I deliberately held off on creating this post, both because I was thinking more of a year end thing and also because I thought there might be another sauce review I could squeeze in there. As I'm suffering from a mild (what I'm guessing is) flu this weekend, additional sauces are out. I still have a few bottles left to polish off or toss. I hate wasting food; I hate wasting anything. Wastefulness is anathema to me, so a sauce has to be really bad for me to do that.
The few I have left drifting down to the last remnants of the bottles, the Orange Krush, the Chipotle Slam, the Texas Pete -- none of those are quite bad enough I'm willing to toss them. In the case of the Chipotle Slam, since my wife has undertaken a new diet and I don't know when or if I will be having fish tacos again. The sauce works marvelously with seafood and less well with everything else and really doesn't have much of a heat charge, rendering it very low on the usefulness scale. The Texas Pete she likes, so I'm not worried about that getting used up, though I'm very tired of it now and the Orange Krush...I keep finding things I would rather have...I imagine that and the Chipotle Slam will get pitched on New Year's Eve, if either is not eaten by then. Perhaps I will make up a bold new tradition for my annual celebration of turning calendar pages.
I like to make lists and one of my favorite lists is a list of goals. Hot sauce is no different. When I started this blog in September, after deciding to get back in the hot sauce game, I wanted to find a standby Mexican sauce. That was my more immediate need. That has been done with the El Yucateco Green. While it doesn't fit every situation, it is the best thing going so far and the value per price point is unmatched as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps now is a good time to look over the list of sauces:
Everyday sauce: Trappey's Red Devil (this is also a mainstay, despite it having little to no heat)
Grilling sauce: CaJohn's Bourbon-Infused Chipotle Habanero (BICH)
Mexican-style sauce: El Yucateco Green
Asian-style sauce: Huy Fong Chili-Garlic Sauce
Louisiana-style sauce: Trappey's Red Devil
Sweet-hot sauce: CaJohn's Happy Beaver
Looking at this, we can see that heat is not a primary consideration. The Red Devil has precious little, the Chili Garlic a bit more and the El Yucateco has some but is mostly a low level. The only two that pack a punch are the CaJohn's offerings and never of them are really in the upper reaches, at that. They both will get hot, to be sure, but quite a bit of them must needs be used. The main thing here is taste, which is why I've decided to abandon purchasing any sauces that contain extract in them. Towards the end of the Stronger Than Death, it took on much greater overtones of extract. I did some accidental oversaucing on a burger and it has broken me completely as it made me borderline ill and the nauseating metallic taste is something I will not again suffer through. There is little reason; the commonality is that all of the sauces TASTE great and add to the flavor of the food, heightening the enjoyment of the experience. If a sauce diminishes that experience, it is time for it to go.
Back to the sauces, I would like to have another everyday sauce that packs more spice than the Red Devil. Even now, I will still choose it over other sauces, just because it is such a good-tasting sauce. I am also still searching, albeit much more slowly, for a Mexican-style sauce. I would like something like the BICH, which is so good that I will end the search or the Red Devil, again, on the Louisiana-style front. I'm pretty happy with the Happy Beaver on the sweet-hot tip, so no real looking there, either. I also would like to add another Asian-style sauce. Chili-Garlic will always be good and traditional and tasty, but like the Everyday Sauce problem, I'd like to rock a little heat.
Some of my other goals this year were to try to assess some of the various chilis. I don't typically enjoy eating raw pods, so that is a pretty rare event for me and I haven't sought out Morugas or 7-Pots or Red Savinas. I have made my way into using sauces that have all of them (except the 7-Pot) as a featured pepper. My outline was to work my way up. I believe I've pretty much surpassed the level of any of the habanero sauces and am now sort of hovering at the ghost chili. It's a pretty different world up there, in that rarefied air and I don't see myself getting past the ghost chili anytime soon. It still amuses me that the rotten abortion of a "ghost" sauce at Red Robin is what got me back...I guess I sort of owe them for reminding me of one of the more pleasurable experiences of life and restarting me back on this tasty journey. Still...that sauce is weak as shit and they do the Bhuts a terrible disservice using that description. I've gone past 50K, nothing world shattering and for 2013, will try to swing 100K, if I can find a sauce that will do it, that does not contain extract and also does not involve onions, given my intolerance to those...a very difficult proposition, I imagine, but we'll see what happens.
As to this year and (finally) the main subject of this list, I really only had three main contenders. Trappey's Red Devil I would disqualify because it does not pack any heat. So, we had these: El Yucateco Green, CaJohn's BICH and CaJohn's Happy Beaver. A brief discussion and then my pick...
El Yucateco Green came on strong and nearly saved habanero sauces for me. I had a few that weren't bad, but were not really worth getting again, unless I was in a pinch. This sauce changed all that and filled a void. It is also a very good tasting sauce, to boot and easily the best value of any sauce appearing in this blog this year. It is a little light on heat, however.
CaJohn's BICH was one that received a lot of deserved press for fantastic flavor and decent heat. I liked it so much, I've not only ordered more, but have given it away as gifts 3X. I found the runniness of the sauce made it somewhat difficult to use, but it really shone magnificently on the grill. Another friend of mine used it with an injector and was well-pleased, but the lesson here is that it needs both heat and some amount of cooking to really bring the flavor to the fore, which cuts down on flexibility. I have not personally tried the injection yet, but this is my current grilling sauce.
CaJohn's Happy Beaver is the most recent entry here. It possesses a similar, yet distinctive taste to the BICH, but without the runniness. It also works as well hot or cold and is far more flexible. I liked this one so much I immediately bought three more bottles. I keep one at work and one at home and this is one I like to have on-hand in the fridge. It is my current sweet-hot sauce. I've also given this away as a gift, though not nearly as much as the BICH.
Any of these would be deserving of the title and even as I write this, I still have trouble choosing. I've decided to leave it up to the overall rating from the reviews:
My pick this year, based on the numerical value is: CaJohn's Happy Beaver sauce, coming in at a 9 and nudging past both of the other two sauces, which were an 8, respectively. I don't rate manufacturers like that, but if I did, CaJohn's would be a runaway this year. Congratulations, for what it's worth and great job making some damn fine sauces!
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Happy Beaver Hot Sauce Review
CaJohns Happy Beaver Hot Sauce - [TSAAF Sauce Of The Year 2012]
UPDATE: Video support now available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRCwpMQBFxc
One of the things I was very gratified to see this year was a holiday pricing community throwdown by the sauce manufacturers towards the sauce eaters: you and me and everyone else we can rope into our unique brand of madness. Because I can't trust any of my immediate local vendors (more on that in the archives), when CaJohn got in on this, I was all about it come Cyber Monday.
I got a good haul overall, adding further to my tally of the Bourbon-Infused sauce, which is my go-to grilling sauce. I also some some new ones I wanted to try, including last week's Sancto Scorpio and this week's Happy Beaver. Much like the Bourbon-Infused sauce, this was an instant love.
The bottle I got from the sale, in fact, struck me so hard that I instantly got online to try out Peppers.com. I'd been meaning to try an online sauce vendor and asked the ever-fantastic Scott Roberts for advice. That was one of the sites he commended and so I clicked the dials for 3 more bottles because this is something I must have on hand.
I'm a huge fan of sweet-hot, always have been. One of the things I disliked somewhat about the Bourbon-Infused was how runny it was. Imagine my delight when I had this nice thick, almost ketchupy substance. Gone was the bourbon overtones, but in its place was this fantastic consistency. The first bottle I got from Peppers, though, is much more liquidy...maybe not quite as watery as the Bourbon-Infused, but much less ketchupy. Taste is still there, though, so I chalk the inconsistency up to the eccentricities of buying from small batch hot sauce manufacturers.
The taste here is the Bhut Jolokia instead of Red Savina Habaneros and minus the bourbon. The vinegar is also much less prominent. We still have a similarity of sauces, to a degree, but in the case of Happy Beaver, we have slightly more heat, slightly less complexity and the somewhat flowery tones of the Bhut, which are blended spectacularly with the smoky chipotles. As thick as it is and as tasty as it is, this could easily (and has been) used as a dipping sauce, a task I must say the Bourbon-Infused is inadequate for. Heat is in the same range, somewhat less than the Sancto Scorpio. I'd figure high 30Ks, maybe low 40s. Like the Sancto Scorpio, it stays at a relatively and pleasant heat level, but unlike that sauce, it goes there nearly immediately.
Like the Bourbon-Infused, this will not go with everything. I had it on pizza, one of the foods I consider an easy test for nearly any sauce and found myself wishing I had pepper flakes instead. Yet, put this thing on burgers or an Arby's Triple Cheese Bacon sandwich (especially the Angus) or with chicken or seafood and watch this thing shine. I imagine it would work well on the grill also and given that I have enough bottles (hopefully) to last, I will probably give that a whack next year also.
I hate to mention this, since labels mean very little to me, but some of the copy on this one bothered me. To wit, I quote: "...it has been tamed for the less adventurous." It follows that by saying it is not for the novice but something an experienced chilehead would enjoy. No thanks for the backslap with the "less adventurous" crack and dial up some confusion for the contradiction. Look, I don't need to have my guts burning for hours and hours after I eat something. If I ever do (never will) desire that, I can just take a few drops of extract. I want a great-tasting sauce with some solid heat. Why the manufacturer wants to put in such frankly asinine text as "less adventuresome" (such a combination of adjectives will not help to sell sauce, I wouldn't say) and insult the buyer and consumer of this product is beyond me. I wouldn't normally mention this, but frankly that kind of shit irritates me. If I saw that on the bottle in a store and didn't know what it was, guarantee I would take the same umbrage I do now and buy something else...it's so goddamn unnecessary. As much as it irritates me, it will not, however, stop me from stocking this sauce on my own personal shelves and giving it to friends. For a lesser sauce, at $10/throw for a 5 oz. bottle, I wouldn't buy it again. Word to the wise.
Bottom line: I have made this a new staple, like the Bourbon-Infused. Also, like the Bourbon-Infused, I am giving some away as gifts for the holidays this year. If those two things aren't enough for a ringing endorsement, there is no such thing. Unlike the Bourbon-Infused, this is a lot more flexible, though there will be many instances where this will not be a preferred sauce, Mexican-food coming immediately to mind. Where it does work well, and there are many instances, it works fantastically.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 4
Flavor: 9
Flexibility: 9
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10
Overall: 9
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Sancto Scorpio Hot Sauce Review
CaJohns Sancto Scorpio Hot Sauce
I've seen a lot of hype about this one, probably because it features somewhat prominently the current record holder for SHU, the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion pepper. I've seen it rated online at as many as a million SHU. Another facet, which I really like, is that a portion of the proceeds go to funding chile research and education at the Chile Pepper Institute in New Mexico. I'm all for furthering science!
Here's where the hype sort of de-rails, though. When talking about Lousiana-style hot sauce, which this is definitely in family of, we're always talking a couple universal factors. First is that it will be a vinegar-based sauce. Second is that it will come with a dropper cap, due to the thinness of the sauce. Check on both counts here, though this is thicker than the Cayenne or Tabasco-based sauces.
So, we're looking at a Trinidad Moruga Scorpion Lousiana-style sauce. No shame in that game, though this is a slightly more complex sauce than many of those I've seen, such as my beloved Red Devil.We have some sugar, lemon and garlic rounding out the bill, which do a nice job of balancing this, but we're talking vinegar and the Scorpion peppers as the respective stars of this show.
You know what you're getting as regards taste, generally, with Lousiana-style sauces and with Trinidad Moruga peppers and this doesn't stray from the path much on either count. We have the nice bite of the vinegar charge and we have the somewhat bitter and flowery taste of the pepper. On first taste, the pepper is more of a grace note, but as is the case with many of the superhot chiles, repeated applications will continue to build and frequently become dominating, which is the case here.
It's using the current recordholder for chile heat in a pepper, so there is definitely some heat here, but it starts subtle and mild initially and builds from there. It never got to the point of uncomfortability or intolerance, even when I used quite a lot of it at once, but rather ascended to a slow and steady nice smooth even heat that was quite pleasant. The heat of this is not rated online (at least not accurately) anywhere I've seen, so I'd put it in the 40K range somewhere, probably in the mids to lower.
Bottom line: If you like Louisiana-style sauces and/or Trinidad Moruga Scorpion peppers, this would be right up your alley. I like the Louisiana sauces, but I'm not quite sure on the peppers yet. I will know by the end of the bottle. I do like the extra kick, but I don't like terribly the residual taste of the Trinidads, which linger a bit longer than I care for and are also dominant during the after-eating belches. I like the thickness of the sauce and the flavor overall, but at $10/5 oz., it's hard to see where, even after I factor in all of the positives of this sauce, that I could realistically find a place for it in my regular rotation. That doesn't mean I wouldn't buy it again (I would), but it's not quite all the way to the point where I would make it a staple.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 6
Flavor: 7
Flexibility: 8
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6
Overall: 7
I've seen a lot of hype about this one, probably because it features somewhat prominently the current record holder for SHU, the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion pepper. I've seen it rated online at as many as a million SHU. Another facet, which I really like, is that a portion of the proceeds go to funding chile research and education at the Chile Pepper Institute in New Mexico. I'm all for furthering science!Here's where the hype sort of de-rails, though. When talking about Lousiana-style hot sauce, which this is definitely in family of, we're always talking a couple universal factors. First is that it will be a vinegar-based sauce. Second is that it will come with a dropper cap, due to the thinness of the sauce. Check on both counts here, though this is thicker than the Cayenne or Tabasco-based sauces.
So, we're looking at a Trinidad Moruga Scorpion Lousiana-style sauce. No shame in that game, though this is a slightly more complex sauce than many of those I've seen, such as my beloved Red Devil.We have some sugar, lemon and garlic rounding out the bill, which do a nice job of balancing this, but we're talking vinegar and the Scorpion peppers as the respective stars of this show.
You know what you're getting as regards taste, generally, with Lousiana-style sauces and with Trinidad Moruga peppers and this doesn't stray from the path much on either count. We have the nice bite of the vinegar charge and we have the somewhat bitter and flowery taste of the pepper. On first taste, the pepper is more of a grace note, but as is the case with many of the superhot chiles, repeated applications will continue to build and frequently become dominating, which is the case here.
It's using the current recordholder for chile heat in a pepper, so there is definitely some heat here, but it starts subtle and mild initially and builds from there. It never got to the point of uncomfortability or intolerance, even when I used quite a lot of it at once, but rather ascended to a slow and steady nice smooth even heat that was quite pleasant. The heat of this is not rated online (at least not accurately) anywhere I've seen, so I'd put it in the 40K range somewhere, probably in the mids to lower.
Bottom line: If you like Louisiana-style sauces and/or Trinidad Moruga Scorpion peppers, this would be right up your alley. I like the Louisiana sauces, but I'm not quite sure on the peppers yet. I will know by the end of the bottle. I do like the extra kick, but I don't like terribly the residual taste of the Trinidads, which linger a bit longer than I care for and are also dominant during the after-eating belches. I like the thickness of the sauce and the flavor overall, but at $10/5 oz., it's hard to see where, even after I factor in all of the positives of this sauce, that I could realistically find a place for it in my regular rotation. That doesn't mean I wouldn't buy it again (I would), but it's not quite all the way to the point where I would make it a staple.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 6
Flavor: 7
Flexibility: 8
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6
Overall: 7
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Testing, As In 5Ws and 1H
I wanted to take a brief moment to discuss how I test sauces. The key word here is: thorough.
To wit:
Who: Me.
What: The sauce in question.
Where: At work, at home, occassionally at play.
Why: To further the information available via this giant big bad grande interwebz
When: Errrr...whenever I get to it.
How: This is the point of this BLOG entry...
I've mentioned earlier that I was looking for a Mexican sauce (more on that in a future entry), but not only cheap crappy Mexican-sorta food (Taco Bell, Del Taco) do I test this one. I also do homemade kick ass Mexican-ish food, such as Panko-holyshit-fish tacos with a homemade slaw. Awesome, even without a sauce. I mentioned chicken strips and pizza. Those are mandatory tests, but it does not stop there. In fact, it winds up being damn near everything. McDonald's cheeseburgers, fries, Wienerschnitzel stuff, which means their version of chili, Marie Callender's dinners, cookies, Hot Pockets, beef jerky, Subway sandwiches, pretty much anything I have around I'll try. There are very foods that can't do with a bit (or more) of spice...
I do this, even after I've completed a review, for the sake of thoroughness. I do this...for you.
To wit:
Who: Me.
What: The sauce in question.
Where: At work, at home, occassionally at play.
Why: To further the information available via this giant big bad grande interwebz
When: Errrr...whenever I get to it.
How: This is the point of this BLOG entry...
I've mentioned earlier that I was looking for a Mexican sauce (more on that in a future entry), but not only cheap crappy Mexican-sorta food (Taco Bell, Del Taco) do I test this one. I also do homemade kick ass Mexican-ish food, such as Panko-holyshit-fish tacos with a homemade slaw. Awesome, even without a sauce. I mentioned chicken strips and pizza. Those are mandatory tests, but it does not stop there. In fact, it winds up being damn near everything. McDonald's cheeseburgers, fries, Wienerschnitzel stuff, which means their version of chili, Marie Callender's dinners, cookies, Hot Pockets, beef jerky, Subway sandwiches, pretty much anything I have around I'll try. There are very foods that can't do with a bit (or more) of spice...
I do this, even after I've completed a review, for the sake of thoroughness. I do this...for you.
