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

Stuzzi Hot Sauce Review

Stuzzi

There is a YouTuber named Barrel Shape that I’ve been bouncing back and forth with a bit and I mention this because it is via one of his videos that this sauce came across my attention. I’d never heard of it before, but Italian food and drink holds a pretty strong appeal to me and so I was immediately interested, particularly since the sauce sounded right up my alley. Not only did it seem more in line with a Louisiana-style, one of my favorites, but it also had a couple of peppers I didn’t run across much, namely the Italian Cayenne and the Campanian. Mostly we hear about the wondrous Calabrian, which I do greatly love, but I’m always interested in trying out pods I haven’t run across before. Also, the claim is that the sauce is loved by wolves, which the more literal part of my brain was intensely curious about from a testing perspective...

I wasn’t able to find out about the validity of the wolf thing, but as for the Campanian peppers, at least in how they are represented here, I did find them to be nice, but not to the level of my beloved Calabrians. This sauce also has the pods in both a fresh and powdered form and I’m always a bit leery of this, as drying out pods tends to have side effects. Here is no exception and I found a slight bitterness to it. This isn’t really of major concern, however, as I only really noticed it when I was eating the sauce solo, which is pretty infrequent. 

This is a highly accessible, intensely flavorful, and quite flexible sauce. Even though it is a touch vinegar forward, it is not bracing and all the flavors meld together nicely, which helps it complement whatever you care to use it on. It is not hot, which is to be expected, given the peppers, but I could see this being a great gateway sauce. I tried it on a fairly wide variety of foods and while it definitely worked better moreso on some than others, I didn’t find a single food it didn’t work with. 

The glass bottle this comes in is quite unique and seems a bit artsy to me, another facet I quite enjoy. The packaging all around is quite excellent and I’m thrilled to report that the sauce is no less so. It could be a lovely elegant gift to the discriminating chili-curious around the holidays, I’d say. If there is a bit of a caveat for me, it is that all that attractive packaging does modify the value proposition a bit. I got my bottle, which is 3.4 fl. oz. for around $10, which is both a tad steep for the quantity as well as that style of sauce generally. I don’t usually dock for this too much in the reviews, but when you’re paying extra for stuff that will likely hit the recycling and/or trash bin, it does bear some noting.

Bottom line: Absolutely recommend this sauce for those who value flavor first and especially for the chile-curious out there...just don’t expect any heat particularly.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 9
            Flexibility: 9
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8

Overall: 7

Butterfly Bakery Duchess Mystery Pepper Hot Sauce Review

Butterfly Bakery Duchess Mystery Pepper

Here, we have a sort of “flying under the radar” type sauce, cloaked in a very nondescript and unassuming label, yet within that bottle is a sauce of pure wonder. As legend has it, there was a mystery patch growing within a field of Ghosties at the fabled Duchess Farms. It was not exactly a Ghostie, exhibiting what the label calls “juicy sweetness.” For me, once I learned of it, I was immediately interested and once I opened it and tried it, it immediately, out of the gate, scratched a number of itches all at once, appealing to my sense as a foodie, chilehead, and former homebrewer all at once. 

This was fairly unusual. Generally sauces will appeal more strongly to one aspect over the other and it is usually to my foodie side and absolutely, this is as intentional as I can make it on my part, but I’m always interested in new varietals and different pods. Not only is the sauce here delicious, with one of the more pleasing mouth feels I can remember, smooth and silky, with a fantastic body, it also really embraces and examines the pod itself, supported by one two other ingredients, that of the vinegar and salt. 

I mentioned homebrewer earlier and here’s why. Different yeasts will naturally yield differing grace notes during the fermentation process to the end result. Anchor Steam Beer, for instance, is derived from using a lager yeast, which generally wants stable chilled temperatures, and putting that at a higher “room” temperature, which yields the fruity notes that beer is known for. That aspect was immediately familiar to me with this sauce. The tones are delicate and lilting, dancing around the sort of Ghostie flavor, and complimenting the superhot bitter notes. 

I don’t think this would really qualify as a superhot, and I found the sauce here to be fairly tame. I can’t really say to try this if you’re interested in a superhot flavor without the accompanying heat, as this is really representative of itself and is very much its own thing, it’s beautiful gorgeous self. If you’re interested in the chiles from a pod perspective, you will get a lot of mileage out of this, as well as if you just want a really great sauce. Functionally, it fits more into the category, for me, where a Louisiana-style might normally dwell, but here, I have a bit of a dilemma. I definitely want to enjoy those grace notes and savor them, which cuts out most of the foods I would normally use with a Louisiana-style Cayenne...but that is me personally. The value for that aspect below is reflective of how well it would work there. 

