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
No comments:
Post a Comment