Q Heat Chipotle Slam Hot Sauce Review
Blair's Heat Collection Q Heat Chipotle Slam
I think, were someone to say I was a fan of Blair, I would find it a fair assessment. A lot of people credit him for inventing the whole "Superhot" and/or "Chilehead" craze and while I'd consider that something of a stretch, truth be said, he does make some fine sauces. This, however, is maybe the most confusing entry I've come across...
On the label, we have the "funky Q" as the scientific symbol for heat. So far, so good. We have Blair himself, purveyor of absurd levels of heat deliverance while maintaining great taste. Again, very promising. We have a 8.5 oz. bottle of hot sauce for $8, with very prominent chunks, presumably peppers AND a list of peppers that includes habanero, jalapeno, chipotle and cayenne. Forget promising, I'm thinking an unholy value and the deliverance of all that is good and right and spicy in the world.
Damn straight I picked it up when I saw it and then it sat in my closet, while I attended to other sauce matters. Finally, the streak of El Yucateco came to a (sad) close and I had need of some sauce for some Mexi-food and nothing open in the fridge to fit the bill. Time to fire up the blades and bust this bad boy out. My early impression were the Zakk Wylde Original Berzerker sauce minus the crazy garlic aspect. The lime came through a lot more here and I could finally detect hints of cilantro, but holy shit, my man Lazar, where is the goddamn heat? It's somewhat of a marvel that someone can make a sauce like that, utilizing those chiles and come up with such a lack of heat.
Sure, the taste and the blend displays Blair's typical (I say this so far only for him as a sauce artisan) sauce magic and artistry. The level of finesse here is astounding, but goddammit, when someone uses the scientific symbol for heat, I damn well expect some heat to be there. The heat level here is at the level of Red Devil, which is to say, more than not at all, but not a damn sight much.
So, to rationalize things, I say maybe Blair just wanted to test himself, take some peppers and neuter them and just make a well-balanced and somewhat tasty sauce for the candyasses out there. If he could pull it off, it's a feather in his cap as a cook, as a chef, as an artiste. Then I slug through more of the sauce and think what a damn shame it is. This is a good tasting sauce, overall. The lime is a bit heavy and the astringent nature frequently threatens to overpower what you use it on, but put this on some fish tacos and tell me you're not in flavor heaven. If this was even half as much as the Stronger Than Death SHU, I think we're done talking about other people's hot sauces and the new conversation is about making Blair the Food Emperor of the planet.
That's not what we have here, though. What we have here is a decent-tasting sauce, that works very well on certain things and less well, sometimes considerably less well, on everything else. I seriously am confused as to the target market of this. Is it Rubio's or some other purveyor of fish tacos? It's not bad on regular tacos, but it needs something like fish to really shine. It's complex and intriguing, at first, by itself, but the taste quickly wears and approaches boring, due to the distinct lack of heat. Where is the Slam?
Bottom line: Blair is a skilled sauce maker. I take nothing away from the Jersey boy and love his attitude, his approach to business, his dealings with Zakk Wylde and his sauce mastery, all of it, to death (no pun). I seriously don't understand what he's doing with this sauce. There is little to no incentive for a chilehead to buy it -- I've seen the SHU estimated at 800, which I consider accurate and which baffles me further -- and who else but a chilehead will seek out the wares of Mssr. Lazar? It's not in grocery stores and takes some doing to find out its very existence. but shit goddamn, under 1K SHU? So baffled...and never buying this again.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 0
Flavor: 5
Flexibility: 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 2
Overall: 3
I think, were someone to say I was a fan of Blair, I would find it a fair assessment. A lot of people credit him for inventing the whole "Superhot" and/or "Chilehead" craze and while I'd consider that something of a stretch, truth be said, he does make some fine sauces. This, however, is maybe the most confusing entry I've come across...On the label, we have the "funky Q" as the scientific symbol for heat. So far, so good. We have Blair himself, purveyor of absurd levels of heat deliverance while maintaining great taste. Again, very promising. We have a 8.5 oz. bottle of hot sauce for $8, with very prominent chunks, presumably peppers AND a list of peppers that includes habanero, jalapeno, chipotle and cayenne. Forget promising, I'm thinking an unholy value and the deliverance of all that is good and right and spicy in the world.
Damn straight I picked it up when I saw it and then it sat in my closet, while I attended to other sauce matters. Finally, the streak of El Yucateco came to a (sad) close and I had need of some sauce for some Mexi-food and nothing open in the fridge to fit the bill. Time to fire up the blades and bust this bad boy out. My early impression were the Zakk Wylde Original Berzerker sauce minus the crazy garlic aspect. The lime came through a lot more here and I could finally detect hints of cilantro, but holy shit, my man Lazar, where is the goddamn heat? It's somewhat of a marvel that someone can make a sauce like that, utilizing those chiles and come up with such a lack of heat.
Sure, the taste and the blend displays Blair's typical (I say this so far only for him as a sauce artisan) sauce magic and artistry. The level of finesse here is astounding, but goddammit, when someone uses the scientific symbol for heat, I damn well expect some heat to be there. The heat level here is at the level of Red Devil, which is to say, more than not at all, but not a damn sight much.
So, to rationalize things, I say maybe Blair just wanted to test himself, take some peppers and neuter them and just make a well-balanced and somewhat tasty sauce for the candyasses out there. If he could pull it off, it's a feather in his cap as a cook, as a chef, as an artiste. Then I slug through more of the sauce and think what a damn shame it is. This is a good tasting sauce, overall. The lime is a bit heavy and the astringent nature frequently threatens to overpower what you use it on, but put this on some fish tacos and tell me you're not in flavor heaven. If this was even half as much as the Stronger Than Death SHU, I think we're done talking about other people's hot sauces and the new conversation is about making Blair the Food Emperor of the planet.
That's not what we have here, though. What we have here is a decent-tasting sauce, that works very well on certain things and less well, sometimes considerably less well, on everything else. I seriously am confused as to the target market of this. Is it Rubio's or some other purveyor of fish tacos? It's not bad on regular tacos, but it needs something like fish to really shine. It's complex and intriguing, at first, by itself, but the taste quickly wears and approaches boring, due to the distinct lack of heat. Where is the Slam?
Bottom line: Blair is a skilled sauce maker. I take nothing away from the Jersey boy and love his attitude, his approach to business, his dealings with Zakk Wylde and his sauce mastery, all of it, to death (no pun). I seriously don't understand what he's doing with this sauce. There is little to no incentive for a chilehead to buy it -- I've seen the SHU estimated at 800, which I consider accurate and which baffles me further -- and who else but a chilehead will seek out the wares of Mssr. Lazar? It's not in grocery stores and takes some doing to find out its very existence. but shit goddamn, under 1K SHU? So baffled...and never buying this again.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 0
Flavor: 5
Flexibility: 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 2
Overall: 3
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Brother Bru-Bru's Very Hot Hot Sauce Review
Brother Bru-Bru's Very Hot African Hot Pepper Sauce
It took me a while to get to this, since re-starting the heat train, but I finally ran into that dreaded thing: the sauce I had to toss. I think I made it as far down as the neck before it opens up into the bottle proper, but it got the old heave-ho, away it goes tonight.
Why? The starter is the flavor. The first two ingredients are apple cider vinegar and water. Nothing wrong with apple cider vinegar, but having that as the dominant flavor, with the next more prominent flavor be that of an unnamed African spice (the name of which I no longer remember) is not really the way to win my affection. It might be the Japones pepper providing the somewhat distinctive taste here; it definitely is not the habaneros listed. If you were to want a taste that could be charitably described as an entire spice closet floating in apple cider vinegar, this would be the sauce you'd want to grab.
The flavor is not entirely unpalatable, just not especially good by itself and frequently jarring with food. I didn't find it offensive to the point of spitting it out, but I had great difficulty in getting it to play nice with anything and by that I mean adding to the taste experience and elevating the food. I'm imaging it might go ok with Southern food, such as collard greens and maybe some ribs, but even that is somewhat in debate and I didn't spend the time to try to find that out. I just couldn't see where it would be worth it to take the time and drive on down and plunk down the money at the rib joint, much as I love those two foods (in winter, I make me the shit out of some greens) just for a test. There was also the chance I would wreck the flavor, which would be a damn shame and I'd have to kick my own ass for that.
The flavor, unfortunately, is the best part. The worst part has to be the texture. If you're banging around in your kitchen, trying to make up a sauce and you decide to go with powdered ingredients, for whatever reason, as the main base of your sauce, chances are you will get some grittiness. Fortunately for you, now you need not bother. You could just buy this instead. It's not like taking a spoonful of the glass beads they use for sandblasting or anything, but it's definitely noticeable and draws attention to this rather irritating aspect and away from the food. If there is a single thing (and it wouldn't be the easiest thing in the world to peg) that rendered this to the trash bin, it's this aspect. Amusingly, there is a dripper cap on this. I discarded it and still the sauce came out by the drop. lovely. It also separated in the bottle, which is not a big deal, but adds to the unappealing aspects.
Finally, we get to the heat or rather lack of it. A friend of mine feels that if there is a hot sauce and the first word in the ingredient list is not a pepper of some kind, then the product is not worth having. I don't necessarily subscribe to it, but this sauce would give substantial credence to that theory. Calling something a hot sauce should indicate that there is some heat present. Labeling it as Very Hot and the hottest of the offerings should mean that there should be some charge there. I suppose this makes things hotter than eating them with no sauce at all, but the heat level is barely detectable.
Bottom line: Easily the leading contender for disappointment of the year. Brother Bru-Bru was a musician and tried hard to create an all-natural, sodium-free sauce, both of which he did. I wanted to like this sauce, but it fails on nearly every level a sauce can fail. This is very pedestrian, somewhat bland and boring, not hot and not very tasty, grainy liquid that simply does not work. At $3.59 for a 5 oz. bottle, I got screwed, no two ways about it. There are plenty of other sauces that deserve your patronage. This is not one of them.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 0
Flavor: 1
Flexibility: 0
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 0
Overall: 0
It took me a while to get to this, since re-starting the heat train, but I finally ran into that dreaded thing: the sauce I had to toss. I think I made it as far down as the neck before it opens up into the bottle proper, but it got the old heave-ho, away it goes tonight.Why? The starter is the flavor. The first two ingredients are apple cider vinegar and water. Nothing wrong with apple cider vinegar, but having that as the dominant flavor, with the next more prominent flavor be that of an unnamed African spice (the name of which I no longer remember) is not really the way to win my affection. It might be the Japones pepper providing the somewhat distinctive taste here; it definitely is not the habaneros listed. If you were to want a taste that could be charitably described as an entire spice closet floating in apple cider vinegar, this would be the sauce you'd want to grab.
The flavor is not entirely unpalatable, just not especially good by itself and frequently jarring with food. I didn't find it offensive to the point of spitting it out, but I had great difficulty in getting it to play nice with anything and by that I mean adding to the taste experience and elevating the food. I'm imaging it might go ok with Southern food, such as collard greens and maybe some ribs, but even that is somewhat in debate and I didn't spend the time to try to find that out. I just couldn't see where it would be worth it to take the time and drive on down and plunk down the money at the rib joint, much as I love those two foods (in winter, I make me the shit out of some greens) just for a test. There was also the chance I would wreck the flavor, which would be a damn shame and I'd have to kick my own ass for that.
The flavor, unfortunately, is the best part. The worst part has to be the texture. If you're banging around in your kitchen, trying to make up a sauce and you decide to go with powdered ingredients, for whatever reason, as the main base of your sauce, chances are you will get some grittiness. Fortunately for you, now you need not bother. You could just buy this instead. It's not like taking a spoonful of the glass beads they use for sandblasting or anything, but it's definitely noticeable and draws attention to this rather irritating aspect and away from the food. If there is a single thing (and it wouldn't be the easiest thing in the world to peg) that rendered this to the trash bin, it's this aspect. Amusingly, there is a dripper cap on this. I discarded it and still the sauce came out by the drop. lovely. It also separated in the bottle, which is not a big deal, but adds to the unappealing aspects.
Finally, we get to the heat or rather lack of it. A friend of mine feels that if there is a hot sauce and the first word in the ingredient list is not a pepper of some kind, then the product is not worth having. I don't necessarily subscribe to it, but this sauce would give substantial credence to that theory. Calling something a hot sauce should indicate that there is some heat present. Labeling it as Very Hot and the hottest of the offerings should mean that there should be some charge there. I suppose this makes things hotter than eating them with no sauce at all, but the heat level is barely detectable.
Bottom line: Easily the leading contender for disappointment of the year. Brother Bru-Bru was a musician and tried hard to create an all-natural, sodium-free sauce, both of which he did. I wanted to like this sauce, but it fails on nearly every level a sauce can fail. This is very pedestrian, somewhat bland and boring, not hot and not very tasty, grainy liquid that simply does not work. At $3.59 for a 5 oz. bottle, I got screwed, no two ways about it. There are plenty of other sauces that deserve your patronage. This is not one of them.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 0
Flavor: 1
Flexibility: 0
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 0
Overall: 0
Saturday, November 17, 2012
Zakk Wylde Stronger Than Death Berzerker Hot Sauce Review
Blair Presents: Zakk Wylde's Stronger Than Death Berserker Hot Sauce
This is the second to hottest of the four Zakk Wylde signature sauces. My first impression was that it was far different than the Original Berzerker sauce, which I was partially nervous about. While the Original Berzerker is not a bad tasting sauce, the garlic can get a bit overbearing. This one is both far more graceful and considerably more punchy at once.
The sauce is somewhat deceptive, starting out with a sort of mild and muted habanero flavor with the more flowery and bittery aspect of the ghost chilis. The garlic is there as a very minor grace note, but after the first five to ten seconds or so, the ghost chilis kick in and the heat becomes progressively more pronounced. Once that begins, the chipotles also assert themselves in the nose and palate, lending a very nice smokiness to the proceedings. This is a sauce that can become overpowering in heat, but not especially so in flavor and Blair has done a phenomenal job of masking the tinny aspect of the extract here. This one is much more flexible than the Original Berzerker and I'd rate the flavor as good to very good but not great.
As noted on the bottle, this did and does go very well with seafood and pizza and smoked ribs and spiking barbeque sauce and frozen tv dinners and cheeseburgers almost everything I tried it with. I presume it would also, as noted on the label, also go fantastically with beer. I'm struggling to think of anything I didn't like it on...Hot Pockets, I guess, but we're not talking any sort of culinary treat there, of course. Using it on them is a waste of this sauce and better reserved for something like Red Devil.
It is also not a sauce I enjoying having by itself. At ~59K SHU (literally stronger than Death, as in the original Death sauce also, cleverly ticking in a literal meaning as well as the borrowing of a Black Label Society album title), putting sauce on top of sauce tends to ratchet the heat level up to a level a bit beyond what is comfortable at work, which is where I keep this one, but not so much that it causes an immediate trot to to the can. The heat will dissipate nicely in about 10 minutes or so. With that nice level of warmth, this can be used sparingly and indeed, treating it more as an accent accompanies food very well and rises the taste experience, especially on McDonald's cheeseburgers, up very nicely.
UPDATE 12.26.12
I noted in another later post, but as I got towards the end of the
bottle, the extract really came to the fore, to the point where it was
obnoxious. I always shake the sauces well before using, so it wasn't a
matter of agitation. Possibly it was due to the age of the sauce, but it
got to the point where I didn't find the experience enjoyable and
disposed of the remainder of the bottle and alternately vowed not to
again engage any of the extract sauces. I've sort of hemmed and hawed
over down-rating this, but despite the initial good taste, overall, I
could not, in good conscience, leave the rating as it was, given that I
was unable to enjoy the entire bottle.
Bottom line: It is a very well-flavored sauce but many elements are going to be reserved more for the discerning chilehead. For most of the population, I think they're going to be distracted by the heat, which didn't appear to have a top ceiling on it and miss many of the subtleties of this (again) extremely brilliantly crafted sauce. At $10 for 5 oz. and for how long you can make this stretch, at least by not being stupid, this is a pretty good deal and you still get the keychain and the entertaining label pic of Wylde and one of his famous bullseye guitars as well as the "traveling case" look to the outer box packaging. I'm not so in love with this that I would have to have another bottle when I run out, but this is on my short list of sauces to potentially get again...or was until the update. This, along with all other extract sauces, is forevermore excised from any future purchases.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 7
Flavor: 7
Flexibility: 8
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 7
Overall: 7
Re-rate 12.26.12
Heat level: 7
Flavor: 5
Flexibility: 7
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4
Overall: 6
Saturday, November 10, 2012
El Yucateco Green Hot Sauce Review
El Yucateco Green Habanero
UPDATE: Video support now available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpA1yKLl-FA
Too often, I think, reviews always start off with a negative. I think reviewers do this so they come across as a "hard sell" or cynical or neutral, any of which is viewed as being better than a pimp or cheerleader. I'm no coward and I've been waiting on writing this for a while while I relentlessly tested it, so let me just say it up front: this sauce is utterly fantastic. This is another first: the first sauce I've had directly recommended to me from a friend.
Now, with that out of the way, despite all the overwhelming (and other less so) positives, there is one gigantic detraction and that is the color. The bright pea-green color is very disconcerting and putting it on food tends to make it look less appetizing. Even as I type this, it sounds borderline remarkably stupid and petty, but it is nonetheless true. I wish they would have ticked over for an orange sauce if they wanted to differentiate. I get they were going for a green sauce echoing throes of tomatillo sauce, but that color is seriously distracting and it's taken me a while to get over that, to a degree, which is a shame, as this is a quite remarkable sauce.