Bottom line: This is one of the more fascinating sauces I’ve had in a while and one of the very few that I’m enormously grateful to have been able to try, perhaps the ultimate reward for being a food explorer and having an open mind, and yes, another itch scratch by this absolute gem.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 7

Sauced & Glazed Marty's Fusion Fuel Hot Sauce Review

Sauced & Glazed Marty's Fusion Fuel 

In August of 2022, I reviewed Doc’s Fusion Fuel (link in TOC at upper right), which is the flagship sauce. I found it seeming to want to straddle the line between a hot sauce and a barbecue sauce, which is fine. I didn’t find it particularly hot, so the intent of this sauce, which wants to be a milder version of that, I find kind of baffling. Since it has directly invoked the comparison, I think we’ll roll with that for a bit. In fact, I wasn’t overly interested in this sauce at all after reading through the ingredient list, but I figured since I did the Doc’s, I may as well do this as companion piece. I will say now that my recommendation is strongly towards the Doc’s, which at least makes a flavorful pass at what it’s attempting. 

To the comparison, both have the annoying foil labels that like to bounce whatever light source you’re trying to use to read it. This one makes a mention of giving it to kids and the website calls it “family-friendly,” which is one of the more nonsensical things I think I’ve seen for a product purporting to be a hot sauce. So, the intent here is a sort of “my first hot sauce” vibe? I will take them at their word and assume this is what they meant by putting out a milder version of an already mild product.

I’m all for accessibility and gateways for the chile-curious, as I have repeatedly noted, but we have a few problems with the approach here. If you lower the heat of something that already has fairly low heat, you’re left with no heat, which is what we have here. Chipotle is the only heat source and it is the third ingredient, so what heat is there will be and is minimal. The ingredient panels are the same between sauces, save for Doc’s Fusion Fuel having red Habaneros as the heat driver, again in the 3rd spot, with the addition of smoke flavor. Of the two, Doc’s reads as more notably smoky as well.

It’s nice they’re trying to make a product for children interested in chiles, I guess, but to my mind, the best gateway sauces are the ones that are flavorful and taste great. While Doc’s was a definitely push towards a barbecue sauce, as noted, this one seems to move from that nearly entirely. What is left is a sort of rough very tomatoey, slightly bitter, and noticeably unrefined collection of the various powders as notes on that platform, an approach I find baffling. I’m not sure what happened here, exactly, but what is here I don’t find works as either a hot sauce or a barbecue sauce. It is probably closest to the latter of those, but not a very good version there, either. This is not to say it is a bad or unpalatable sauce, but more a confusing and overall somewhat mediocre one. It is not one I find especially enjoyable and will probably be binning. 

Bottom line:  I might be wrong about who this is for and it’s perhaps more meant as a novelty companion piece for fans of the Back To The Future movie franchise and not intended to be consumed. I found it remarkably underwhelming and an unnecessary alteration to the Doc’s.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 2 

Mikey V's Pineapple Habanero Hot Sauce Review

Mikey V’s Pineapple Habanero

I like pineapple a great deal, and hot sauce, of course, and pairing pineapple with Habanero was a very big deal in the hot sauce world for quite a while. It seems less so now, especially once mango and Habanero sort of came into the fold, but I’ve had a lot of both styles. For a while, before things started to drift more towards mango Habanero, I had the idle thought that I might just wind up covering every single pineapple Habanero sauce that was around, sans onions, naturally. Sweet hots and fruit-based sweet hots, where these sauces usually reside, are among my favorite styles, so I consider myself well-versed enough in these to sort of have internal sub-categories of the style. This particular one fits more into the “pineapple juice” area. 

While it is clearly fruit-based, I can’t say it’s a sweet hot, though. This one reads a lot more as salty pineapple, which reminds me a bit of the churrascarias that put a rock salt water spray on the pineapple and roast them on a spit, twirling on a trompo. I don’t think that’s exactly what the intent was here, though...I’m not sure quite what the intent was, but there are quite a few ingredients that don’t really show up in the flavor, which is vinegar, pineapple, salt, with the vinegar making things more tangy than a blast, and a slightly bitter note here and there from the Habs. I quite like this flavor, but I have a bit of a problem with this sauce.

