This one does at least have a nicely appreciable degree of heat, but it’s none too much. I don’t mind this, but with the lean away from those others, this also is something I’m not sure is going to work overly great on pizza, though I am willing to try...which I will also do at some point.

Bottom line: Very lovely and intriguing sauce from El Yucateco and a bit of a surprise as well. Definitely think of this one more in that al pastor vein rather than a fruit-based sweet hot, but where it works, it works extremely well. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8

Overall: 5

Mythical Meats Dragon's Breath Hot Sauce Review

Mythical Meats Dragon’s Breath

This will (probably) be the shortest full review on the blog. This is the third (and almost certainly) final of the Mythical Meats hot sauces I do from them, this one another I got from Amazon. Because of that facet, I was not aware the sauces were produced by Torchbearer, which is indicated directly on the label of this one. From the Mythical Meats website, this is a relabel of the Garlic Reaper, which I reviewed here: https://d-dubtsaaf.blogspot.com/2021/05/torchbearer-garlic-reaper-hot-sauce.html

Unlike the other two, which were slightly different from what I remembered of their Torchbearer counterparts, probably due to a batch variation, this one is exactly how I remembered the Garlic Reaper and any commentary I might make has been already covered in that review, which I will not repeat.

Bottom line: This is a relabel of the Torchbearer Garlic Reaper. 

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 3 

Kinder's Creamy Louisiana Hot Sauce Review

Kinder’s Creamy Louisiana

Here we have a bit of an anomaly, a strange sort of entry. It is very clearly labeled as a hot sauce, although I believe it has since been rebranded as a “Wing & Dip” sauce, which is probably more realistic. I find this functions barely as a hot sauce and if they simply marketed this erroneously, it does got a long way towards explaining things...at least some things. The label, throwing the convention of treating liquids with a volumetric nomenclature, instead goes for weight. Additionally, there is the inclusion of both Vitamin E and Green Tea Extract, both ingredients going beyond my understanding of why they’re there. 

Kinder’s is a pretty huge name in the seasoning trade, with a fairly large and wide variety of rubs and dry mixes centered more or less around meat. They have some frozen food products as well and I imagine this is part of a larger brand extension. I’ve seen many of their BBQ products and found them generally favorable, if slightly overpriced to my mind. They also have many wing sauces, but the hot sauces are new. I want to say they had some beef jerky out at one time or maybe snack sticks, but I may have just dreamed that. I try to get to the bigger names when they come out with new hot sauces and while I don’t know if Kinder’s is national or not, they do seem very present. I went in thinking that the hot sauce would be more along the lines of the other stuff I’ve had from them that I’ve mentioned above. 

The big issue here, beyond just being in a plastic bottle with slightly overly thick and rigid walls, is the off-flavor to this. I can’t put my finger on precisely what it is, but something is very off, some odd note that I find overwhelmingly distracting. It is less so when used with meat, which is why changing this to a “Wing & Dip” sauce is more reasonable, particularly if you are pairing it with a nice bleu cheese dressing, but trying to use it as an actual Lousiana-style hot sauce proved to be a mistake, as it generally fouled and degraded whatever I was putting it on. It is both somewhat harshly abrasive, as well as having those very funky flavor notes that struck me as somewhat artificial in tone. It could have been the plastic leaching or whatever they were using for the Vitamin E or the Green Tea Extract or possibly the modified dextrose or soybean oil, all ingredients I don’t generally run across in hot sauce, but I’m not familiar enough with those flavor profiles to definitively pick it out. Perhaps it’s some combination. Whatever the case, I found it rather unpalatable for the most part. It’s not all the way to inedible, but the usages are very, very narrow. Heat-wise, consistent with the style which name it uses, there is next to no heat.

Bottom line: I’ve had a lot of Louisiana-style sauces, as it is one of my favorite styles. I’ve had a lot of wing sauces as well, some of which appear in FOH videos. I truly do not know quite what they were attempting with this, as it fails as a hot sauce, while also not being especially creamy. The overall effect is just kind of bizarre and confusing.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 0 

Captain Mowatt’s Jolly Roger Hot Sauce Review

Captain Mowatt’s Jolly Roger

The very last of the Captain Mowatt’s I got last year and possibly my favorite of the bunch, though the Canceaux Turbeaux was also excellent (reviews can be found in the TOC > link at right). It is at least the minimum of that very worthy and delectable blend. This is definitely the hottest of the bunch, with Habaneros and Ghosties holding court. I found this to have a nice degree of build, though I don’t think this will be overly challenging. It can get up there a bit, though nowhere near to the exaggeration suggested on the label, so it might be nice for normies who are ready to push the envelope a bit but not ready to go all the way to full chilehead. Chileheads will not find this particularly challenging. It is happily missing any of the bitter superhot notes.

There are quite a lot of things going on here. We have some playful fruitiness here and there from the Habs, along with a quite lovely umami punch from the seaweed, the salt, and possibly some of the other spices at hand, but the first flavor is a very nice tang from the cider vinegar. Here, though there is a touch of the foot smell from that vinegar at times, the effect as far as flavor is a lot towards tang than vinegar punch and this is one of the rare times that I think that particular vinegar works well in the blend. 

Indeed, we have here an exceedingly well-done sauce, provided you want the tang, as at home in a ramen soup as it is on fried foods or generally anywhere you might normally use a Lousiana-style sauce. It definitely is more than that, though, and this sauce is quite a bit more flexible than that style usually is. I found it very nice on a fairly wide variety of things and for quite a while, was flying through the bottle. Given that it is an 8 fl. oz. bottle, that is probably saying something. It may not have the depth and richness or accessibility of the aforementioned Canceaux Turbeaux, but I found it worked pretty well on seafood also.

Bottom line: As long as you want both a nice degree of heat and tang, this is a quite worthy blend, and well worth a look. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 8
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 7