At 9, 000 SHU, like the red, it's not particularly hot, but it is at least noticeable. What is less noticeable is that "bright" taste that habanero sauces seem to frequently have. That is very muted and subdued and the burn, when it comes, is delayed, as I expect from habaneros in general. The flavor is fantastic and despite it not working well on pizza, nearly everything I tried it on was better for having it there.That is the function of sauces after all, to improve the eating experience. I could use more heat, but as far as blending and having lovely flavor, this is a very difficult sauce to beat. Even when eaten directly, it doesn't taste overpowering and while the flavor is not good enough for me to want to have by itself in great amounts, quite a lot of this can be used. At $2.59 for a 4 oz. bottle and a dollar more to double it up to an 8 oz. bottle, the value per cost ratio may just be the highest of any sauce I've reviewed so far.
As noted, the heat amount is not great or particularly significant, but enough to be moderately respectable. The mild burn hangs in there for a good little bit and I would be endlessly pleased if they dropped something out with a higher boost, but all in all, I'm very pleased and this is the current heavy leader for my standby Mexican sauce.
Bottom line: There's still more to test, of course, slated upcoming, but I have reservations that anything will overtake this for my standby Mexican sauce. Like the Red Devil, the taste is wonderful and like the Red Devil, while it tastes acceptable on almost everything, it definitely excels on specific things more considerably. The most ringing endorsement I can ever make about a sauce is that I intend to buy it again and as soon as the last remnants of what's in the current bottle are gone, I'm going out to secure one of those larger bottles immediately. Standby or not, this one is necessary to have on hand.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 1
Flavor: 9
Flexibility: 8
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10
Overall: 7
UPDATE: Video support now available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpA1yKLl-FA Too often, I think, reviews always start off with a negative. I think reviewers do this so they come across as a "hard sell" or cynical or neutral, any of which is viewed as being better than a pimp or cheerleader. I'm no coward and I've been waiting on writing this for a while while I relentlessly tested it, so let me just say it up front: this sauce is utterly fantastic. This is another first: the first sauce I've had directly recommended to me from a friend.
Now, with that out of the way, despite all the overwhelming (and other less so) positives, there is one gigantic detraction and that is the color. The bright pea-green color is very disconcerting and putting it on food tends to make it look less appetizing. Even as I type this, it sounds borderline remarkably stupid and petty, but it is nonetheless true. I wish they would have ticked over for an orange sauce if they wanted to differentiate. I get they were going for a green sauce echoing throes of tomatillo sauce, but that color is seriously distracting and it's taken me a while to get over that, to a degree, which is a shame, as this is a quite remarkable sauce.
At 9, 000 SHU, like the red, it's not particularly hot, but it is at least noticeable. What is less noticeable is that "bright" taste that habanero sauces seem to frequently have. That is very muted and subdued and the burn, when it comes, is delayed, as I expect from habaneros in general. The flavor is fantastic and despite it not working well on pizza, nearly everything I tried it on was better for having it there.That is the function of sauces after all, to improve the eating experience. I could use more heat, but as far as blending and having lovely flavor, this is a very difficult sauce to beat. Even when eaten directly, it doesn't taste overpowering and while the flavor is not good enough for me to want to have by itself in great amounts, quite a lot of this can be used. At $2.59 for a 4 oz. bottle and a dollar more to double it up to an 8 oz. bottle, the value per cost ratio may just be the highest of any sauce I've reviewed so far.
As noted, the heat amount is not great or particularly significant, but enough to be moderately respectable. The mild burn hangs in there for a good little bit and I would be endlessly pleased if they dropped something out with a higher boost, but all in all, I'm very pleased and this is the current heavy leader for my standby Mexican sauce.
Bottom line: There's still more to test, of course, slated upcoming, but I have reservations that anything will overtake this for my standby Mexican sauce. Like the Red Devil, the taste is wonderful and like the Red Devil, while it tastes acceptable on almost everything, it definitely excels on specific things more considerably. The most ringing endorsement I can ever make about a sauce is that I intend to buy it again and as soon as the last remnants of what's in the current bottle are gone, I'm going out to secure one of those larger bottles immediately. Standby or not, this one is necessary to have on hand.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 1
Flavor: 9
Flexibility: 8
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10
Overall: 7
Saturday, November 3, 2012
Zakk Wylde Original Berzerker Hot Sauce Review
Blair Presents: Zakk Wylde's Original Berserker Hot Sauce
This is the first product of the other of the two who are probably the major "small batch" hot sauce producers in the Chilehead world, Blair's Hot Sauce. The other one is CAJohn and the offering I had there was spectacular. This one was less spectacular, but overall quite tasty.
This is the mildest of the Zakk Wylde signature sauces and my first impression was this was an extremely skillfully crafted sauce. The habanero and garlic were initially very well balanced, with a hint of lime cutting through. As noted on the bottle, this did and does go very well with seafood and pizza and any other offering that would be paired well with beer. It does not, however, go particularly well with cheeseburgers.
It is also not a sauce I enjoying having by itself and there have been times that I thought the garlic was a bit overpowering, being reminiscent more of a garlic-type sauce than an actual hot sauce. There is some minor heat here, but I'd be surprised if the SHU rating was over 10K. Happily, none of the brightness I'm coming to strongly associate with habanero sauces was not present and for the most part, I found this enjoyable.
Bottom line: It is far from a polarizing sauce, but it won't work well with everything. What it does go with, it does spectacularly. What it doesn't go with isn't terrible, but does leave you wishing you had a different sauce. At $10 for 5 oz., this is not a particularly great deal, even with the keychain and the entertaining label pic of Wylde and one of his famous bullseye guitars as well as the "traveling case" look to the outer box packaging. I wouldn't be averse to using it again, but I can't foresee any future repeat purchase.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 4
Flavor: 6
Flexibility: 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3
Overall: 5
This is the first product of the other of the two who are probably the major "small batch" hot sauce producers in the Chilehead world, Blair's Hot Sauce. The other one is CAJohn and the offering I had there was spectacular. This one was less spectacular, but overall quite tasty.
This is the mildest of the Zakk Wylde signature sauces and my first impression was this was an extremely skillfully crafted sauce. The habanero and garlic were initially very well balanced, with a hint of lime cutting through. As noted on the bottle, this did and does go very well with seafood and pizza and any other offering that would be paired well with beer. It does not, however, go particularly well with cheeseburgers.
It is also not a sauce I enjoying having by itself and there have been times that I thought the garlic was a bit overpowering, being reminiscent more of a garlic-type sauce than an actual hot sauce. There is some minor heat here, but I'd be surprised if the SHU rating was over 10K. Happily, none of the brightness I'm coming to strongly associate with habanero sauces was not present and for the most part, I found this enjoyable.
Bottom line: It is far from a polarizing sauce, but it won't work well with everything. What it does go with, it does spectacularly. What it doesn't go with isn't terrible, but does leave you wishing you had a different sauce. At $10 for 5 oz., this is not a particularly great deal, even with the keychain and the entertaining label pic of Wylde and one of his famous bullseye guitars as well as the "traveling case" look to the outer box packaging. I wouldn't be averse to using it again, but I can't foresee any future repeat purchase.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 4
Flavor: 6
Flexibility: 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3
Overall: 5
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Valentina Black Label "Extra Hot" Salsa Picante Hot Sauce Review
Valentina Black Label Extra Hot
NOTE: This sauce appeared in Season Four of The Hot Ones.
UPDATE: Support video now available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmQFL0N77xk
Along with Cholula and Tapatio, this is the third leg of the triumvirate of large-scale Mexican-oriented hot sauces. It is probably the oldest of the three and easily the least popular (at least in Salt Lake). Cholula, in the United States, is far and away the king there, running away with a strong nationwide distribution and near-ubiquitous presence in so many places I've not lost count. They are also the only one, to my knowledge, to make the transition into sauce packets, which is a much bigger deal than it sounds. It's also probably the mildest of the three, though to my mind, it is also the best-tasting. So, to get to the point, if you've tried either of the others, you've basically tried this, though I think Valentina and Tapatio are closer to each other than to Cholula.
For $.99, I got a 12.5 oz. bottle and was very excited about it. This possibly could have been the prime standby Mexican sauce for which I've been searching, but sadly, oh so sadly, not to be. While it does have moderately more heat than either of the other two (Tapatio has an SHU of 3000, so I'd say this is maybe 3500 - 4000 somewhere), it is comparably less than a good jalapeno. The taste isn't good or bad; it's that same sort of "standard" Mexican sauce taste, which I've understood is malleable enough to use on almost everything.
So, while this is ok for what it is, which is for those people who want hotter versions of one of those sauce variations, I think my taste has moved on. It's very difficult eating this sauce on Mexican food when I have some El Yucateco left. It's doesn't even compare favorably to Texas Pete in several instances and despite it not being at all a bad-tasting sauce, it's a flavor that I find incredibly easy to tire of. The value is almost incomparable, except for it being almost entirely unpalatable to me. I can't imagine an instance in which I would intentionally choose it and unless my wife likes it (she likes the other two in the triumvirate), I may wind up having to pitch a mostly full bottle to make room for other and better sauces.
Bottom line: This is one of those sauces I call a "desert isle" sauce, not meaning that I would take it with me to a deserted island, but if I was cast adrift with nothing else (ignoring the more obvious larger concerns), this would do in a pinch. If I still ate ramen noodles, this is probably what I would use it for, assuming I was out of Red Devil or any other better-tasting sauce or if whatever Mexican restaurant I was at didn't have some good homemade sauce and was out of either of the other two in their table bottles.
Breakdown (Original):
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 2
Flexibility: 4
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 2
Overall: 2
** Update 04/17/13 **
As I am wont to do ever so often, I've decided, after spending a lot more unexpected time with the Valentina lately -- for all its faults, it was one of the few palatable during my recent bout with food poisoning -- that I probably did it a bit of a disservice rating it as low as I did. I stand by most of my comments. This will never be mistaken for an actual good sauce and it remains mostly one of those "better than nothing" sauces, yet it does have its uses and in the interests of fairness, I'm giving it a re-rate. This should not be taken to mean I'm going to rush right out and buy more, but you could have worse things in the fridge.
Breakdown (Re-rate):
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 4
Flexibility: 6
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4
Overall: 4
NOTE: This sauce appeared in Season Four of The Hot Ones. UPDATE: Support video now available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmQFL0N77xk
Along with Cholula and Tapatio, this is the third leg of the triumvirate of large-scale Mexican-oriented hot sauces. It is probably the oldest of the three and easily the least popular (at least in Salt Lake). Cholula, in the United States, is far and away the king there, running away with a strong nationwide distribution and near-ubiquitous presence in so many places I've not lost count. They are also the only one, to my knowledge, to make the transition into sauce packets, which is a much bigger deal than it sounds. It's also probably the mildest of the three, though to my mind, it is also the best-tasting. So, to get to the point, if you've tried either of the others, you've basically tried this, though I think Valentina and Tapatio are closer to each other than to Cholula.
For $.99, I got a 12.5 oz. bottle and was very excited about it. This possibly could have been the prime standby Mexican sauce for which I've been searching, but sadly, oh so sadly, not to be. While it does have moderately more heat than either of the other two (Tapatio has an SHU of 3000, so I'd say this is maybe 3500 - 4000 somewhere), it is comparably less than a good jalapeno. The taste isn't good or bad; it's that same sort of "standard" Mexican sauce taste, which I've understood is malleable enough to use on almost everything.
So, while this is ok for what it is, which is for those people who want hotter versions of one of those sauce variations, I think my taste has moved on. It's very difficult eating this sauce on Mexican food when I have some El Yucateco left. It's doesn't even compare favorably to Texas Pete in several instances and despite it not being at all a bad-tasting sauce, it's a flavor that I find incredibly easy to tire of. The value is almost incomparable, except for it being almost entirely unpalatable to me. I can't imagine an instance in which I would intentionally choose it and unless my wife likes it (she likes the other two in the triumvirate), I may wind up having to pitch a mostly full bottle to make room for other and better sauces.
Bottom line: This is one of those sauces I call a "desert isle" sauce, not meaning that I would take it with me to a deserted island, but if I was cast adrift with nothing else (ignoring the more obvious larger concerns), this would do in a pinch. If I still ate ramen noodles, this is probably what I would use it for, assuming I was out of Red Devil or any other better-tasting sauce or if whatever Mexican restaurant I was at didn't have some good homemade sauce and was out of either of the other two in their table bottles.
Breakdown (Original):
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 2
Flexibility: 4
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 2
Overall: 2
** Update 04/17/13 **
As I am wont to do ever so often, I've decided, after spending a lot more unexpected time with the Valentina lately -- for all its faults, it was one of the few palatable during my recent bout with food poisoning -- that I probably did it a bit of a disservice rating it as low as I did. I stand by most of my comments. This will never be mistaken for an actual good sauce and it remains mostly one of those "better than nothing" sauces, yet it does have its uses and in the interests of fairness, I'm giving it a re-rate. This should not be taken to mean I'm going to rush right out and buy more, but you could have worse things in the fridge.
Breakdown (Re-rate):
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 4
Flexibility: 6
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4
Overall: 4
Video/Audio vs. Written Reviews
UPDATE 03/15/20: I came across this when updating the blog and largely forgotten I'd written it. I seem somewhat upset about video reviews. Part of the reason is that a lot of YouTube, then and now, comes across as eating challenges. With any kind of challenge, it's always a game of one-ups-manship. You got hot, someone else goes hotter, you eat 57 hot dogs, someone eats 70, etc., and that sort of thing remains of limited interest to me. It took me a while to think of a way to do the videos (at the time of writing, I was very against doing a YouTube channel at all) in a way that would add on to the written reviews (which I still consider a lot more important), and cover things that the written review could not, such as the motional viscosity and to a degree, the reaction with the sauces. I'm leaving this as I wrote it, as sort of a capsule, though some of the elements in it have obviously "evolved" over time.
Scott Roberts (go to his website if you haven't already) recently did his usual fantastic job of wrapping up the Weekend Of Fire 2012 and put up a post about a Bloggers roundtable he and some others did. I have not taken the time to go through the video (more on that in a bit), but in his blurb about the episode, he mentions the discussion of video/audio vs. written reviews.
I wrote on this briefly earlier when I mentioned there would be no pictures, etc. but while I may, at some point, add pictures of the bottle, at least, I won't be adding pictures of the sauce on food or videos of my reaction, etc. The reason for this is that I view the reviews for posterity and after doing literally thousands of them on other subjects, I think I've got them more or less nailed down, in terms of what I want to see.
What I don't want to see if having to pore through three and a half minutes or 45 seconds or whatever length of video to get to the information I want. If someone wants to be a star and be on camera or whatever, good on them. Go for it, do it up, go crazy, but if there's a review in there, it's worthless to me. Take a look at any of my written-only reviews and you can find the information (the most important of which is should you spend your money on whatever the thing being reviewed is) in seconds and if you decide you're tired of reading the strings of letters some asshole has cobbled together, then you can skip out and no real harm done. If you're like me and you sit through a few minutes of video, it had damn better be worth your while or you're going to be disappointed or possibly pissed that someone just wasted your time. If you want to go back to it, are you really going to remember the time stamp of when some cutesy fucker said just the right pithy thing that kinda sorta stuck in your mind? I don't think most people have the time to sit through those and if they're like me, they also lack the inclination.
Perhaps equally important is the idea that something written, by nature, is inherently more considered than off-the-cuff remarks, even if they're as practiced and well (perhaps over) rehearsed as those of any given politician. Take a look at literally any random YouTube sauce review (and I say this having seen exactly zero of them) and tell me if they seem polished or outlined or scripted out at all. There might be some general framework and continuity and may even border on cohesive, but are they useful, other than possibly as (light) entertainment? If you're looking for some guidance before you plonk down your dancing-for-tip money for a bottle of magic elixir you haven't tried yet, do you want to see some schnook prancing and dancing around trying to get to whatever point there is to be made or do you want to see something organized or at least static, so you can stare at it to glean whatever useful knowledge there is to be had?
Even if this blog somehow takes off and people stream here by the droves, you won't see video reviews (*ahem* see update) or audio reviews and probably not much in the way of pictures. What you will get is hard, truthful information. Just the facts, kids. Just the facts.
Scott Roberts (go to his website if you haven't already) recently did his usual fantastic job of wrapping up the Weekend Of Fire 2012 and put up a post about a Bloggers roundtable he and some others did. I have not taken the time to go through the video (more on that in a bit), but in his blurb about the episode, he mentions the discussion of video/audio vs. written reviews.
I wrote on this briefly earlier when I mentioned there would be no pictures, etc. but while I may, at some point, add pictures of the bottle, at least, I won't be adding pictures of the sauce on food or videos of my reaction, etc. The reason for this is that I view the reviews for posterity and after doing literally thousands of them on other subjects, I think I've got them more or less nailed down, in terms of what I want to see.
What I don't want to see if having to pore through three and a half minutes or 45 seconds or whatever length of video to get to the information I want. If someone wants to be a star and be on camera or whatever, good on them. Go for it, do it up, go crazy, but if there's a review in there, it's worthless to me. Take a look at any of my written-only reviews and you can find the information (the most important of which is should you spend your money on whatever the thing being reviewed is) in seconds and if you decide you're tired of reading the strings of letters some asshole has cobbled together, then you can skip out and no real harm done. If you're like me and you sit through a few minutes of video, it had damn better be worth your while or you're going to be disappointed or possibly pissed that someone just wasted your time. If you want to go back to it, are you really going to remember the time stamp of when some cutesy fucker said just the right pithy thing that kinda sorta stuck in your mind? I don't think most people have the time to sit through those and if they're like me, they also lack the inclination.
