Splintered Hummin' & Strummin' Hot Sauce Review

Splintered Hummin' & Strummin'

I don't generally have a lot of interest in strawberry sauces, as they take me generally a really long time to get through. I'm not a fan of the strawberry chicken combination, outside of say a summer strawberry salad, and as most of them are fairly sweet, there's only so much ice cream I consume, either with or without a nice strawberry hot sauce. So, it can take a bit to get through a bottle and space is always kind of at a premium in my fridge door.

But, they can be interesting on burgers and this was the last of the sauces from Splintered that used the base of Reapers and so on, described elsewhere here in other reviews, with replacing the main fruit and for the sake of completeness, I definitely wanted to have a crack at it. I had no idea when I got them how sweet or fruity they would actually be and I think at least some part of me had a high notion of making a July 4 sundae, potentially, with all of them, but alas. This, like the others, is not particularly sweet, but like the other berry flavors, is very forward in fresh fruit flavor. Strawberry, though, is a lot more subtle than I think the other two are and consequently, the superhot bitter of the Reapers reads a bit more here. It also feels ever so slightly hotter, but it is still not particularly blazing. 

The real issue I have with this one is the consistency. This sauce is not watery, but overall quite thin. I found this to be a bit of a dilemma, as it was too runny to work well on burgers and not quite sweet enough for desserts. Actually, I should take that back. It worked the best on ice cream, but the runniness again created an issue. There was some very nice favorable flavor cancellation there and I was debating hunting down some strawberry shortcake to try it there. 

It is not anywhere near as savory as the other two berry variants, so flexibility is somewhat of an issue. Fortunately, I had this during summer and during summer, when strawberries are more in season, it's always nice to have a summer strawberry salad or two and that's where this thing really shined, beyond the ice cream and possibly the desserts I mentioned. It brought the salad to life in a way that perfectly contrasted with the crispy bacon and chicken nuggets, and though I used cheddar cheese, I think some nice bleu would have really been the ticket. So, you may have to fish around a bit to pair this, but it definitely can be well worth it when you find the combination.

Bottom line: The last of the fruit-based Splintered sauces based on the same foundation, this one is definitely the equal to the others in flavor, but is marred considerably by the consistency.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 5 

Splintered Dirty Blues Hot Sauce Review

Splintered Dirty Blues

Alright, a 1 and a 2 and 3 and let's get going. What we have here is the usual Splintered framework, at least as far as the fruit-based sauces that I've done (as well as the one on deck - check TOC at right for any you may have missed), which is vinegar, Reaper mash, Jalapeno mash, salt, and both onion and garlic powder. This is the base upon which the various fruits lay upon and it's very interesting, because it almost functions as a control group. I quite like the idea, though the results vary for me pretty widely. This one, however, I'm happy to say, is my favorite of the lot by a pretty wide margin...at least for now. 

This is because the blueberries have a fresh and lively vibrancy, a freshness to them, along with a wonderful concentration of flavor. In the background, we have the aromatics and the peppers, with the Reapers bringing a slight degree of heat. While I still feel the onion and garlic powders are unnecessary and all the sauces would be better without those things, I will note that their base with fruit combination works the best here and the sauce by itself is pretty nice. It is not sweet enough to use on pancakes and it failed pretty considerably on blueberry pie, but it works well on ice cream and I could see it doing well with other breakfast foods, like sausage. Indeed, it is on meats where this really shines. Chicken, pork, and beef all worked wonderfully with it. I have my doubts on pairing it with fish, but I was tempted to go track down some buffalo to pair it with...I still might. I think it also could come together well with something like cheeses. 

For me, my preference with fruit-based sauces will always be towards the sweeter side of things and that might be my preference generally...discounting the Louisiana-styles and Mexican-style sauces, of course. I do think if you like fruit-based sauces, particularly the ones with blueberry, this one is definitely worth a go, even though it presents a side I don't think I've seen many of the other ones necessarily come forward with. Reaper has definitely been used with blueberries before elsewhere, but the berry taking on and meshing with the other components so well was something I was pleasantly surprised to find. Even with the Reaper, like the other Splintered fruit sauces, the heat here is pretty tame. 