One of my favorite places to put the tropical fruit-based sweet hots is on pizza and I’m always happy when I’m able to do that. With the more watery and loose sauces, such as this one, that is right off the table, as the sauce will just run and sog out the crust, if you’re not exceedingly careful. Another issue with the sort of “pineapple juice”sub-category I think this falls into is that you tend to lose concentration of flavor. Sure, this can mean saucing more, but what happens when a sponge is saturated and you try to pour more water on it? I think this sauce would be dramatically improved by being a good two to three times thicker, go for a nice medium body to it. As it is now, it probably should have come with a restrictor cap. 

The best places I found this are generally with meats where you’d want pineapple, so things like chicken and pork, grilled pineapple slabs, or mixed drinks. For the foods where you’re not so worried about the sauce pooling and puddling, this can make a welcome addition, though I found the flavor frequently got lost in things like breading of tendies, for instance. It is a touch on the hotter side than these kinds of sauces, specifically the ones more like juice, tend to be, but I’d say more like 1 - 1.5, rather than racing towards a two. It is a quite nice, pleasant heat.

Bottom line: While I think this is overall a solid sauce, particularly in the flavor direction, the consistency definitely works against it. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 7
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6

Overall: 4

Black-Eyed Susan Death By Chocolate (Hot) Hot Sauce Review

Black-Eyed Susan Death By Chocolate Hot

It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly two and a half years since I did the Mild version of this, review available here: https://d-dubtsaaf.blogspot.com/2023/10/black-eyed-susan-death-by-chocolate.html, but it was worth the wait...way, way worth the wait. This is an extremely well-done sauce, very excellently delivered, and quite unlike anything else out there...just like the aforementioned Mild version. In fact, I’m tempted to just say to read that other review, because everything else applies, with the main difference being this one has a more satisfying heat. This one hovers more between a 1 and a 2, while the other was perhaps even under a 1 slightly, but both are utterly delicious. This also, incidentally, makes their ratings identical.

If I had to pick between the two, it would be this one, on account of that nicer heat level, but I also like the flavor of this slightly better. The more food adventurer you have in your blood, the more you will appreciate this, as there’s a lot going on and it’s a great deal to fun to play with some of the more meat-forward Mexican-style dishes that might bear some mole’ influence, like carne asada, carnitas, and Al Pastor. The sauce is a bit sweeter than most of the mole sauces I’ve encountered, but I found it a wonderful addition generally where I tried it. 

Bottom line: Picking up directly from the Milder version (again, read that review, as nearly all of it applies), this is, for me, the more preferable version of a thoroughly unique sauce, featuring one of the lesser used and undersung pods out there, the venerable Chocolate Habanero.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 6 

Seed Ranch Smoky Ghost Hot Sauce Review

Seed Ranch Smoky Ghost

I had noticed this brand on various grocery shelves here and there for a while, but the flavors always seemed a bit tame, so I thought it was maybe a boutique brand that was geared more towards intriguing flavor combinations, but not necessarily a heat that I would find satisfying. I gave them no more thought until I saw them on the hallowed shelves of BYT and noticed some other flavors that sounded intriguing. This was the one I picked up as introduction to the company, given that the ingredients up front were Ghosties, Chipotle, dates, and, inexplicably, cumin, but naturally I disregarded that last one.

After getting into it a bit, I think this sauce may be another that is somewhat miscategorized. For me, this is much more in line with what I recognize as a steak sauce than a hot sauce. It is fairly astringent, but like most steak sauces, the various ingredients are part of one unifying whole, an amalgamation of flavors rather than one individual component, other than maybe the black pepper. Interestingly, in both smell and aftertaste, that is the one ingredient that tended to read the strongest and hang in there the most, but it is not an especially black peppery sauce. 

What I was most excited for was the idea of having something smoky and perhaps leaning into the dates, which is a fruit I quite love, and with Ghosties in the name, I expected some degree of heat as well. Heat is here, but quite minimal. This is not going to be challenging for anyone in that respect, I wouldn’t think. The dates appear to be here more as part of the texture and body of the overall composite, rather than an individual flavor note. I was able to detect some grace notes of carrots here and there as well, which was interesting. Of note, apple is also in the mix here as well, but I think it’s more like the date, providing body to the whole. To be sure, this is not a particular sweet sauce, either.

I tried it in the usual places, but it didn’t work the way I was hoping, until it tripped over in my brain that I was applying it to the wrong foods. Once I switched over, things fell more into place. I thought the sauce was nice and the flavor pleasant, but it also seems to me “wrong,” for lack of better word, unless it is on something like a burger or maybe some pork, generally the same sorts of food where you might reach for a steak sauce. There it is excellent and unless they were to reformulate it and lean much more heavily into the things I mentioned in the first paragraph, which are also on the label, I think they’d be better off calling it a steak sauce instead of hot sauce.