Perhaps equally important is the idea that something written, by nature, is inherently more considered than off-the-cuff remarks, even if they're as practiced and well (perhaps over) rehearsed as those of any given politician. Take a look at literally any random YouTube sauce review (and I say this having seen exactly zero of them) and tell me if they seem polished or outlined or scripted out at all. There might be some general framework and continuity and may even border on cohesive, but are they useful, other than possibly as (light) entertainment? If you're looking for some guidance before you plonk down your dancing-for-tip money for a bottle of magic elixir you haven't tried yet, do you want to see some schnook prancing and dancing around trying to get to whatever point there is to be made or do you want to see something organized or at least static, so you can stare at it to glean whatever useful knowledge there is to be had?
Even if this blog somehow takes off and people stream here by the droves, you won't see video reviews (*ahem* see update) or audio reviews and probably not much in the way of pictures. What you will get is hard, truthful information. Just the facts, kids. Just the facts.
Orange Krush Hot Sauce Review
Orange Krush
My first impression, on peeling back the plastic, was that this was an older bottle. After cleaning out the neck carefully of some discolored sauce, I shook it up and went for the straight test. It immediately reminded me on the El Yucateco red, though noticeably more initial heat. At 9,400 SHU, it's not quite double the El Yucateco, but most of the heat here is what I call the "flash" variety, meaning it hits immediately but has little to no staying power.
Despite having a laundry list of ingredients, the main star here is the "bright" taste of the sauce, again, very similar to El Yucateco. You won't be marveling at being able to flush out the celery seed taste or pondering how nicely the mace is integrated or how well the cardamom shines through, but that complexity does a nice job of smoothing and mellowing the flavor, which adds greatly to the flexibility here, unlike the El Yucateco, which is somewhat of a one-trick pony. Unfortunately, this sauce does not taste as good as the El Yucateco, so it's decidedly advantageous that it is not as overpowering and backs off a bit in intensity there.
I ran this through the usual suspects, up to and including a Subway sandwich and at times it would blend well enough to blunt and mask the initial taste and blend and accent in a way to add a nice degree of heat to whatever it was, from microwaved macaroni & cheese on to stepping up a few other more mundane sauces. Also like the El Yucateco, this did not do well with flavors not prominent enough to hold their own and this is not a good enough tasting sauce to either keep around or ever buy again, ultimately. At $5.99 for a 5 oz. bottle (they have since changed the bottle size), the cost to enjoyment ratio is not staggeringly low, but low nonetheless. There are simply better and more enjoyable sauces out there.
Of course, no review of this particular product would be complete without mentioning the absurd disclaimer on the bottle label about Experienced Chileheads Only! As if 9K SHU would be anything any self-respecting chilehead would ever bat an eye about...it does do a nice job of frightening off several people I work with, since I've moved the bottle to work instead of home. I guess there's that...
Bottom line: This is one of those products that's been out a while, that has generated some noise for itself, but is not in any way what I would consider a high-end product. The taste is not bad, certainly, but not good enough to make me want to use it frequently. It doesn't really fit into any particular area of sauces I would keep on hand nor go especially well with dishes I would normally cook/eat and it's not particularly available easily. I'm not unhappy I tried it, but this is a one-and-done sauce.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 4
Flavor: 4
Flexibility: 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3
Overall: 4
My first impression, on peeling back the plastic, was that this was an older bottle. After cleaning out the neck carefully of some discolored sauce, I shook it up and went for the straight test. It immediately reminded me on the El Yucateco red, though noticeably more initial heat. At 9,400 SHU, it's not quite double the El Yucateco, but most of the heat here is what I call the "flash" variety, meaning it hits immediately but has little to no staying power.Despite having a laundry list of ingredients, the main star here is the "bright" taste of the sauce, again, very similar to El Yucateco. You won't be marveling at being able to flush out the celery seed taste or pondering how nicely the mace is integrated or how well the cardamom shines through, but that complexity does a nice job of smoothing and mellowing the flavor, which adds greatly to the flexibility here, unlike the El Yucateco, which is somewhat of a one-trick pony. Unfortunately, this sauce does not taste as good as the El Yucateco, so it's decidedly advantageous that it is not as overpowering and backs off a bit in intensity there.
I ran this through the usual suspects, up to and including a Subway sandwich and at times it would blend well enough to blunt and mask the initial taste and blend and accent in a way to add a nice degree of heat to whatever it was, from microwaved macaroni & cheese on to stepping up a few other more mundane sauces. Also like the El Yucateco, this did not do well with flavors not prominent enough to hold their own and this is not a good enough tasting sauce to either keep around or ever buy again, ultimately. At $5.99 for a 5 oz. bottle (they have since changed the bottle size), the cost to enjoyment ratio is not staggeringly low, but low nonetheless. There are simply better and more enjoyable sauces out there.
Of course, no review of this particular product would be complete without mentioning the absurd disclaimer on the bottle label about Experienced Chileheads Only! As if 9K SHU would be anything any self-respecting chilehead would ever bat an eye about...it does do a nice job of frightening off several people I work with, since I've moved the bottle to work instead of home. I guess there's that...
Bottom line: This is one of those products that's been out a while, that has generated some noise for itself, but is not in any way what I would consider a high-end product. The taste is not bad, certainly, but not good enough to make me want to use it frequently. It doesn't really fit into any particular area of sauces I would keep on hand nor go especially well with dishes I would normally cook/eat and it's not particularly available easily. I'm not unhappy I tried it, but this is a one-and-done sauce.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 4
Flavor: 4
Flexibility: 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3
Overall: 4
Friday, September 28, 2012
Brick & Mortar Hot Sauce Locations in Salt Lake
Circa 09.27.12
Well, not actually, in the lake, per se, but in the area, specifically in the city proper. There are, precisely, two and another about an hour away. Before I get to talking about them, I should back up. Long, long ago, back when I was first doing the Chilehead ride before the thing had a proper name, there were two places in Salt Lake that pushed the heat end. One of them was Grove Market and the other was a shop in Fashion Place Mall where we'd buy a bottle of Dave's Insanity every 6 months or so for drunken party bravery challenges.
The place in Fashion Place, whatever the name, is now long gone, but Grove Market is still around, doing their damn thing. Mostly, that means making gigantic (and tasty) deli sandwiches. They also have a couple floor to ceiling shelves (and an area behind the register) featuring nothing but hot to superhot sauces. Some of them are probably more keepsakes, such as John McCain campaign bottle of something and possibly that bottle of Orange Krush I got a couple weeks ago, than actually usable, but the range is overall pretty good, even discounting the bullshit like Melinda's and Marie Sharp's and other assorted sauces that use the dreaded ass-onions as part of their makeup. I've decided to make this my go-to store, for a variety of reasons and have put in some tags for the Original Death and a couple others to pick up sometime in the next month (backlog and all). They even have Danny Cash stuff, which I frankly never expected to see on a shelf. One major caveat, to go back to the keepsake thing for a second, is that anything on the very top shelf of the north shelf must be inspected closely. Several of the bottles are apparently just for collectible purposes and several of them have discolored sauce remnants up the necks of the bottles.
By way of update to Grove's, as of today, 11/03/12, I've bought 6 bottles of hot sauce there. Three of them have been out of date and the sauce has been discolored. Accordingly, I must recommend that you check the date and color carefully before making an actual purchase.
The other Satl Lake store is called Chili & Max and is in the top area of the detestable outdoor Gateway Mall, down the street from the more useless outdoor City Creek Mall. In the age of the internet, for a brick & mortar anything to succeed, they need to do one of two things: offer something unique and that people really want and can only get there OR offer a great enough selection to offset the higher price for convenience vs. ordering whatever it is online for probably (maybe) cheaper and having to wait a week or so. What Chili & Max has done is neither. This is evidently an outlet for a sauce company unfortunately named "Its F'n Hot." Loads of that on the shelves, along with a few things from CaJohn's and Dave's, but the selection seems almost haphazard. There are a few of the superhots and the store, with its hundreds and hundreds of bottles, seems to run the gamut, but where is the Blair's and where is the rest of the CaJohn's? Again, with the Melinda's and Marie Sharp's, several of which are in grocery stores, but when you're putting a storefront in a mall, where patrons have to validate their fucking parking, your ass better bring it and this store was a resounding and solid disappointment. I may go back again someday, but damn if it's worth a special trip. I seriously can't see how you can cater to that narrow of an audience, most of the shoppers from there can be counted on to be knowledgeable, and then have that skimpy of a selection.
An hour north, in another mall and nestled in a Quilted Bear storefront (I couldn't make up something that delicious if I wanted), is a third, called Burn Your Tongue. Now, it's a waste of my time and money to drive to that town merely to peruse the wares on display, even if I buy something, but if I'm in the area, I'll definitely drop in. The selection they have listed on their website is intriguing and by names alone, world better than either of the two I already mentioned.
Grocers are carrying more sauces now. Smith's (part of Kroger), goes about as far as El Yucateco, but Harmon's carries several of the charged habanero sauces and Fresh Market has several more. Whole Foods is supposed to have a good selection (I couldn't find any on my last visit) and some of the more boutique stores also advertise their supposed prowess here. I can't canvass them all, obviously, but I always check the shelves for something recently added. A Trader Joe's is supposed to open downtown and that has some possibilities, but in a town this size -- and even including Ogden an hour north -- 3 shops that specialize (sorta) in hot sauce is piss poor pathetic. Salt Lake is not a "dead" food town-- there are a lot of great and flavorful eateries and we have the Kobe Sushi restaurant, with its infamous 7 levels of heat (working my way up to that one) -- it's not like it's Fargo, where nobody knows anything about food or flavor, after all. It is, somewhat, a "safe" town, though and the Chilehead movement, while gaining some ground, is not storming the castles here just yet...
Well, not actually, in the lake, per se, but in the area, specifically in the city proper. There are, precisely, two and another about an hour away. Before I get to talking about them, I should back up. Long, long ago, back when I was first doing the Chilehead ride before the thing had a proper name, there were two places in Salt Lake that pushed the heat end. One of them was Grove Market and the other was a shop in Fashion Place Mall where we'd buy a bottle of Dave's Insanity every 6 months or so for drunken party bravery challenges.
The place in Fashion Place, whatever the name, is now long gone, but Grove Market is still around, doing their damn thing. Mostly, that means making gigantic (and tasty) deli sandwiches. They also have a couple floor to ceiling shelves (and an area behind the register) featuring nothing but hot to superhot sauces. Some of them are probably more keepsakes, such as John McCain campaign bottle of something and possibly that bottle of Orange Krush I got a couple weeks ago, than actually usable, but the range is overall pretty good, even discounting the bullshit like Melinda's and Marie Sharp's and other assorted sauces that use the dreaded ass-onions as part of their makeup. I've decided to make this my go-to store, for a variety of reasons and have put in some tags for the Original Death and a couple others to pick up sometime in the next month (backlog and all). They even have Danny Cash stuff, which I frankly never expected to see on a shelf. One major caveat, to go back to the keepsake thing for a second, is that anything on the very top shelf of the north shelf must be inspected closely. Several of the bottles are apparently just for collectible purposes and several of them have discolored sauce remnants up the necks of the bottles.
By way of update to Grove's, as of today, 11/03/12, I've bought 6 bottles of hot sauce there. Three of them have been out of date and the sauce has been discolored. Accordingly, I must recommend that you check the date and color carefully before making an actual purchase.
The other Satl Lake store is called Chili & Max and is in the top area of the detestable outdoor Gateway Mall, down the street from the more useless outdoor City Creek Mall. In the age of the internet, for a brick & mortar anything to succeed, they need to do one of two things: offer something unique and that people really want and can only get there OR offer a great enough selection to offset the higher price for convenience vs. ordering whatever it is online for probably (maybe) cheaper and having to wait a week or so. What Chili & Max has done is neither. This is evidently an outlet for a sauce company unfortunately named "Its F'n Hot." Loads of that on the shelves, along with a few things from CaJohn's and Dave's, but the selection seems almost haphazard. There are a few of the superhots and the store, with its hundreds and hundreds of bottles, seems to run the gamut, but where is the Blair's and where is the rest of the CaJohn's? Again, with the Melinda's and Marie Sharp's, several of which are in grocery stores, but when you're putting a storefront in a mall, where patrons have to validate their fucking parking, your ass better bring it and this store was a resounding and solid disappointment. I may go back again someday, but damn if it's worth a special trip. I seriously can't see how you can cater to that narrow of an audience, most of the shoppers from there can be counted on to be knowledgeable, and then have that skimpy of a selection.
An hour north, in another mall and nestled in a Quilted Bear storefront (I couldn't make up something that delicious if I wanted), is a third, called Burn Your Tongue. Now, it's a waste of my time and money to drive to that town merely to peruse the wares on display, even if I buy something, but if I'm in the area, I'll definitely drop in. The selection they have listed on their website is intriguing and by names alone, world better than either of the two I already mentioned.
Grocers are carrying more sauces now. Smith's (part of Kroger), goes about as far as El Yucateco, but Harmon's carries several of the charged habanero sauces and Fresh Market has several more. Whole Foods is supposed to have a good selection (I couldn't find any on my last visit) and some of the more boutique stores also advertise their supposed prowess here. I can't canvass them all, obviously, but I always check the shelves for something recently added. A Trader Joe's is supposed to open downtown and that has some possibilities, but in a town this size -- and even including Ogden an hour north -- 3 shops that specialize (sorta) in hot sauce is piss poor pathetic. Salt Lake is not a "dead" food town-- there are a lot of great and flavorful eateries and we have the Kobe Sushi restaurant, with its infamous 7 levels of heat (working my way up to that one) -- it's not like it's Fargo, where nobody knows anything about food or flavor, after all. It is, somewhat, a "safe" town, though and the Chilehead movement, while gaining some ground, is not storming the castles here just yet...
Saturday, September 22, 2012
CaJohn's Bourbon Infused Chipotle-Habanero Hot Sauce Review
CaJohn's Bourbon Infused Chipotle-Habanero (15th Anniversary Limited Edition)
UPDATE: Video support now available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZYKJn4_LQg
Part of me is tempted to greatly simplify this and call it Tiger Sauce Amplified and On Steroids, which, while somewhat accurate, is also woefully inadequate. My initial impression on tasting it plain was that it was a similar sort of sweet/hot sauce and the immediate reminiscence was of that, but 2 seconds later, the similarity ended. Whereas Tiger can be quickly cloying and has a feel and taste of "cheap" to it, requiring it to be used very judiciously, BICH is on a level where it could be poured into a shot glass and slugged. Very few sauces tasted good enough to consider drinking (not that I would), but this is one where I found myself thinking..."yes, but I could." Sweet-hot is always high on my list and this one fills the bill magnificently!
The heat is almost perfectly orchestrated. It is a slight delay, then a steady build into an overall crescendo of notes that is not too bracing, but at a pleasant enough level to let you know that it's there and you may commence with the happiness over that fact. The grace notes of vinegar and the chipotle overtones are fantastically well done, but the real skill, for me, came in the use of the Jim Beam Black. It is hard to imagine a better choice of bourbon for use here. While Jim Beam Black is a bit too sweet for me to keep on hand for drinking (I much prefer Eagle Rare as my on-hand bottle for bourbon), it is still an excellent bourbon and that exact sweetness really shines here. The choice is sheer brilliance and it shines through very nicely in the sauce.
While I have tested this extensively on nearly everything I can think of -- including eggs -- along with the standards of pizza and chicken strips, I found it interesting on tacos, but not something I would choose again. The taste is so delicious that I don't think there is a way that adding it to anything would be necessarily bad, however, it borderline clashes, which makes for the taste to be curious and a nice change of pace, but not anything that would be necessarily used regularly. I think where it really shines is on the grill. While slightly thin, it sticks well enough to food and it has a somewhat heavier, darker taste that it can easily be used for anything from hamburgers to chicken to steak to pork. This is another marked difference from Tiger, which works well on fish, chicken, rice and mashed potatoes and very little else. The BICH also caramelizes incredibly well and the very slight astringency from the vinegar would make this a fantastic mop or finishing sauce for ribs.
Bottom line: I still have a great many sauces in line for testing before I add another one to my standbys, but I have a sneaking suspicion that when I run out of this bottle, I will be buying another couple next time I hit the store or order online, presuming I can find it. At $10 for a 6.8 oz. bottle, the enjoyment per dollar level is the highest I've found this year, excepting maybe the Red Devil. The only thing that gives me some degree of pause is the availability of it, which may be an issue at some future point.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 9
Flexibility: 7
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10
Overall: 7
UPDATE: Video support now available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZYKJn4_LQg Part of me is tempted to greatly simplify this and call it Tiger Sauce Amplified and On Steroids, which, while somewhat accurate, is also woefully inadequate. My initial impression on tasting it plain was that it was a similar sort of sweet/hot sauce and the immediate reminiscence was of that, but 2 seconds later, the similarity ended. Whereas Tiger can be quickly cloying and has a feel and taste of "cheap" to it, requiring it to be used very judiciously, BICH is on a level where it could be poured into a shot glass and slugged. Very few sauces tasted good enough to consider drinking (not that I would), but this is one where I found myself thinking..."yes, but I could." Sweet-hot is always high on my list and this one fills the bill magnificently!
The heat is almost perfectly orchestrated. It is a slight delay, then a steady build into an overall crescendo of notes that is not too bracing, but at a pleasant enough level to let you know that it's there and you may commence with the happiness over that fact. The grace notes of vinegar and the chipotle overtones are fantastically well done, but the real skill, for me, came in the use of the Jim Beam Black. It is hard to imagine a better choice of bourbon for use here. While Jim Beam Black is a bit too sweet for me to keep on hand for drinking (I much prefer Eagle Rare as my on-hand bottle for bourbon), it is still an excellent bourbon and that exact sweetness really shines here. The choice is sheer brilliance and it shines through very nicely in the sauce.