Bottom line: Easily my favorite of the Splintered fruit sauces thus far and to my mind, probably the best. If you're a fan of blueberry hot sauces, this one should be on your radar. 

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 6

Lunar Ghost Smoke Hot Sauce Review

Lunar Ghost Smoke

I've mentioned this before about other sauces, but I can't get away from the idea that words matter, that they have to mean things, in order to have any value. The more specific the word, the less I feel like we should drift from its designation. Take, for instance, the word "decimate." This is a very specific Roman practice of reducing something, usually opposing armies of lands they'd captured or otherwise subjugated, by 10 percent. We are familiar with "deca" as in a unit of 10 and are familiar with such words as decade, but "deci" is on the other side of the zero and means 1/10, as "centi" means 1/100 of something, such as a meter, or cent as in 1/100 of a dollar.

Anyway, sriracha also means a very specific type of hot sauce. Sometimes companies will want to use this, but then make something that might otherwise be a very fine sauce, such as this one, but which will not register as the word it's using. Sriracha, in a lot of ways, could be considered a sort of liquefied chili-garlic sauce, and it has a characteristic of imparting a fairly specific flavor, but one general enough to be good solo or incorporated into various Asian dishes. It can be used as either dipping sauce or topping, as well as mixed in. This is another that does not really work this way, from a flavor perspective, and is not what I would call a sriracha. 

I really liked the idea of this, a sriracha with some nice Ghosties bringing heat and flavor, as well as the addition of smoke. It sounded quite interesting, but what's here is very much a Ghost-forward sauce, in terms of both flavor and heat. This means there is quite solid heat, to be sure, probably well above what will be comfortable for most non-chileheads, but also a very notable superhot bitter, which is probably the main flavor note. There are accents of the Ghosties before the roaring heat and bitter come on, along with the smoke and a bit of pungency from the vinegar, but the sugar and garlic part of things are lost nearly entirely.

This is a sauce that almost immediately overpowers whatever it's used on with that bitter aspect. While I found it a lovely sauce when using it as incorporations with lighter amounts and mixing it in with other sauces or foods, sprinkling it over the top was not something I found overly enjoyable. Once I got out of the idea of using it for Asian foods, which can often be a bit light and delicate in terms of flavors, I found a lot of places I liked it, but again, mixed in with other stuff. Indeed, that's where I think this shines and has a lot to offer. 

Bottom line: This is not what I would call a sriracha and I'm a bit confused as to why they called it that. Taken as its own thing, it has a lot to offer, such as putting the Ghosties very forward and showcasing what they can bring, which is its best footing.

 Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 5
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8

Overall: 5

Moto Hot Sauce Review

Moto Calabrian Chili

 

Note: This is the 700th overall hot sauce review on this blog. 

Calabrians are one of my more favored pods. There is an entire post to the effect of which pods are my strong preference, which can be accessed via the SOTY Link at right. Consequently, I always get a little excited when they’re used in sauces, though, truth be told, the resulting sauce I enjoy about half the time. Of the half that I do, it tends to be a lot, while the other half I enjoy less well I find a bit underwhelming. Of course, one never knows until you crack open the seal and get into the bottle.

I really like the bottle. The packaging is all-around very slick. On the label, there is a scooter with a background of flame and it’s very nicely structured with the text. “Moto” is an Italian derivative of the Latin “motus,” which means movement or motion and so I figured this was an Italian sauce. I didn’t investigate too closely, though, as I was already sold on the appeal. It is not, in fact, Italian, but from Northern Cal, but I’m wasn’t overly upset with that revelation. The majority of my favorite sauces are from the USA, though sometimes with regional ingredients, like the Calabrian pods, this can work against it.

So, I made a special trip to get a bottle, cracked open the bottle and was nearly instantly dismayed. I am not even remotely a fan of oils and fats. I hate the mouth feel and generally dislike the flavor of it by itself. When used in sauces, it tends to make them a bit thicker than I would prefer and they tend to come across as heavy. This was exactly the case here, more akin to a salad dressing than hot sauce, despite more heat than salad dressings usually have. It is only Calabrians, though, so heat is quite tame. Ok, fine, the first shot was at room temp and maybe I’d like it better chilled, as what happens sometimes with hot sauces. So, I tossed it into the fridge door and forgot about it while I did some of the other sauces around it and contemplated what I could conceivably pair it with.