Bottom line: Very intriguing introduction to this company, with a blend of ingredients that are somewhat unusual to behold for a hot sauce. If you stick to where you’d normally use a steak sauce, this delivers a quite lovely element to things.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 5

The General's Berry Breach Hot Sauce Review

The General’s Berry Breach

Note: This sauce was provided for purposes of review by Roger Damptz of Burn Your Tongue. Check him out on Facebook & Instagram. 

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

I have a stance about fruit-based sauces and it is that I think they should always lean towards the sweeter side of things. Now, admittedly, this is my direct preference and does not preclude me trying and sometimes enjoying sauces that don’t fit into this characteristic exactly, but that is what a not inconsiderable part of me wants when I see fruit as an ingredient in a sauce. For this, I was very interested to see what the result would be with their first fruit-based sauce, given this company’s very distinctive approach to the other sauces. 

The General’s sauces all tend to have a fairly notable characteristic in the flavor note that I’m fairly sure is due to the fermentation and how much mash is going into the respective bottles. This sauce joins the others in that and like most of the others, is relatively few ingredients. We have blueberries, Habanero mash, vinegar, honey, and salt. The honey is an interesting addition, given that it is far too subtle of a flavor to be there as a tasting note and instead winds up as sweetener. Most of the flavor here is Habanero, with a salted blueberry side note. There is a degree of bitterness here from the Habs as well that I could have lived without, even with the honey probably at least tempering that somewhat. This is definitely far from a sweet sauce, however. As far as heat, what is there is mostly immediately, but with Habaneros comes a slight build as well, which this does. I would call it a nice warmth, but not particularly challenging.

As with many other sauces that skew away from sweetness, I think it works against the sauce here and it would have been better served to lean a lot harder into the sweet side. I know, I know military-theme, tough guys, rah rah and all that, but that’s marketing and irrelevant to what’s actually inside the glass. I think had they skipped the honey and instead used pure maple syrup and also more of it, the result would have been a lot closer to my happy zone. I definitely enjoy what is here, which works nicely on both chicken and especially red meat, but making it sweeter would not have detracted from those and would have also positioned it nicely against the other sauces in the line-up. It also would have opened up things for dessert, which I assume even military rah rah tough guys also enjoy from time to time. 

Bottom line: The first foray from The General’s into a fruit-based sauce was as interesting as I was expecting. While solid, it ultimately does not quite hit the spot I was hoping.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 5

Butterfly Bakery Mustard Cranberry Hot Sauce Review

Butterfly Bakery Mustard Cranberry

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM18-lxagUQ 

This is a fascinating sauce and one of the few that comes to mind which places the Ghosties front and center from a flavor perspective. Most of the time, when sauces use this ingredient, it is more as accent, if used for flavor, but generally, the idea is that it will provide some superhot heat. Here, it delivers both heat and flavor, which is enhanced considerably by the lovely Carmen peppers also in the mix. To be sure, while the heat is not quite what I would call chilehead only, there is little question a superhot is in the mix and I suspect it make take normies unaware, if they are not prepared somewhat for it.

So we already have that profile, which gets us some pod fruitiness, along with some bitter superhot notes, and then in comes the mustard and cranberry. Mustard and the quinine of cranberry tend to be fairly forceful notes, with the latter of the two borderline unpalatable in its raw form. There is quite a bit of bitterness to be had with those as well, so I was greatly curious of the direction this sauce would take. It is one of the more intriguing combinations I’ve had, in that you have the pod flavors, as noted, then grace notes of the mustard and a not-exactly-but-close sort of berry quality from the cranberries. Altogether, it sort of defies categorization.

I will be frank here. The enjoyment of this sauce rather greatly depends on where you put it. I don’t find it an overly flexible sauce, as there are definitely some strong flavors going on here. Pairing notes suggest German food, which I think is definitely the good call. Some nice smoked ham, some outstanding cervelat, maybe some brats are all on the money. Rye bread is also a suggestion and I do think sandwiches are one of the places it excels. If you happen to be making a sandwich where you would want both mayo and mustard, for instance, making up a spicy mayo with this and using that as a sandwich spread, especially if you’re pairing it with a nice creamy cheese, like a high quality Havarti, is going to put this is fantastic territory. In terms of pairing, just think of a food where you’d want a fairly strong mustard to go and you’d about have it. 

Bottom line: One of the more unique sauces (I can think of nothing quite like it) out there, but a bit narrow in terms of application scope. While the heat level isn’t overbearing, some familiarity with the bite of Ghosties would definitely be in order before stepping in.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 7

Overall: 5