While I have tested this extensively on nearly everything I can think of -- including eggs -- along with the standards of pizza and chicken strips, I found it interesting on tacos, but not something I would choose again. The taste is so delicious that I don't think there is a way that adding it to anything would be necessarily bad, however, it borderline clashes, which makes for the taste to be curious and a nice change of pace, but not anything that would be necessarily used regularly. I think where it really shines is on the grill. While slightly thin, it sticks well enough to food and it has a somewhat heavier, darker taste that it can easily be used for anything from hamburgers to chicken to steak to pork. This is another marked difference from Tiger, which works well on fish, chicken, rice and mashed potatoes and very little else. The BICH also caramelizes incredibly well and the very slight astringency from the vinegar would make this a fantastic mop or finishing sauce for ribs.
Bottom line: I still have a great many sauces in line for testing before I add another one to my standbys, but I have a sneaking suspicion that when I run out of this bottle, I will be buying another couple next time I hit the store or order online, presuming I can find it. At $10 for a 6.8 oz. bottle, the enjoyment per dollar level is the highest I've found this year, excepting maybe the Red Devil. The only thing that gives me some degree of pause is the availability of it, which may be an issue at some future point.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 9
Flexibility: 7
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10
Overall: 7
El Yucateco Red Habanero Hot Sauce Review
El Yucateco Red Habanero
UPDATE: Video support now available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZPp3PGf28
NOTE: This sauce appeared in Season Two and Season Three of The Hot Ones.
Since my newest pressing sauce "need" is still for a new "Mexican"-type sauce, I picked up a bottle of this I happened across during the course of my normal grocery shopping. At 5, 800 SHU, it's not particularly hot, but a significant step up from Pico Pica or the random sauce packets I had from whatever Mexican type food place I was at last or from the usual suspects of Tapatio/Cholula. If it did turn out to be good, the $2.59 I spent on the 4 oz. bottle would be well worth it.
The initial taste is a very vivid and lively one, something I would best describe as "bright", nearly as bright, in fact, as the red coloration of this sauce. It's a very peppery, very chile-tasting sauce, though it happily does not have a lot of the obnoxious overtones of habanero that makes the pepper itself one that I use sparingly. The taste is something I would rate as palatable, but not too strong one way or the other and the heat flush, something else atypical of habaneros for me, is immediate, though it tends to be a mouth heat only, failing to radiate into an overall internal burn, such as Thai peppers have a happy habit of doing.
All is not rosy, however. My main contention with this sauce is that it can quickly and easily overpower everything else. This is not a negative if the flavor of the sauce is enjoyable. To me, this one, as noted, is not. It is what I say is average. I found it to be best when mixed and being, as it is, intended for the Mexican market, it excels at those foods, when mixed in thoroughly with something else. Just slapping the sauce on something generally means a big hit of sauce that doesn't always play nice with other things in the mouth and becomes the focal point. This distraction is what really limits its overall flexibility for me. Despite the burst of initial mouth heat, I could stand for this to contain more of the usual habanero element of building heat.
I tried this on a wide variety of the usual suspects, such as pizza & chicken strips and while it wasn't totally dissatisfying, I was happy when the small sections that I used it on were consumed. It worked far better on mole' chicken, tacos, burritos, pinto beans, pork & beans and eggs.
Bottom line: This is a significant upgrade from what I was using normally as a Mexican sauce and I'm in no way dissatisfied at all. It is not on a level, however, that I will give up my search and frankly not really good enough in terms of what I'm wanting to make it a standby. By far the most redeeming thing about it is the under $1/oz. price and the near-ubiquitous availability, which makes it an outstanding value. Unfortunately, the other factors are just not there as much as I need them to be. This is what I would call a very solid mid-range sauce.
Breakdown:
Heat level:1
Flavor: 5
Flexibility: 4
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 7
Overall: 4
UPDATE: Video support now available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZPp3PGf28NOTE: This sauce appeared in Season Two and Season Three of The Hot Ones.
Since my newest pressing sauce "need" is still for a new "Mexican"-type sauce, I picked up a bottle of this I happened across during the course of my normal grocery shopping. At 5, 800 SHU, it's not particularly hot, but a significant step up from Pico Pica or the random sauce packets I had from whatever Mexican type food place I was at last or from the usual suspects of Tapatio/Cholula. If it did turn out to be good, the $2.59 I spent on the 4 oz. bottle would be well worth it.
The initial taste is a very vivid and lively one, something I would best describe as "bright", nearly as bright, in fact, as the red coloration of this sauce. It's a very peppery, very chile-tasting sauce, though it happily does not have a lot of the obnoxious overtones of habanero that makes the pepper itself one that I use sparingly. The taste is something I would rate as palatable, but not too strong one way or the other and the heat flush, something else atypical of habaneros for me, is immediate, though it tends to be a mouth heat only, failing to radiate into an overall internal burn, such as Thai peppers have a happy habit of doing.
All is not rosy, however. My main contention with this sauce is that it can quickly and easily overpower everything else. This is not a negative if the flavor of the sauce is enjoyable. To me, this one, as noted, is not. It is what I say is average. I found it to be best when mixed and being, as it is, intended for the Mexican market, it excels at those foods, when mixed in thoroughly with something else. Just slapping the sauce on something generally means a big hit of sauce that doesn't always play nice with other things in the mouth and becomes the focal point. This distraction is what really limits its overall flexibility for me. Despite the burst of initial mouth heat, I could stand for this to contain more of the usual habanero element of building heat.
I tried this on a wide variety of the usual suspects, such as pizza & chicken strips and while it wasn't totally dissatisfying, I was happy when the small sections that I used it on were consumed. It worked far better on mole' chicken, tacos, burritos, pinto beans, pork & beans and eggs.
Bottom line: This is a significant upgrade from what I was using normally as a Mexican sauce and I'm in no way dissatisfied at all. It is not on a level, however, that I will give up my search and frankly not really good enough in terms of what I'm wanting to make it a standby. By far the most redeeming thing about it is the under $1/oz. price and the near-ubiquitous availability, which makes it an outstanding value. Unfortunately, the other factors are just not there as much as I need them to be. This is what I would call a very solid mid-range sauce.
Breakdown:
Heat level:1
Flavor: 5
Flexibility: 4
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 7
Overall: 4
Monday, September 17, 2012
An Open Letter to Hot Sauce Manufacturers
What I'm about to write was prompted by a discussion in the comment section of a review Scott Roberts recently did for a sauce called Johny 5 by Threatcon Kitchens, available here: http://www.scottrobertsweb.com/Review-Johny-5-Hot-Sauce-from-Threatcon-Kitchens#comments
Reading through the review, Roberts ultimately didn't enjoy the sauce and like others of which he's had an identical reaction, he said so. So far, so good, right? Except here's where it get stupid...
In his first post in the comment section, one Chris Tice, creator of the sauce, took great umbrage at the review Mr. Roberts did of the Johny 5 sauce, the first to be released commercially from Threatcon Kitchens. Part of his grievance centered on having to wait months for the review, despite Roberts repeatedly posting that he has an enormous backlog of review items. Given the amount of effort put into any given Roberts review (amusingly, one of Tice's gripes was that Roberts did not post a photo of every single thing the sauce was used on), along with his children and other more important elements that demand his time, he clearly is not in a position to churn them out, like these text-only posts I do. Even with my own, it still takes time to test the sauce and line out where it falls in the scheme of things, because the obligation to readers is one any good reviewer takes seriously. Roberts is also, far and away, the king of the hot sauce blog world, unquestionably. That doesn't make him always right or even someone that I necessarily agree with on all things a significant portion of the time, but that's why a manufacturer would want his review. To get into that rarefied air, there are conditions that come with the territory. A review on his site will potentially expose a product to a greater segment of the hotter sauce buying base, the exact customer demographic that a sauce such as this would appeal. Obviously, other companies recognize this, which is why he has boxes and boxes of stuff unopened before him. If someone wants him, he's not exactly invisible and trade shows and there are plenty of pages on his site for them to research so they know what they are getting. Failing to do this is on them.
Scott Roberts does not know me and does not need me to defend him, but there are some larger issues raised by the comments of Tice that have a more direct bearing. Tice, for instance, attempted to take Roberts to task for trying the sauce on pizza and "bar food". In the comments section, he levied this attack repeatedly, insisting that not only does sauce not belong on Italian foods at all, restricting any addition to the dried and dessicated hot pepper flakes and seeds, but further that reviewers should pair hot sauce to its pallet [sic] when testing. He also was angered that his "gourmet" sauce was used on Hamburger Helper. Finally, there were numerous misspellings in Tice's angry posts, yet he bandied his stature as some sort of published food writer for a couple papers in Florida as a means in his attempt to belittle Roberts further.
Almost all of Tice's behavior is laughable but his irate sentences about not pairing a sauce to its palate is absurd. Even if the label says the sauce is strictly intended for certain foods under the full pale moonlight after turning three time widdershins and even if the manufacturer gets some kind of commitment (somehow) that the food will only be used according to those directions, the fact remains that all bets are off once it is in the hands of the reviewer (or consumer). A good review will state how something is tested. Roberts did that. Nothing further is necessary. Readers can decide for themselves if it is fair and applicable and if Tice didn't believe it was and felt strongly about it, all he had to say was that the sauce would be better oriented to other things and leave it at that. That he chose to use the comment section as a sort of electronic assault is crass.
The sauce, as a condiment or accompaniment to food, comes to us, not the other way around. It either fits in with what we're doing and what we're eating or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it fails. There's nothing wrong with using sauce on pizza. Pizza is fine as a staple as is Hamburger Helper or mac & cheese or chicken strips. If any of the chilehead households have young children, dollars to doughnuts some of those foods will be staples, so of course the food at hand is where the sauce will be tested and it will pass or fail on its relative merits thereof. Pizza, it also should be noted, is one of the easiest tests there is for a sauce and one of the things I use as a base. If a sauce fails there, it typically points to a larger issue with the sauce in general. Very few sauces I can think of have failed this test or that of ramen noodles, which was my baseline test years and years ago. Sauces, if they are any good, should be able to fail this easy test and even the more specific Asian-oriented one have done so easily in the past. Even though I felt I had a handle on the Jim Beam Hot Sauce well enough to review it, as long as I have some in the bottle, unless a sauce is so awful I have to toss it, I will continue to test it on a variety of things, such as mole' chicken last night and Italian meatloaf tonight. I even ran it on a BLT(-L) sandwich while I was at it and have a couple more tests this week to continue checking and confirm things. Ultimately, the whole point of doing a food-based review is so that someone else can read your experience and determine if they have similar tastes and if they would use the product in a similar manner. That's why people read reviews, to help them answer the question "should I spend money on this thing" and maybe to be entertained in the process. Theoretically, assuming Tice is a competent reviewer (I have not and will not read any of his articles), he should know this already.
As a reviewer, I really want a sauce to have flexibility because I will not ever stock 50 - 100 sauces for every thing I might ever cook or eat. I believe everyone else reading the reviews probably wants the same thing. Just give us something good that we can (or do) love on a variety of foods and you'll have a repeat customer, we'll have a new staple and it's a win-win. For Tice to suggest that food be bought specifically for a sauce review is ridiculous and frankly asinine and demonstrates a core lack of understanding for the marketplace. The only way I could conceivably see that happening is if Tice paid for the food to be used during the review, but even then, it would probably be tested on other stuff as well because we want to know. Why be afraid of a sauce being used on a variety of foods? If the sauce is really great, possibly food would be purchased specifically for it, but probably 99.9% of the time that would be the exception and not the rule.
Here's the rub, though. Johny 5 is not a sauce I would have ever considered, due to my intolerance of the onions in it, but if the day comes when Threatcon makes a sauce without that component, I won't be tasting it. When I saw that reaction from Tice, my first counter-reaction was that there was a sauce company who would never get my money, who I would make it a point to ignore and if ever I was asked, would intentionally steer people away from. It doesn't matter how good the sauce is; it could be the greatest sauce in the world and I would still say no because that sort of bizarre reaction from Tice I find highly offensive, as well as off-base and I have no intention of even indirectly supporting it. Fact is, I will never spend a cent on anything from Threatcon because of this and I will encourage others not to buy anything from them either. There are too many other good and great sauces from good and great companies and much more deserving sauce creators to support.
I've reviewed products for years and years, everything from CDs to bodybuilding products. I've known a great number of reviewers in that time and I will state categorically that of all the other reviewers I've known, as well as speaking for myself, we truly want to love what we're reviewing. We all want to find the next great thing, to find something that will help us to the next level of training or will be another addition to the list of "Island" CDs or to find the sauce that will ratchet up the taste factor of our food. Nobody sets out wanting to write a "bad" review, to tell someone that their product is not ready for prime time yet or needs more development or should have been erased from the studios hard drive, yet sometimes, in order to do our jobs as reviewers, whether we are paid or not -- from a pride perspective, if nothing else -- we must tell the truth. Not every product is great. Most are not even good. The highest single statistical area is that of average. The really bad ones are as few as the really great ones and the notably below-average about the same as notable above-average. In any field, the most competitive area is in the middle, but with an industry relatively in its infancy, such as hot sauce, it becomes very important to try to gain and latch onto a paying fan/customer base. Treating a neutral reviewer that badly and generally acting an ass to the other commenters in the community is not the way to go about doing that. Indeed, this is the epitome of what not to do.
Reading through the review, Roberts ultimately didn't enjoy the sauce and like others of which he's had an identical reaction, he said so. So far, so good, right? Except here's where it get stupid...
In his first post in the comment section, one Chris Tice, creator of the sauce, took great umbrage at the review Mr. Roberts did of the Johny 5 sauce, the first to be released commercially from Threatcon Kitchens. Part of his grievance centered on having to wait months for the review, despite Roberts repeatedly posting that he has an enormous backlog of review items. Given the amount of effort put into any given Roberts review (amusingly, one of Tice's gripes was that Roberts did not post a photo of every single thing the sauce was used on), along with his children and other more important elements that demand his time, he clearly is not in a position to churn them out, like these text-only posts I do. Even with my own, it still takes time to test the sauce and line out where it falls in the scheme of things, because the obligation to readers is one any good reviewer takes seriously. Roberts is also, far and away, the king of the hot sauce blog world, unquestionably. That doesn't make him always right or even someone that I necessarily agree with on all things a significant portion of the time, but that's why a manufacturer would want his review. To get into that rarefied air, there are conditions that come with the territory. A review on his site will potentially expose a product to a greater segment of the hotter sauce buying base, the exact customer demographic that a sauce such as this would appeal. Obviously, other companies recognize this, which is why he has boxes and boxes of stuff unopened before him. If someone wants him, he's not exactly invisible and trade shows and there are plenty of pages on his site for them to research so they know what they are getting. Failing to do this is on them.
Scott Roberts does not know me and does not need me to defend him, but there are some larger issues raised by the comments of Tice that have a more direct bearing. Tice, for instance, attempted to take Roberts to task for trying the sauce on pizza and "bar food". In the comments section, he levied this attack repeatedly, insisting that not only does sauce not belong on Italian foods at all, restricting any addition to the dried and dessicated hot pepper flakes and seeds, but further that reviewers should pair hot sauce to its pallet [sic] when testing. He also was angered that his "gourmet" sauce was used on Hamburger Helper. Finally, there were numerous misspellings in Tice's angry posts, yet he bandied his stature as some sort of published food writer for a couple papers in Florida as a means in his attempt to belittle Roberts further.
Almost all of Tice's behavior is laughable but his irate sentences about not pairing a sauce to its palate is absurd. Even if the label says the sauce is strictly intended for certain foods under the full pale moonlight after turning three time widdershins and even if the manufacturer gets some kind of commitment (somehow) that the food will only be used according to those directions, the fact remains that all bets are off once it is in the hands of the reviewer (or consumer). A good review will state how something is tested. Roberts did that. Nothing further is necessary. Readers can decide for themselves if it is fair and applicable and if Tice didn't believe it was and felt strongly about it, all he had to say was that the sauce would be better oriented to other things and leave it at that. That he chose to use the comment section as a sort of electronic assault is crass.
The sauce, as a condiment or accompaniment to food, comes to us, not the other way around. It either fits in with what we're doing and what we're eating or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it fails. There's nothing wrong with using sauce on pizza. Pizza is fine as a staple as is Hamburger Helper or mac & cheese or chicken strips. If any of the chilehead households have young children, dollars to doughnuts some of those foods will be staples, so of course the food at hand is where the sauce will be tested and it will pass or fail on its relative merits thereof. Pizza, it also should be noted, is one of the easiest tests there is for a sauce and one of the things I use as a base. If a sauce fails there, it typically points to a larger issue with the sauce in general. Very few sauces I can think of have failed this test or that of ramen noodles, which was my baseline test years and years ago. Sauces, if they are any good, should be able to fail this easy test and even the more specific Asian-oriented one have done so easily in the past. Even though I felt I had a handle on the Jim Beam Hot Sauce well enough to review it, as long as I have some in the bottle, unless a sauce is so awful I have to toss it, I will continue to test it on a variety of things, such as mole' chicken last night and Italian meatloaf tonight. I even ran it on a BLT(-L) sandwich while I was at it and have a couple more tests this week to continue checking and confirm things. Ultimately, the whole point of doing a food-based review is so that someone else can read your experience and determine if they have similar tastes and if they would use the product in a similar manner. That's why people read reviews, to help them answer the question "should I spend money on this thing" and maybe to be entertained in the process. Theoretically, assuming Tice is a competent reviewer (I have not and will not read any of his articles), he should know this already.