To that, the best thing to do with this is to try and seek balance. So, anything astringent or on the lighter side, like tomatoes, it works well. Pairing it with cheese was...not great. It is another that would work well with a tomato sauce Italian dish, but not at all with something like a Carbonara, unless you used this in place of some of the heavier parts of that sauce. It is very low in sodium and has no black pepper, so using it on something with black pepper and/or a higher salt content is also quite nice. If whatever you’re thinking is heavier, then it is less useful, unless you want richness on top of richness, which, for me, is just too much. I didn’t love the flavor here, as the Calabrians were not forward enough, but in the right application, it can be pretty nice. You may just have to cast about a bit to find the right light for it…

Bottom line: I can’t really say this is a good representation of Calabrians, as it comes across to me as far too oily, but if you’re up for some experimentation, this can be pretty fun to play with.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 4

Splintered Jazz Berry Hot Sauce Review

Splintered Jazz Berry

I didn’t look at the labels too closely when I picked up the four sauces from Splintered, just doing the main check to make sure they didn’t have onions or onion-derivatives. Yes, there was onion powder, but that can go either way, depending on how much is used and so I figured I’d take a calculated chance, given that the idea of pairing Carolina Reaper with the various fruits could be very interesting. It was certainly unusual in that this is not something I often saw.

What I didn’t realize was that they have a framework, a flavor platform of sorts, in which they have a sort of base, including the mighty, mighty Reapers, but also Jalapeno, as well as the more usual vinegar and salt, but also including curious components for a fruit-based sauce, such as the aforementioned onion powder, as well as garlic. It appears that they then will just change out the fruit ingredient, be it pineapple or blueberry or here, raspberry. I don’t believe this is a direction I would personally take, but I do understand having a format, and so figured it would be interesting to see what they did with the various fruits in the context of that base, as sort of a control group.

While I didn’t like the pineapple (reviewed elsewhere here) especially, I think the raspberry works much better. There is a vibrancy to the flavor, which suggest to me that they most probably used fresh raspberries. Leaning a bit harder towards the savory side with those ingredients also meant that they might gain a bit as far as pairing with meats, but would also likely lose when it came time to pair with sweeter items, such as ice cream. I don’t know of a world in which garlic and onion would be good in ice cream, but can say definitively it is not this one...at least not for me.

Like the pineapple before it, heat is pretty moderate. Every so often, a trace of the Reaper flavor will show up and I will say I did find a lot of enjoyment playing around with this sauce, to see how flavor cancellation would go, depending on the pairings. I found it pretty pointless to use on sweeter foods, where I might normally use a more desserty raspberry hot sauce, but did find it lovely on chicken tendies, where I don’t like the more desserty sauces. It was, as expected, wonderful on burgers and I liked it quite a bit on pork chops also, though I must needs give some credit to the salt/pepper blend I use on the burgers, which greatly accentuated things.

Bottom line: A sort of interesting spin on fruit in hot sauces, with this one being a lot more enjoyable, as far as I’m concerned. Well worth a spin if that’s your bag.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 5 

Seed Ranch Umami Reserve Hot Sauce Review

Seed Ranch Umami Reserve

So back a bit ago, on my last BYT haul, I came away with the Umami Everyday Sauce from Seed Ranch and the other hot sauce I reviewed earlier. Because the Everyday Sauce is very strictly not a hot sauce nor meant to be one, it does not appear in these annals. There is an FOH video for that specifically, if you’re interested in checking it out. Not to spend too much time on it here, but that is one of the best sauces of any kind anyone has ever created, ever. My one admittedly minor complaint was that I should like a bit of heat. I liked that Everyday Sauce so much that I made it a priority hunt down a bottle of that Reserve post-haste.