As a reviewer, I really want a sauce to have flexibility because I will not ever stock 50 - 100 sauces for every thing I might ever cook or eat. I believe everyone else reading the reviews probably wants the same thing. Just give us something good that we can (or do) love on a variety of foods and you'll have a repeat customer, we'll have a new staple and it's a win-win. For Tice to suggest that food be bought specifically for a sauce review is ridiculous and frankly asinine and demonstrates a core lack of understanding for the marketplace. The only way I could conceivably see that happening is if Tice paid for the food to be used during the review, but even then, it would probably be tested on other stuff as well because we want to know. Why be afraid of a sauce being used on a variety of foods? If the sauce is really great, possibly food would be purchased specifically for it, but probably 99.9% of the time that would be the exception and not the rule.
Here's the rub, though. Johny 5 is not a sauce I would have ever considered, due to my intolerance of the onions in it, but if the day comes when Threatcon makes a sauce without that component, I won't be tasting it. When I saw that reaction from Tice, my first counter-reaction was that there was a sauce company who would never get my money, who I would make it a point to ignore and if ever I was asked, would intentionally steer people away from. It doesn't matter how good the sauce is; it could be the greatest sauce in the world and I would still say no because that sort of bizarre reaction from Tice I find highly offensive, as well as off-base and I have no intention of even indirectly supporting it. Fact is, I will never spend a cent on anything from Threatcon because of this and I will encourage others not to buy anything from them either. There are too many other good and great sauces from good and great companies and much more deserving sauce creators to support.
I've reviewed products for years and years, everything from CDs to bodybuilding products. I've known a great number of reviewers in that time and I will state categorically that of all the other reviewers I've known, as well as speaking for myself, we truly want to love what we're reviewing. We all want to find the next great thing, to find something that will help us to the next level of training or will be another addition to the list of "Island" CDs or to find the sauce that will ratchet up the taste factor of our food. Nobody sets out wanting to write a "bad" review, to tell someone that their product is not ready for prime time yet or needs more development or should have been erased from the studios hard drive, yet sometimes, in order to do our jobs as reviewers, whether we are paid or not -- from a pride perspective, if nothing else -- we must tell the truth. Not every product is great. Most are not even good. The highest single statistical area is that of average. The really bad ones are as few as the really great ones and the notably below-average about the same as notable above-average. In any field, the most competitive area is in the middle, but with an industry relatively in its infancy, such as hot sauce, it becomes very important to try to gain and latch onto a paying fan/customer base. Treating a neutral reviewer that badly and generally acting an ass to the other commenters in the community is not the way to go about doing that. Indeed, this is the epitome of what not to do.
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Jim Beam Hot Sauce review
Jim Beam Hot Sauce
Fuck, he typed as he very professionally began his review.
Here's the thing. I really wanted to like this sauce. Everyone who knows me knows I love bourbon. I don't especially love Jim Beam, despite the swimming pool of the shit I've probably drank by now, but if something says "bourbon" on it, it has my attention and immediate interest.
A quick sidetrack -- so the other day, I'm at a place in Salt Lake called Grove Market. They asses boast the largest hot sauce in the city and at well over 200 different bottles, maybe even 300+, they're right on the money there. Nobody else is even close. Like a fucking fool, I went there during a half hour lunch. Figure 7 - 8 minutes to drive there and the rest staring and drooling and dancing around people trying to order lunch sandwiches at this damn deli. I could have spent hours, but instead, I threw down my $5 and took this bottle home, figuring I would go back later (which will be 09.15.12, almost certainly).
I got it back to work (late from lunch) and cracked the bitch open to kick up some 7-11 pizza (best I could do on short notice) and my immediate impression, after taking a slug from the bottle straight (couldn't find a spoon) was that it was a pleasant-tasting sauce. It's a little difficult to place precisely. Initially, I got the chili-powder aspect, reminding me of Pico Pica, then the vinegar hit, so now we have Pico Pica + maybe Tabasco and finally I got the bourbon, albeit very light at that moment, aspect. Hmmmm. As I got further into the sauce, I began to detect more notes and the bourbon flourished more.
On pizza, it kicked all kinds of ass and frankly, this is one of the better sauces I've had on pizza. Clocking in at ~5K SHU, it is around the level of the average jalapeno, nothing special there. The taste...figuring it to be similar to Pico Pica, I slopped it on some Del Taco hardshells and became immediately depressed. Ass city. I put it on some bean burritos from there, to no avail. I got some El Yucateco to bail me out and put the JB away for another day. That day happened a short time later at a chicken strip dinner. I made both these Tyson pre-sauced things that looked like poop logs and some chicken finger appetizers as well. On the fingers, it was aces. On the BBQ strips, however, it was ass personified and I had to call on Texas Pete for a bailout there.
Bottom line: This is overall a pleasant-tasting sauce by itself and as long as you don't have other stronger flavors (hence the success with pizza and chicken fingers), it does quite well. In conjunction with more dominant flavors and the subtleties get masked and you get...vinegar, which creates an ill result. The flexibility of this sauce is lacking, but even if it wasn't, it's not a great sauce, by any means. If you want heat, this is not your sauce, but if you want something that tastes reasonably good on specific foods, you could do worse than to pick up a bottle of this. Even though the cost is higher than more useful sauces, I wouldn't be afraid to pick up a bottle if you like bourbon-sauces and haven't tried this yourself.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 6
Flexibility: original 4, update 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4
Overall: original 4, update 5
** Update: 09.18.12 **
After further consideration and testing, this stuff is somewhat more flexible than I initially indicated, though not a great deal. I've moved the overall rating up slightly in recognition of that. I still don't believe I would pay $5 for another 5 oz. bottle of it, though...
* Do yourself a favor and go to www.scottrobertsweb.com and check out his Scoville scale. It will prove infinitely useful not only with these (and others) reviews, but in general if you're stepping into this world.
Fuck, he typed as he very professionally began his review.Here's the thing. I really wanted to like this sauce. Everyone who knows me knows I love bourbon. I don't especially love Jim Beam, despite the swimming pool of the shit I've probably drank by now, but if something says "bourbon" on it, it has my attention and immediate interest.
A quick sidetrack -- so the other day, I'm at a place in Salt Lake called Grove Market. They asses boast the largest hot sauce in the city and at well over 200 different bottles, maybe even 300+, they're right on the money there. Nobody else is even close. Like a fucking fool, I went there during a half hour lunch. Figure 7 - 8 minutes to drive there and the rest staring and drooling and dancing around people trying to order lunch sandwiches at this damn deli. I could have spent hours, but instead, I threw down my $5 and took this bottle home, figuring I would go back later (which will be 09.15.12, almost certainly).
I got it back to work (late from lunch) and cracked the bitch open to kick up some 7-11 pizza (best I could do on short notice) and my immediate impression, after taking a slug from the bottle straight (couldn't find a spoon) was that it was a pleasant-tasting sauce. It's a little difficult to place precisely. Initially, I got the chili-powder aspect, reminding me of Pico Pica, then the vinegar hit, so now we have Pico Pica + maybe Tabasco and finally I got the bourbon, albeit very light at that moment, aspect. Hmmmm. As I got further into the sauce, I began to detect more notes and the bourbon flourished more.
On pizza, it kicked all kinds of ass and frankly, this is one of the better sauces I've had on pizza. Clocking in at ~5K SHU, it is around the level of the average jalapeno, nothing special there. The taste...figuring it to be similar to Pico Pica, I slopped it on some Del Taco hardshells and became immediately depressed. Ass city. I put it on some bean burritos from there, to no avail. I got some El Yucateco to bail me out and put the JB away for another day. That day happened a short time later at a chicken strip dinner. I made both these Tyson pre-sauced things that looked like poop logs and some chicken finger appetizers as well. On the fingers, it was aces. On the BBQ strips, however, it was ass personified and I had to call on Texas Pete for a bailout there.
Bottom line: This is overall a pleasant-tasting sauce by itself and as long as you don't have other stronger flavors (hence the success with pizza and chicken fingers), it does quite well. In conjunction with more dominant flavors and the subtleties get masked and you get...vinegar, which creates an ill result. The flexibility of this sauce is lacking, but even if it wasn't, it's not a great sauce, by any means. If you want heat, this is not your sauce, but if you want something that tastes reasonably good on specific foods, you could do worse than to pick up a bottle of this. Even though the cost is higher than more useful sauces, I wouldn't be afraid to pick up a bottle if you like bourbon-sauces and haven't tried this yourself.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 6
Flexibility: original 4, update 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4
Overall: original 4, update 5
** Update: 09.18.12 **
After further consideration and testing, this stuff is somewhat more flexible than I initially indicated, though not a great deal. I've moved the overall rating up slightly in recognition of that. I still don't believe I would pay $5 for another 5 oz. bottle of it, though...
* Do yourself a favor and go to www.scottrobertsweb.com and check out his Scoville scale. It will prove infinitely useful not only with these (and others) reviews, but in general if you're stepping into this world.
Review Methodology
It probably would be best if you, perhaps perusing the archives,
perhaps following at the onset, all 124 of you, were to know a few
things, more specifically What The Hell I'm Doing Here. The long and
short of any review I've done (probably numbering 1,000+ for various
items) is to tell the random person whether or not they should spend
their money on it. To me, your time and your money are valuable and I
don't want to waste either. If you come here, I want you to go away with
something, even if only momentary entertainment. It's always been that
way. Before, I told the people what records to get and why or if they
should get any of the newest offerings from Band X or should you go see
Movie Y or eat at This Place or That. I don't steer anyone wrong,
whether or not they are some faceless click across the worldwide
electronic medium we all share together or if I know someone personally.
It's my word.
With these sauces, I will continue that. When I say, something is worth buying, it means, like the Eagle Rare bourbon I've repeatedly recommended, I back it 100%. I told a friend of mine to buy a bottle of the Eagle Rare and if he didn't like it, I would buy it and cover his full price all the way, even if there was only a swallow left in the bottle. I won't do that for the interwebz denizenry, mind you, but that's the kind of trust I expect my word to mean. I've done it with CDs, books, movies, spirits, wine and now I turn my attention, finally, to sauces.
My first official review will be up tomorrow and you will see what I do, but you can expect to see some of the usual stuff. I will discuss expected uses, how I actually tested it, where it succeeds, where it fails, what the relative SHU* is, what my recommendation and perhaps unique to this blog only, what my enjoyment to dollar ratio is. Frankly, this is where most sauces pass/fail. Some of the things you won't see are me discussing labels or bottle shapes. Why? Look, the receptacle is meaningless. You eat the sauce and you throw the fucking thing away. Why am I reviewing the look and shape of trash? The "collector's" items are different, but check, you break a single seal and you've just devalued that item all the way. The new value of your opened value is $0. You might as well just eat it all up. With CDs, the libretto/liner notes are part of the magilla. With sauce...the container is bound for the nearest landfill and really, unless they are paying me, I don't see a burning need to help the sauce manufacturer's market themselves. If they do want to pay me, then we have something to talk about, but otherwise, it's like rating logos. I prefer that of Coca-Cola over Pepsi, but does anyone really care? Is there difficulty somehow differentiating between the two from some segment of the public?
I will rate using whole numbers out of 10, on a sliding scale. If you want to revert those to stars or whatever, to translate to what the other blogs are doing, divide the final number by 2. I am using a jalapeno as a "base", meaning 5000K SHU is equivalent more or less to zero heat. Like most reviewers (I think), I'm in search of the "perfect" sauce, though I know damn well that is a tall order probably impossible to fulfill. What I've always reviewed has been on the basis of how it fits into my life and in this case, my food and eating habits. I'm not going to whip up a batch of buffalo wings, which I think are one of the most overrated foods out there, simply so I can conduct a specific test for a sauce. I don't mind having a different sauce for different functions, but if it won't fit into a "regular" rotation, it greatly devalues its usefulness to me.
Here is what you can expect to see:
Breakdown: (this is how I determine the final score)
Heat level: (Anything higher than probably 8 and you're looking at a "by-the-drop" cooking additive)
Flavor: (Complexity, "mouth feel", level of intrigue and just plain tastiness are where this would go)
Flexibility: (How many different types of food will this go with and how much does it positively enhance flavor)
Enjoyment to dollar factor: (the higher the $ number, the more demands placed on the sauce)
Overall: (Average of the score of the above ranked factors)
If you see an overall of less than 5, you don't have me backing it. It's buy at your risk. I personally will not pay money for a sauce less than that. The higher the number, the more worth your monetary support: simple, direct, true.
What won't you see? Crazy graphics. I don't have a full-on kick-ass blog like Scott Roberts' and unless I can somehow afford to obtain his service at some future point, I never will. What I can do is write and write like the unholy wind of a muthafucka, so that is what I will do. I can't code and have no idea how to imbed anything. I have gone back and added pictures of the sauces for those I could find and as of fall 2019, will be having video accompaniments of several.
You also probably won't see stuff like snack foods, the aforementioned wing sauce, barbeque sauce (unless it is something compelling) or restaurant item reviews. Likewise you won't see a breakdown of powders or rubs or the like, at least not in this blog. That will, however, be available on the YouTube video series.
elit·ist noun \ā-ˈlē-ˌti-st, i-, ē-\
This is me, the quintessential elitist. I've built a rather large wine list by slogging through hundreds of bottles of sometimes cheap swill. Why? Because a $20 bill is the sweet spot and if you're like me, you have a hard time (and maybe not the cash) to plunk down much more for a bottle of the fine vino. However, once I get enough to be attached to something (see Red Devil), I'm a diehard. I've liked the UK Wildcats in college [basket]ball and the Oakland Raiders of the NFL and precious little else for longer than three decades. For my bourbon, the aforementioned Eagle Rare and I have standbys in vodka and sake as well. Point being, it's a tough battle, but win my heart and I'm yours forever, which is why I will always love heavy metal, classical music and science fiction best of all until the goddamn day I die. That shit's from the heart and it's true and it's real and you can take it to the bank as full-on bond.
As of today (09.14.12), I'm seeking a standby Mexican sauce as a high priority, but for Louisiana sauces I'm set as long as they keep making Red Devil. For Asian dishes, I'm largely set as long as there's 5-spice & chili-garlic sauce out there. You don't need eye-breaking heat for a sauce to be good. A sauce has to be good to be good, but heat is a component gaining more and more importance and that's what this blog largely is, running through the sauces that I can eat (considering the onion intolerance I have) and telling all of y'alls asses what's good in the 'hood (or elsewhere).
I have probably a couple dozen sauces on deck. I'm buying all of these that I'm testing, in the interests of full disclosure, so some of them may take a while for me to actually obtain and post thoughts regarding.
With these sauces, I will continue that. When I say, something is worth buying, it means, like the Eagle Rare bourbon I've repeatedly recommended, I back it 100%. I told a friend of mine to buy a bottle of the Eagle Rare and if he didn't like it, I would buy it and cover his full price all the way, even if there was only a swallow left in the bottle. I won't do that for the interwebz denizenry, mind you, but that's the kind of trust I expect my word to mean. I've done it with CDs, books, movies, spirits, wine and now I turn my attention, finally, to sauces.
My first official review will be up tomorrow and you will see what I do, but you can expect to see some of the usual stuff. I will discuss expected uses, how I actually tested it, where it succeeds, where it fails, what the relative SHU* is, what my recommendation and perhaps unique to this blog only, what my enjoyment to dollar ratio is. Frankly, this is where most sauces pass/fail. Some of the things you won't see are me discussing labels or bottle shapes. Why? Look, the receptacle is meaningless. You eat the sauce and you throw the fucking thing away. Why am I reviewing the look and shape of trash? The "collector's" items are different, but check, you break a single seal and you've just devalued that item all the way. The new value of your opened value is $0. You might as well just eat it all up. With CDs, the libretto/liner notes are part of the magilla. With sauce...the container is bound for the nearest landfill and really, unless they are paying me, I don't see a burning need to help the sauce manufacturer's market themselves. If they do want to pay me, then we have something to talk about, but otherwise, it's like rating logos. I prefer that of Coca-Cola over Pepsi, but does anyone really care? Is there difficulty somehow differentiating between the two from some segment of the public?
I will rate using whole numbers out of 10, on a sliding scale. If you want to revert those to stars or whatever, to translate to what the other blogs are doing, divide the final number by 2. I am using a jalapeno as a "base", meaning 5000K SHU is equivalent more or less to zero heat. Like most reviewers (I think), I'm in search of the "perfect" sauce, though I know damn well that is a tall order probably impossible to fulfill. What I've always reviewed has been on the basis of how it fits into my life and in this case, my food and eating habits. I'm not going to whip up a batch of buffalo wings, which I think are one of the most overrated foods out there, simply so I can conduct a specific test for a sauce. I don't mind having a different sauce for different functions, but if it won't fit into a "regular" rotation, it greatly devalues its usefulness to me.
Here is what you can expect to see:
Breakdown: (this is how I determine the final score)
Heat level: (Anything higher than probably 8 and you're looking at a "by-the-drop" cooking additive)
Flavor: (Complexity, "mouth feel", level of intrigue and just plain tastiness are where this would go)
Flexibility: (How many different types of food will this go with and how much does it positively enhance flavor)
Enjoyment to dollar factor: (the higher the $ number, the more demands placed on the sauce)
Overall: (Average of the score of the above ranked factors)
If you see an overall of less than 5, you don't have me backing it. It's buy at your risk. I personally will not pay money for a sauce less than that. The higher the number, the more worth your monetary support: simple, direct, true.
What won't you see? Crazy graphics. I don't have a full-on kick-ass blog like Scott Roberts' and unless I can somehow afford to obtain his service at some future point, I never will. What I can do is write and write like the unholy wind of a muthafucka, so that is what I will do. I can't code and have no idea how to imbed anything. I have gone back and added pictures of the sauces for those I could find and as of fall 2019, will be having video accompaniments of several.
You also probably won't see stuff like snack foods, the aforementioned wing sauce, barbeque sauce (unless it is something compelling) or restaurant item reviews. Likewise you won't see a breakdown of powders or rubs or the like, at least not in this blog. That will, however, be available on the YouTube video series.
elit·ist noun \ā-ˈlē-ˌti-st, i-, ē-\
This is me, the quintessential elitist. I've built a rather large wine list by slogging through hundreds of bottles of sometimes cheap swill. Why? Because a $20 bill is the sweet spot and if you're like me, you have a hard time (and maybe not the cash) to plunk down much more for a bottle of the fine vino. However, once I get enough to be attached to something (see Red Devil), I'm a diehard. I've liked the UK Wildcats in college [basket]ball and the Oakland Raiders of the NFL and precious little else for longer than three decades. For my bourbon, the aforementioned Eagle Rare and I have standbys in vodka and sake as well. Point being, it's a tough battle, but win my heart and I'm yours forever, which is why I will always love heavy metal, classical music and science fiction best of all until the goddamn day I die. That shit's from the heart and it's true and it's real and you can take it to the bank as full-on bond.
As of today (09.14.12), I'm seeking a standby Mexican sauce as a high priority, but for Louisiana sauces I'm set as long as they keep making Red Devil. For Asian dishes, I'm largely set as long as there's 5-spice & chili-garlic sauce out there. You don't need eye-breaking heat for a sauce to be good. A sauce has to be good to be good, but heat is a component gaining more and more importance and that's what this blog largely is, running through the sauces that I can eat (considering the onion intolerance I have) and telling all of y'alls asses what's good in the 'hood (or elsewhere).
I have probably a couple dozen sauces on deck. I'm buying all of these that I'm testing, in the interests of full disclosure, so some of them may take a while for me to actually obtain and post thoughts regarding.
Friday, September 14, 2012
Mini-Reviews
The idea here is to run through a bunch of commercial hot sauces that I've already tried. There are not a lot of extreme ones here. This is mostly to try to get everything brought up to date.
Crystal Hot Sauce
Spent plenty of this time when I was down on my luck and only had a buck to get me some sauce to pour on a little cluck-cluck. I've been around the world culinarily and spent some time with Asians (more on that in a future post) and the bruthas and the Latinos and damn near everyone, including the boring predominant cuisine of the white-bread motherfuckers that made me seek out the heat in the first place. This is possibly the weakest and cheapest of the vinegar-cayenne blends out there. It is the Rothschild vodka of the hot sauce world, but in a pinch, it's better than nothing and much better than....
Louisiana "Original" Hot Sauce
I could call this the heartbreaker sauce and not be far off. At a time when I couldn't readily get my beloved Red Devil, I found this at a local store and bought some after hearing from a friend that it would do the damn thing. After burning through a few bottles, I happily was beginning to conclude that maybe I had an effective substitute...until the day that I bought one, opened it, had some in ramen, put it back in the fridge and opened the door to find the top half had turned green, as in some sort of mold or something. I tossed the bitch and heard later from that same friend that hers had done the same thing. There is no excuse for that, so despite this being a pretty decent vinegar-cayenne sauce overall, no way am I going to fuck with something like that, especially when it wasted up my brand new bottle.
Trappey's Louisiana Hot Sauce
Not a bad cayenne-pepper sauce (at one time, I ate a shit-ton of that style sauce...now just a ton), but not Red Devil and not worth the change. I'd say this is slightly hotter, but far less tasty. Red Devil is really a marvel unto itself...
Taco Bell Sauces (Various)
None of these are actually good, but the best-tasting of the lot is the mild, so I always get that. For a long time I didn't and suffered through basically micro-drops of the Hot in an absurd quest to be macho. Stupid, stupid. All of them strike me as basically chili powder-based and taste cheap as Hell. The mild works with all of the product that the chain offers, but will cheapen anything you put it on. Hot and Fire and consecutively more chunky and correspondingly ass-awful. At one time, we (myself and others) used to scavenge and horde this for those awful ramen noodles that keep cropping up in this narrative...it was not a Good Time.
Del Taco Sauces (Various)
You are dealing with ketchup, in all cases. If you like ketchup, you're set. If not, you will have to spike it. Their regular green sauce that comes with the burritos is surprisingly decent, the red sauce less so. It's better than nothing, but not by much. The mild and the one below Inferno are rotten abortions and should be avoided entirely.
Taco John's Sauces (Various)
At one time, you could buy these by the bottle...after consuming the sauce, presumably one could break the conveniently shaped flask and use it to slit one's own wrists. The dreadful packets with the unidentifiable chucks and alternately tasteless and nasty assault on my taste buds was quite enough for me, however.
Huy Fong Sriracha
Make friends with a Thai person or shop at an Asian grocer's. That's the only way you're going to experience even the remotest sense of What The Big Deal Is (though it is still nothing I would call "good"). If you buy the bastardized American version, you're getting ketchup. Crap ketchup. With a nasty horseradish ring-around-the-tongue.
Frank's Hot Sauce
Someone -- and I'm too drunk to remember now who the guilty party is -- should be shot for telling me to get this. I should be shot for listening. A friend of mine who did not believe in refrigeration (but it has vinegar, which is a preservative, et. al.) kept this crap in a hot closer in the top half of her split-level house. There was not a marginal difference in the taste between her awful bottle and mine. The big difference came down to me throwing mine out without finishing it. Probably the worst of the cayenne-vinegar sauces, yet inexplicably possibly the most popular. The public's taste for crap will forever remain unsatisfied and H.L. Mencken said it best. You will never go broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
La Victoria Salsa Brava/Ortega Hot Sauce
My parents fed me this cheap crap as a kid. I recently got a bottle of each to see if it was as bad as I remembered. Truth be told, it was worse. I should demand a refund. Both are even worse, somehow, than the Taco Bell sauces.
McIlhenny Tabasco Sauce
Dammit, all those other chilehead bloggers out there are calling this pepper-flavored vinegar and damn if they're not right. Still, this is the original and deserves props for basically inventing the field (though Trappey's might also hold claim to that). As to usefulness, I like to mix it with ketchup at IHOP to spike it a little, but I can't really get past the overwhelming vinegar. There is precious little heat to speak of and although this is a standby in many refrigerators, it has never been one in mine.
McIlhenny Green Jalapeno Sauce
One of the most disappointing things I've had...the taste was not too shabby, but utterly lacking in heat. Pass.
Bufalo Sauce
I forget now which I had, but it was a thick, red paste and nearly impossible to get out of the bottle. Once I did, I was flatly overwhelmed and kind of wished I hadn't. I'm being too harsh, I suspect...the taste wasn't awful, but it also wasn't worth the work to get the shit out of the stupid bottle.
Dave's Insanity Original Sauce
The first of the "boutique" hot sauces that we (the group of us into those things years and years ago) came across...it tasted flatly awful, indicative of extract sauces and honestly, no one ever used it on food...just on drunken "bravery" challenges. The next day after was never very pleasant and it became used much more rarely for that purpose. I can't think of a single reason to obtain this...
Louisiana Gold (Green) Hot Sauce
Have not seen it around for years, but it was one of the more enjoyable sauces I've encountered. Sort of a cross between vinegar-cayenne, but with a nice jalapeno charge...quite tasty. You could do worse than to pick up a bottle, if you come across one.
Crystal Hot Sauce
Spent plenty of this time when I was down on my luck and only had a buck to get me some sauce to pour on a little cluck-cluck. I've been around the world culinarily and spent some time with Asians (more on that in a future post) and the bruthas and the Latinos and damn near everyone, including the boring predominant cuisine of the white-bread motherfuckers that made me seek out the heat in the first place. This is possibly the weakest and cheapest of the vinegar-cayenne blends out there. It is the Rothschild vodka of the hot sauce world, but in a pinch, it's better than nothing and much better than....
Louisiana "Original" Hot Sauce
I could call this the heartbreaker sauce and not be far off. At a time when I couldn't readily get my beloved Red Devil, I found this at a local store and bought some after hearing from a friend that it would do the damn thing. After burning through a few bottles, I happily was beginning to conclude that maybe I had an effective substitute...until the day that I bought one, opened it, had some in ramen, put it back in the fridge and opened the door to find the top half had turned green, as in some sort of mold or something. I tossed the bitch and heard later from that same friend that hers had done the same thing. There is no excuse for that, so despite this being a pretty decent vinegar-cayenne sauce overall, no way am I going to fuck with something like that, especially when it wasted up my brand new bottle.
Trappey's Louisiana Hot Sauce
Not a bad cayenne-pepper sauce (at one time, I ate a shit-ton of that style sauce...now just a ton), but not Red Devil and not worth the change. I'd say this is slightly hotter, but far less tasty. Red Devil is really a marvel unto itself...
Taco Bell Sauces (Various)
None of these are actually good, but the best-tasting of the lot is the mild, so I always get that. For a long time I didn't and suffered through basically micro-drops of the Hot in an absurd quest to be macho. Stupid, stupid. All of them strike me as basically chili powder-based and taste cheap as Hell. The mild works with all of the product that the chain offers, but will cheapen anything you put it on. Hot and Fire and consecutively more chunky and correspondingly ass-awful. At one time, we (myself and others) used to scavenge and horde this for those awful ramen noodles that keep cropping up in this narrative...it was not a Good Time.
Del Taco Sauces (Various)
You are dealing with ketchup, in all cases. If you like ketchup, you're set. If not, you will have to spike it. Their regular green sauce that comes with the burritos is surprisingly decent, the red sauce less so. It's better than nothing, but not by much. The mild and the one below Inferno are rotten abortions and should be avoided entirely.
Taco John's Sauces (Various)
At one time, you could buy these by the bottle...after consuming the sauce, presumably one could break the conveniently shaped flask and use it to slit one's own wrists. The dreadful packets with the unidentifiable chucks and alternately tasteless and nasty assault on my taste buds was quite enough for me, however.
Huy Fong Sriracha
Make friends with a Thai person or shop at an Asian grocer's. That's the only way you're going to experience even the remotest sense of What The Big Deal Is (though it is still nothing I would call "good"). If you buy the bastardized American version, you're getting ketchup. Crap ketchup. With a nasty horseradish ring-around-the-tongue.
Frank's Hot Sauce
Someone -- and I'm too drunk to remember now who the guilty party is -- should be shot for telling me to get this. I should be shot for listening. A friend of mine who did not believe in refrigeration (but it has vinegar, which is a preservative, et. al.) kept this crap in a hot closer in the top half of her split-level house. There was not a marginal difference in the taste between her awful bottle and mine. The big difference came down to me throwing mine out without finishing it. Probably the worst of the cayenne-vinegar sauces, yet inexplicably possibly the most popular. The public's taste for crap will forever remain unsatisfied and H.L. Mencken said it best. You will never go broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
La Victoria Salsa Brava/Ortega Hot Sauce
My parents fed me this cheap crap as a kid. I recently got a bottle of each to see if it was as bad as I remembered. Truth be told, it was worse. I should demand a refund. Both are even worse, somehow, than the Taco Bell sauces.
McIlhenny Tabasco Sauce
Dammit, all those other chilehead bloggers out there are calling this pepper-flavored vinegar and damn if they're not right. Still, this is the original and deserves props for basically inventing the field (though Trappey's might also hold claim to that). As to usefulness, I like to mix it with ketchup at IHOP to spike it a little, but I can't really get past the overwhelming vinegar. There is precious little heat to speak of and although this is a standby in many refrigerators, it has never been one in mine.
McIlhenny Green Jalapeno Sauce
One of the most disappointing things I've had...the taste was not too shabby, but utterly lacking in heat. Pass.
Bufalo Sauce
I forget now which I had, but it was a thick, red paste and nearly impossible to get out of the bottle. Once I did, I was flatly overwhelmed and kind of wished I hadn't. I'm being too harsh, I suspect...the taste wasn't awful, but it also wasn't worth the work to get the shit out of the stupid bottle.
Dave's Insanity Original Sauce
The first of the "boutique" hot sauces that we (the group of us into those things years and years ago) came across...it tasted flatly awful, indicative of extract sauces and honestly, no one ever used it on food...just on drunken "bravery" challenges. The next day after was never very pleasant and it became used much more rarely for that purpose. I can't think of a single reason to obtain this...
Louisiana Gold (Green) Hot Sauce
Have not seen it around for years, but it was one of the more enjoyable sauces I've encountered. Sort of a cross between vinegar-cayenne, but with a nice jalapeno charge...quite tasty. You could do worse than to pick up a bottle, if you come across one.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
The Standby Sauces/Past Favorites
These are hot sauces that I have known, loved dearly and will never be without...mostly. Since I'm going through a Renaissance of sorts, it's possible some old favorites may get the heave-ho to make way for some new loves...I will also include past loves in here as well...none of these on this list will be reviewed from this point on (09.12.12), though if a new sauce makes it on the list in a review after this is posted, it won't be deleted. Clear as fucking mud, right?
Circa 09.12.12 (in no particular order):
Trappey's Red Devil
This one has been with me the longest (I fell in love with it the first time I tried it nearly 20 years ago) and though it does not pack much, if any, heat, it is perhaps the greatest of them all. It is a typical vinegar/cayenne based sauce, but the blend is such that it's one of the few sauces I've found that I could drink straight. Aside from Mexican food, which does not tolerate vinegar particularly well, it goes with everything else well and elevates the taste astronomically. Those cheap shitty frozen dinners that you got for a buck at the grocery store to have at work? Throw some of this on there and elevate them to a whole new level. Does it make them great? No. Nothing exists to make shit shine (yet), but for $1.50/bottle, this is the greatest taste to dollar ratio value there is. Unfortunately, several grocers around me have stopped carrying it lately and I have to drive several blocks to get it. I usually clean out the stock of whatever store I find it in when it's shopping time, which could be up to 12 bottles, but it is well worth it. This is one of the few sauces I won't be without and always have on hand. In fact, I typically have stock both at work and at home, perhaps the greatest testament to a sauce I can make.
Thai Kitchen Red Curry
Not a sauce per se, but my wife likes to use this when she makes the jumble of random vegetables and chicken in a sauce pan stirred with coconut milk and a few spoonfuls of this and calls it "curry". I find it useful to spike up the otherwise bland version of Thai peanut chicken deviation I make at the behest of her son from an engagement previous to me. The most I've seen it for is $3.99 for the little-ass jar this comes in, but the shit lasts damn near forever and complements the Asian-based foods I make overall well. As long as I stay married to my current wife, I'd expect it to be a staple. It is minorly hot and mostly non-offensive and doesn't take up too much door refrigerator space.
Huy Fong Chili-Garlic Sauce
This is my preference as far as Asian-oriented sauces go. Most of the time you can throw a couple bucks at it and have one of these small jars. They don't ever seem to last as long as the Thai Kitchen red curry, but somewhat longer than the Red Devil. Like the Red Devil, they have a great range of uses, excepting Mexican, again, but if ever there is a lull in usage, this also degrades somewhat quickly and dries on the sides, a trend wholly unpalatable if ever there was one. Still, no refrigerator is complete without it.
--------------------------
Since undertaking this new quest, I've moved a number of sauces out of rotation and have opened up the market to the new and exciting possibilities out there. Here is, more or less, my sauce graveyard, though I enjoyed my time with them all greatly.
TryMe Tiger Sauce
Red Devil was the second-longest and this was the first. I was introduced to this in high school, which put it at least 25 years+ by my side. It was the first sauce I loved, though even then I knew it had very limited uses. Specifically, we're talking fish, pork, potatoes and other very light meats. As time wore on, I mixed with Yoshida's and the Huy Fong Chili-Garlic sauce to make my bodybuilder's concoction of tuna and jasmine rice, but the writing was on the wall. I love sweet and hot, but this was never hot enough, unless spiked with jalapenos and then only barely and the taste, though distinctive, is something I crave very rarely now, if ever. I still have some left and it's been there a while. Once I clear that bottle, I'm not sure I will ever get another.
Texas Pete Hot Sauce
This is the original, not the hotter or chipotle versions, which I have yet to try, though probably will get to at some point. I encountered this at Chick-Fil-A and was impressed enough with how it blended with the entree' offerings there to get a bunch of packets at the restaurant. Once I ran out of them, I got a bottle, since I was low-to-out of Red Devil and wanted a backup. As far as backups go, this would be acceptable to cover for a lack of Red Devil, at least temporarily. It is slightly spicier, slightly saltier, but despite my initial impression, far less tastier. While better than Frank's (as is nearly everything), it is not Red Devil and once I run the bottle out, I don't see another one in my future. This is also the fastest run of anything I've considered as a staple, as well.
Cholula/Tapatio
For a while, during a sort of down period, this was the best I could do and I made the most of it. Cholula is great on a salad, but is a sort of dismal chili powder-based concoction. It will do in a pinch or in a restaurant if that's the best they can do, but that's about it. Tapatio was brought to me by some Mexican friends from CA. It was evidently a sort of regional sauce there. It tastes sort of cheap, but worked well to spice up the cups of ramen noodles I found myself frequently eating at the time. I got away from it for about 15 years and tried it again recently. Still as cheap-tasting as ever, but in a pinch, it's better than any taco sauce from Ortega, La Victoria or whatever chain restaurant in that line you can name (looking at you, Taco Bell).