Clearly Seed Ranch felt the same way, as they released this, which is the Umami Reserve, which does have heat, and is also meant to be in the hot sauce category. This sauce is quite unique in the world of hot sauces, given that it is basically that other sauce, with the addition of Chocolate Habaneros. There was a time when I found Habaneros to be a fairly dismal thing in general, but definitely in a sauce...until I discovered the reds generally and red Savinas particularly. Since then, I have a greater tolerance for the flavor, which I still don’t think is very good, discounting those red varietals, which I do like. Chocolate I find kind of interesting, but still too close in flavor to remind me of the Oranges and it is that flavor here which mars this sauce, respectively.

Here is where it gets tricky. Taken by itself, the sauce is still quite wonderful and from a flavor perspective, both unique and quite beyond what a lot of makers out there are doing. However, it is a variant on a different sauce and a comparison, to me, is unavoidable. It is certainly hotter than the other, which has no heat, but it also adds both the Habanero flavor and a certain bitterness I could do without. The heat is not even remotely scorching, just a nice cozy warmth to let you know it’s there, but that is the trade-off with a lot of things. Drive the heat up and flavor will tend to necessarily skid somewhat. Where I think this one does better is that it is somewhat less astringent and pungent than the everyday sauce.

With umami, it has a fairly wide variety of applications. Everything from ramen to mushrooms to most meats, particularly aged ones, will all do well with a healthy dose of either sauce. Both sauces are a joy to experiment with and to be clear, the Habanero flavor notes is very much my own personal preference. There is not a damn thing wrong with either sauce, and both have a silky smooth mouth feel and just a pleasure to use. You can’t really go wrong with picking up a bottle of either, or have the fun I did and wind up with them both.

Bottom line: While my preference for flavor is more with the Everyday Sauce, I do like the heat and lowered pungency of this one better, so in many respects, it’s a wash. Absolutely very worthy sauces that any foodie should get their hands on with all due quickness.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 9
            Flexibility: 6
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 9

Overall: 6  

Hawaiian Hot T’s P.O.G.2 Hot Sauce Review

Hawaiian Hot T’s P.O.G.²

Note: This sauce appears on Season 28 of The Hot Ones.

The worst thing about this is the label and yes, it’s apparently time for me return to grousing about labels and label design. I think there is a pretty strong correlation between sauces I find favorable and me doing this, because I think it potentially works against the sauce. Here, we have a few problems. The level gap is excessively large, which makes the ingredients and nutritional information section too small. The front part, with the Ghost pepper in a ghost costume, is mostly fine. I could live without the foil, but it’s ok for all that. Then there is the section between the two I mentioned, where we have an unholy onslaught of label foil with insufficient contrast and it’s just...not great. In that text, after searing my eyes, I detected that this sauce is meant to have Scorpion in it, an ingredient which does not appear in the ingredient list. I’m certain this is an oversight and the version used here is probably powder, but it’s hard to proof-read stuff like that when the label design is so poor. Amusingly, the ingredient list on the Heatonist website and the Hawaiian Hot T’s website is completely different from my bottle, so I’m going to presume I got a wrong or incorrect label or possibly different batch. 

That aside, the important part is the sauce itself. As I’ve mentioned numerous times, I’m no fan of either Scorpion or passion fruit and I kind of went into this sauce more for coverage than any other motivator, but I was happily and quite pleasantly surprised by the sauce, which does a lot of things at once. It is a very much composite mix of the flavors and there is a nice tropical vibe from the fruits and Habs, along with every once in a while a shot of what seems like a straight cane sugar. This is a thick and somewhat pulpy sauce, so agitation can be a challenge, but if I can get hits of that cane sugar in amidst the overall atmosphere, I want that. I really like the way this sauce approaches sweetness. I can’t really pick out individual fruit flavors, but this is evidently an island drink concoction ported over into a hot sauce, so I’m thinking the blend is probably the idea.

As for heat, there is a bit of a floral note and plenty of bitter superhot notes that seem to me beyond what the Ghost would impart in the dead last ingredient slot, as it is here. It seems likely there is some Scorpion in there somewhere, maybe around where the Ghost is. This was in the 7 slot for the show and it does have an appreciable punch to it, but nothing overwhelming. With heavily tropical flavors, I think this generally works best on lighter meats, so seafoods, chicken, and pork would probably do nicely here. I haven’t tested it on all of them, but of the ones I have, I did find this quite enjoyable.

Bottom line: Definitely dig what they’re doing here and this is another enjoyable entry from the show, presuming you like tropical flavors and a good bit of punch to your sauce.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 7
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6

Overall: 5  

El Yucateco Habanero & Ghost Hot Sauce Review

El Yucateco Habanero & Ghost

I may have mentioned it before in these pages, but I’m a long-time fan of science fiction, particularly the “Golden Age.” One of the things that writers of that era loved to do was to come up with adages, phrases meant as rules, such as Asimov’s famous (and currently ignored) “Laws Of Robotics.” In that spirit, I am considering developing my own relative to this and for the first one, it would probably be something along the lines of “There is no hot sauce where the flavor is improved by the addition of extract,” followed by the corollary of “No sauce is ever improved by the addition of extract.” You may be able to see where this review is going...

This was part of a wave of new sauces that El Yucateco put out for their 55th Anniversary celebration, if memory serves. I’ve had my eye on it for a while, but like the other one from this batch that I reviewed this year (Hab & Grilled Pineapple, see TOC link at right >>), I put it on the backburner, both because I had other sauces in that style on deck first and because of the presence of the word onion in the ingredients. There does not appear to be actual onion in this sauce, just the flavoring of, and my intolerance will allow very limited uses, such as minor amounts of powder or salt of that type, so I figured this was probably safe in that respect. Ghost and Habanero go together well, so I was kind of excited about this combination here. Ghosties are my favorite superhot and I’ve personally used these two actual peppers together. I am honestly a bit miffed at the audacity of them using the word “Ghost” in the sauce name, when there are not actual Ghosties in the mix, but extract...I get ahead of myself a bit.

In any case, the onion does not read much in the flavor of this. Initially, the sauce reminded me of amateur cooking, in which someone may want to add some dried spice or other, and not give it sufficient time to meld and cook in and integrate with the dish and you get this flavor aspect heavily reminiscent of the scent of dried spice. That is what this tasted like, which usually means that a dried ingredient was added and given insufficient time under heat to rehydrate and become part of the club. After that, however, the flavor of the extract came much more to the fore and it’s why this review stared with the paragraph it did. There is just no masking that and the only one who has come close is the Buldak Black sauce from Samyang. 

Mexi-style sauces tend to be somewhat inherently limited in application, but here, you have a sauce that has extract fire, extract flavor, with a very slight citrus and Habanero aspect to it. It is quite rough overall and not something I find enjoyable by itself. It does mix out acceptably with other milder, better-flavored taco sauces, for instance, but if you’re in the position where you have to add other stuff in it to mask the flavor, the sauce itself is largely a failure and it disappoints me to no end to type those words. 

This is easily the hottest thing El Yucateco has ever made and this is quite a bit of heat for $3 shelf price, but I can’t imagine too many users finding this satisfying, particularly in flavor. Like all extract sauces, it races immediately to whatever heat level its going to hit and stays there, which I imagine will be too much for most normies. Chileheads may like that part, even if that heat reads largely as artificial, as most extract sauces do, but there is the flavor that one has to contend with, which is decidedly not great. The best thing I’ve found for it, other than trying to mix it out with something tastier, is to use it on meats. I can’t remember the last bottle of extract hot sauce I’ve finished, but even though this is the usual 4 fl. oz. instead of 5, I’m not sure I will be getting to the bottom of this one, either. 

Bottom line: Though easily the hottest, it is also one of the more disappointing sauces from this brand. I’m not sure who would find this enjoyable and their decisions on this I find baffling. 

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 3 

Uncle Chainsaw A Fuego Hot Sauce Review

Uncle Chainsaw A Fuego 

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg7vwtZuSIs

As a chile and garlic flavored vinegar, this one is pretty nice. The peppers show up a bit on the back end and the garlic has a nice subtlety to it, after you get past the belt of vinegar. This, however, is indicated as a hot sauce, though the website refers to it as a style called chili water. The predominant vinegar is intentional, as is the lack of suspension for the various particles. We are going to be considering and rating it here as a hot sauce, given that is the nomenclature on the bottle, which again has a lot of the heavy metal motifs that are one of my favorite things about this maker. 