Pico Pica
This is a hard one to walk away from because I've burned through many, many bottles of this. It was a standby for years and had many attributes I liked: nice hearty thickness, good, solid earthy tones, a very distinctive taste and smell and was no more than $2 a bottle. This is the kind of sauce you can pour into a bag of Fritos, shake it up and just eat them like that for a tasty snack. Being chili powder-based, it is sort of a one-trick pony and for the taste being distinctive, it is somewhat strong, nearly to the point of overpowering. It makes it easy to use if you like the taste and very difficult to taste when you develop your palate more to want to catch a wider array of food tones. I still think it is a good sauce, but like most kid's cereals to me, I think I've outgrown the taste.
Circa 09.12.12 (in no particular order):
Trappey's Red Devil
This one has been with me the longest (I fell in love with it the first time I tried it nearly 20 years ago) and though it does not pack much, if any, heat, it is perhaps the greatest of them all. It is a typical vinegar/cayenne based sauce, but the blend is such that it's one of the few sauces I've found that I could drink straight. Aside from Mexican food, which does not tolerate vinegar particularly well, it goes with everything else well and elevates the taste astronomically. Those cheap shitty frozen dinners that you got for a buck at the grocery store to have at work? Throw some of this on there and elevate them to a whole new level. Does it make them great? No. Nothing exists to make shit shine (yet), but for $1.50/bottle, this is the greatest taste to dollar ratio value there is. Unfortunately, several grocers around me have stopped carrying it lately and I have to drive several blocks to get it. I usually clean out the stock of whatever store I find it in when it's shopping time, which could be up to 12 bottles, but it is well worth it. This is one of the few sauces I won't be without and always have on hand. In fact, I typically have stock both at work and at home, perhaps the greatest testament to a sauce I can make.
Thai Kitchen Red Curry
Not a sauce per se, but my wife likes to use this when she makes the jumble of random vegetables and chicken in a sauce pan stirred with coconut milk and a few spoonfuls of this and calls it "curry". I find it useful to spike up the otherwise bland version of Thai peanut chicken deviation I make at the behest of her son from an engagement previous to me. The most I've seen it for is $3.99 for the little-ass jar this comes in, but the shit lasts damn near forever and complements the Asian-based foods I make overall well. As long as I stay married to my current wife, I'd expect it to be a staple. It is minorly hot and mostly non-offensive and doesn't take up too much door refrigerator space.
Huy Fong Chili-Garlic Sauce
This is my preference as far as Asian-oriented sauces go. Most of the time you can throw a couple bucks at it and have one of these small jars. They don't ever seem to last as long as the Thai Kitchen red curry, but somewhat longer than the Red Devil. Like the Red Devil, they have a great range of uses, excepting Mexican, again, but if ever there is a lull in usage, this also degrades somewhat quickly and dries on the sides, a trend wholly unpalatable if ever there was one. Still, no refrigerator is complete without it.
--------------------------
Since undertaking this new quest, I've moved a number of sauces out of rotation and have opened up the market to the new and exciting possibilities out there. Here is, more or less, my sauce graveyard, though I enjoyed my time with them all greatly.
TryMe Tiger Sauce
Red Devil was the second-longest and this was the first. I was introduced to this in high school, which put it at least 25 years+ by my side. It was the first sauce I loved, though even then I knew it had very limited uses. Specifically, we're talking fish, pork, potatoes and other very light meats. As time wore on, I mixed with Yoshida's and the Huy Fong Chili-Garlic sauce to make my bodybuilder's concoction of tuna and jasmine rice, but the writing was on the wall. I love sweet and hot, but this was never hot enough, unless spiked with jalapenos and then only barely and the taste, though distinctive, is something I crave very rarely now, if ever. I still have some left and it's been there a while. Once I clear that bottle, I'm not sure I will ever get another.
Texas Pete Hot Sauce
This is the original, not the hotter or chipotle versions, which I have yet to try, though probably will get to at some point. I encountered this at Chick-Fil-A and was impressed enough with how it blended with the entree' offerings there to get a bunch of packets at the restaurant. Once I ran out of them, I got a bottle, since I was low-to-out of Red Devil and wanted a backup. As far as backups go, this would be acceptable to cover for a lack of Red Devil, at least temporarily. It is slightly spicier, slightly saltier, but despite my initial impression, far less tastier. While better than Frank's (as is nearly everything), it is not Red Devil and once I run the bottle out, I don't see another one in my future. This is also the fastest run of anything I've considered as a staple, as well.
Cholula/Tapatio
For a while, during a sort of down period, this was the best I could do and I made the most of it. Cholula is great on a salad, but is a sort of dismal chili powder-based concoction. It will do in a pinch or in a restaurant if that's the best they can do, but that's about it. Tapatio was brought to me by some Mexican friends from CA. It was evidently a sort of regional sauce there. It tastes sort of cheap, but worked well to spice up the cups of ramen noodles I found myself frequently eating at the time. I got away from it for about 15 years and tried it again recently. Still as cheap-tasting as ever, but in a pinch, it's better than any taco sauce from Ortega, La Victoria or whatever chain restaurant in that line you can name (looking at you, Taco Bell).
Pico Pica
This is a hard one to walk away from because I've burned through many, many bottles of this. It was a standby for years and had many attributes I liked: nice hearty thickness, good, solid earthy tones, a very distinctive taste and smell and was no more than $2 a bottle. This is the kind of sauce you can pour into a bag of Fritos, shake it up and just eat them like that for a tasty snack. Being chili powder-based, it is sort of a one-trick pony and for the taste being distinctive, it is somewhat strong, nearly to the point of overpowering. It makes it easy to use if you like the taste and very difficult to taste when you develop your palate more to want to catch a wider array of food tones. I still think it is a good sauce, but like most kid's cereals to me, I think I've outgrown the taste.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Introduction (Again)
Updated 09/22/19 - see bottom section.
What a long, strange life it's been. I'm 41 (as of this writing), yet I can think of no more apt description.
I had in mind, when I first started this blog, to use it as an artistic thing, kinda sorta like what Neil Gaiman does. I cribbed the title from Poul Anderson and then decided that I couldn't quite make the nut of what the fuck it was supposed to do. Part of the problem with blogs is content. If I wrote shit I wouldn't want my wife to read, then it's a diary and those are to be private. However, I've always found those to be dreadfully stupid and boring (such as the pages of any famous person unfortunate enough to have theirs published) and so never had the interest in a diary. I also, despite not putting actual names to anyone, don't want someone to be caused pain because of something I wrote, truthful or no.
So, like my LiveJournal, which was dedicated mainly to a time period when I was doing nothing but literally working myself out of being a disgusting fatass, this blog languished. I had a bodybuilding-type blog, when I had time for bodybuilding, elsewhere. I had a music blog, when I was active in that scene, elsewhere. I didn't want to make a "holy shit I'm a new father OMG this kid is shitting everywhere" type blog, so it meandered from "holy shit I'm a new husband OMFG this woman and her son (not my baby) are shitting everywhere" to let's talk about a season of Top Chef to bitching about the dumbshit online reviewers of the Netflix servers.
Waste of space? Hard to argue against it. There's enough noise on the internet, so I forgot about it...until now. A week and a half ago, I had the distinct displeasure of being hammered in the ass by the bill at Red Robin for very mediocre and substandard foodstuffs, most particularly the pizza I ordered for the baby, which was so noxious I had to spit it into a napkin. I really wanted to go find a construction site, steal a jackhammer, dig up their parking lot and bury that putrid, wretched pile of cheese-covered shit, but my disdain for a pointless jail sentence got the better of me and I elected to not pursue that particular course.
During that dinner, however, I noticed they were offering a sauce based on the Bhut Jolokia pepper, the so-called "ghost pepper," and since I hadn't a chance to try a food with a heat rating that could earn someone a trip on a speeding white truck to the nearest emergency room, I was all for it. Since chain restaurants generally cannot do anything right, this was an abysmal disappointment. The sauce, while tasty, was not particularly hot, but while combining with the anemic Bourbon BBQ sauce they offered and some fried jalapeno coins, I got a burger, after topping it with bacon, that managed to make it all the way to acceptable. The idea of them using the "ghost pepper" got me curious, though, and I scoured the internet.
That led me to the site run by the esteemed Scott Roberts and my interest in firing up the blades of spicy foods was re-ignited. Why the blog, though? That's coming...
To back up a step, years before, shortly after I first moved to Utah, a friend and me started chasing heat. We eventually got the the point of using it correctly, after several novice mistakes of ratcheting the heat up beyond the point of it being pleasant to eat. Once we learned the lesson of flavor first, we made a steak marinade with a variety of ingredients that ruined us both for years and years in terms of going out to eat at steakhouse. We had a lovely chicken marinade also (ok, that one was mostly mine), but it was a constant battle to improve and pair it with home-brewed beer, which we also did.
Time change and people fuck off elsewhere out of your life. Everybody knows. I largely abandoned a lot of the heat-chasing, refining myself to tinkering and exploring fresh ginger, curry, mustards and garlic. I still kept jars of jalapenos on hand and a few bottles of my standby sauces (that list in another post) on hand at all times, but no longer would I go crazy buying (and eating) the newest and latest/greatest chilis or sauces. Once my son was born, though I had the itch again, I still laid off, since babies and hot shit are not generally what is considered a great combination.
Red Robin and Scott did me in, though. I found a whole new world that didn't exist when I moved to other things. The hottest pepper back then was the habanero and/or Scotch bonnet. There was no ghost, no Trinidad Scorpion, no Carolina Reaper. All the extract sauces back then tasted like steaming ass and the only time I ever saw them was at parties during drunken macho "bravery" (stupidity) contests. No one used them for cooking or anything like that because they tasted awful and it took a great deal of work to make the fuckers even remotely palatable. Not the case these days.
Why I decided on this blog was that I did a lot of music reviews (over 1,000) easy for a website years ago and I enjoyed that. The reviews of hot sauce (Scott's not included) are sorely lacking online. When I see stupid shit like someone parroting the tagline of Frank's Hot Sauce, as awful a concoction as is out there, about putting that shit on everything, during the course of the review, I automatically think to myself, "fuck that review and fuck that site for hosting that review." Also, I see people discussing their thoughts on the label font, text and graphic and it gives me pause. Is that what readers care about? Maybe, but not me.
So, this blog, if you haven't deduced by now, will be primarily for a review and discussion of hot sauces. I happen to have an intolerance to onions, so that limits dramatically the sauces available to me. I also don't see a value to cost ratio in any of the other online reviews and when you're chucking out buckets of cash for a sauce, it has to be worth it. I'm an elitist by nature, so I will tend towards the incredibly demanding. That is part my motivation, but also that I recently went on vacation and am not finding the groove to get back into the various writing projects I have. I'm hoping this will stimulate that in some way as well.
As for those other posts...they probably will never go live here, but some of them are moderately interesting and may work their way into a book or story of mine someday. I'm primarily a writer and one never knows what comes out the other end after everything finds its way into the hopper atop the grist mill.
- UPDATED CONTENT -
In 9 days, on October 01, 2019, after over 7 years, I have decided to take this blog in a direction I didn't necessarily envision and start doing video accompaniment to some of the written reviews, including 100% of all new reviews from that point going forward. It will launch with a video introduction to the series, but in that way, I can expand a bit more into arenas I have interest in doing, such as reviewing all the available sauces from Taco Bell or expanding more on my Standby Sauce list or trying other spicy foods live. Not all sauce reviews will get that treatment (indeed, not all of them have pictures at this point and some of those never will), but I hope you find what is available to be entertaining. If you look at the "Special Announcement" post of September 2019, you will be able to obtain more information about this endeavor.
As always, thanks for joining me.
What a long, strange life it's been. I'm 41 (as of this writing), yet I can think of no more apt description.
I had in mind, when I first started this blog, to use it as an artistic thing, kinda sorta like what Neil Gaiman does. I cribbed the title from Poul Anderson and then decided that I couldn't quite make the nut of what the fuck it was supposed to do. Part of the problem with blogs is content. If I wrote shit I wouldn't want my wife to read, then it's a diary and those are to be private. However, I've always found those to be dreadfully stupid and boring (such as the pages of any famous person unfortunate enough to have theirs published) and so never had the interest in a diary. I also, despite not putting actual names to anyone, don't want someone to be caused pain because of something I wrote, truthful or no.
So, like my LiveJournal, which was dedicated mainly to a time period when I was doing nothing but literally working myself out of being a disgusting fatass, this blog languished. I had a bodybuilding-type blog, when I had time for bodybuilding, elsewhere. I had a music blog, when I was active in that scene, elsewhere. I didn't want to make a "holy shit I'm a new father OMG this kid is shitting everywhere" type blog, so it meandered from "holy shit I'm a new husband OMFG this woman and her son (not my baby) are shitting everywhere" to let's talk about a season of Top Chef to bitching about the dumbshit online reviewers of the Netflix servers.
Waste of space? Hard to argue against it. There's enough noise on the internet, so I forgot about it...until now. A week and a half ago, I had the distinct displeasure of being hammered in the ass by the bill at Red Robin for very mediocre and substandard foodstuffs, most particularly the pizza I ordered for the baby, which was so noxious I had to spit it into a napkin. I really wanted to go find a construction site, steal a jackhammer, dig up their parking lot and bury that putrid, wretched pile of cheese-covered shit, but my disdain for a pointless jail sentence got the better of me and I elected to not pursue that particular course.
During that dinner, however, I noticed they were offering a sauce based on the Bhut Jolokia pepper, the so-called "ghost pepper," and since I hadn't a chance to try a food with a heat rating that could earn someone a trip on a speeding white truck to the nearest emergency room, I was all for it. Since chain restaurants generally cannot do anything right, this was an abysmal disappointment. The sauce, while tasty, was not particularly hot, but while combining with the anemic Bourbon BBQ sauce they offered and some fried jalapeno coins, I got a burger, after topping it with bacon, that managed to make it all the way to acceptable. The idea of them using the "ghost pepper" got me curious, though, and I scoured the internet.
That led me to the site run by the esteemed Scott Roberts and my interest in firing up the blades of spicy foods was re-ignited. Why the blog, though? That's coming...
To back up a step, years before, shortly after I first moved to Utah, a friend and me started chasing heat. We eventually got the the point of using it correctly, after several novice mistakes of ratcheting the heat up beyond the point of it being pleasant to eat. Once we learned the lesson of flavor first, we made a steak marinade with a variety of ingredients that ruined us both for years and years in terms of going out to eat at steakhouse. We had a lovely chicken marinade also (ok, that one was mostly mine), but it was a constant battle to improve and pair it with home-brewed beer, which we also did.
Time change and people fuck off elsewhere out of your life. Everybody knows. I largely abandoned a lot of the heat-chasing, refining myself to tinkering and exploring fresh ginger, curry, mustards and garlic. I still kept jars of jalapenos on hand and a few bottles of my standby sauces (that list in another post) on hand at all times, but no longer would I go crazy buying (and eating) the newest and latest/greatest chilis or sauces. Once my son was born, though I had the itch again, I still laid off, since babies and hot shit are not generally what is considered a great combination.
Red Robin and Scott did me in, though. I found a whole new world that didn't exist when I moved to other things. The hottest pepper back then was the habanero and/or Scotch bonnet. There was no ghost, no Trinidad Scorpion, no Carolina Reaper. All the extract sauces back then tasted like steaming ass and the only time I ever saw them was at parties during drunken macho "bravery" (stupidity) contests. No one used them for cooking or anything like that because they tasted awful and it took a great deal of work to make the fuckers even remotely palatable. Not the case these days.
Why I decided on this blog was that I did a lot of music reviews (over 1,000) easy for a website years ago and I enjoyed that. The reviews of hot sauce (Scott's not included) are sorely lacking online. When I see stupid shit like someone parroting the tagline of Frank's Hot Sauce, as awful a concoction as is out there, about putting that shit on everything, during the course of the review, I automatically think to myself, "fuck that review and fuck that site for hosting that review." Also, I see people discussing their thoughts on the label font, text and graphic and it gives me pause. Is that what readers care about? Maybe, but not me.
So, this blog, if you haven't deduced by now, will be primarily for a review and discussion of hot sauces. I happen to have an intolerance to onions, so that limits dramatically the sauces available to me. I also don't see a value to cost ratio in any of the other online reviews and when you're chucking out buckets of cash for a sauce, it has to be worth it. I'm an elitist by nature, so I will tend towards the incredibly demanding. That is part my motivation, but also that I recently went on vacation and am not finding the groove to get back into the various writing projects I have. I'm hoping this will stimulate that in some way as well.
As for those other posts...they probably will never go live here, but some of them are moderately interesting and may work their way into a book or story of mine someday. I'm primarily a writer and one never knows what comes out the other end after everything finds its way into the hopper atop the grist mill.
- UPDATED CONTENT -
In 9 days, on October 01, 2019, after over 7 years, I have decided to take this blog in a direction I didn't necessarily envision and start doing video accompaniment to some of the written reviews, including 100% of all new reviews from that point going forward. It will launch with a video introduction to the series, but in that way, I can expand a bit more into arenas I have interest in doing, such as reviewing all the available sauces from Taco Bell or expanding more on my Standby Sauce list or trying other spicy foods live. Not all sauce reviews will get that treatment (indeed, not all of them have pictures at this point and some of those never will), but I hope you find what is available to be entertaining. If you look at the "Special Announcement" post of September 2019, you will be able to obtain more information about this endeavor.
As always, thanks for joining me.
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