One of the facets with this style is its extreme looseness and consistency, which is basically watery. The second is that it is more or less as I described as a chile and garlic flavored vinegar, but perhaps infused would be more accurate than flavored. You will wind up with a big old hit of vinegar, just a solid punchy belt right in the kisser of that pungency. There are shades of fresh garlic as well, though nowhere near as prominent and way in the back of all that is some slight heat and chile flavor. It definitely doesn’t taste bad...once the vinegar wanes a bit. 

For most of us, hot sauces are something we like to pair with various foods, but with this kind of product, it definitely needs to be incorporated as part of something else...unless that astringency slug is what you want. I think it will probably work very nicely in a dressing or for making refrigerator pickles, but that’s not really what I’m after in a hot sauce. If you want something as an ingredient to cook with, buying a hot sauce is a very expensive way of going about it. 

Taking this as a hot sauce, the issue of application is apparent. Trying to pour this frequently sees it running down the threads of the bottle and sometimes into the label. This is absolutely one in strong need of a restrictor cap, but even if it had one, I wouldn’t pair a more or less straight white vinegar with any of the foods I generally eat. I definitely have uses for this kind of thing and will use it, definitely, but as I described in the previous paragraph. 

Bottom line: Not really a hot sauce, much more a chile & garlic vinegar or “chili water” that has the wrong labeling. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 4
            Flexibility: 0
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 2

Overall: 2 

Pepper North Red Serrano & Reaper Hot Sauce Review

Pepper North Red Serrano & Reaper

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYykPR6xNHk 

My first (and prior to this, only) experience with Pepper North was another that arose due to a sauce being on The Hot Ones show. It was called Stargazer and is reviewed elsewhere here. I loved the idea, loved the title, as it hearkens back to a great song on one of the best rock albums ever, from one of my favorite bands, Rainbow, at a time when they were fronted by one of the all-time greats Ronnie James Dio, dearly missed still, and under the helm of the maestro Ritchie Blackmore. The sauce itself, however, did not quite live up to all of that majesty and was ok, but kept surprising me by not ever quite being as good as I thought it was or should be.

I saw this on the shelf of BYT one day, it might have been on clearance, memory no longer serves, but the first two words were Red Serrano, a pepper I have grown quite fond of. I still dislike the green Serranos, which are tragically the ones available most of the time in grocery stores, but the reds are simply phenomenal. If there was a great pepper to pair with the Reapers to sort of modify the flavor favorably, it is probably a Fresno, but if there was a slightly less great, but still entirely wonderful pod, it is definitely the red Serrano. There was some nice maple in there to boot, along with some Chipotle powder to round things out and I missed that the label called it a 9/10 Ultra Hot, so I was somewhat excited to see what the mix was here.

When I opened the bottle, it was blazing Reaper superhot bitter and not much else, which mystified me considerably. It was then that I looked at the label and ingredients and observed what I evidently had not before. So, I socked it away in the fridge door, where it sat for quite a while and I set about experimenting with it. It did nicely in nearly everything I tried it on and as the sauce level in the bottle lowered and I was able to agitate it better, a gorgeous sauce emerged, more in line with the flavor notes I was hoping for. It worked very nicely on nearly everything I put it on, everything from ramen to pizza, from mac & cheese to various meats. I’d even suspect it would do well in both an Asian food and Mexican food setting, making this one of the more flexible sauces I’ve had in a while. 

For all that, there is no getting around the fact that this is very much a superhot sauce and the mighty mighty Reapers are fully activated here. This sauce also does a nice job of building in heat, even though it’s pretty punchy out of the gate. I suspect this will be well beyond where most normies will find enjoyable or probably even tolerable, but I’d anticipate chileheads will find it fairly satisfying, particularly those who are also foodies. It’s good to have a sauce like this around as it packs a quite decent wallop without having to use a whole bunch of it. 

Bottom line: A sauce that bloomed into a surprisingly lovely, impressive sauce, a rare combination of delicious and quite roasty.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 3
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 10
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 8