One year to the date of the last post of this type and, once again, I find myself suffering from a slight flu. Unlike last year, I knew for quite a while, since early May this year, what the likely winner for my Sauce Of The Year would be and while there were other contenders before it, nothing else was really close after it. More on that later.
One major difference between this year and last is that while I ran this journal for an entire full year this time, due to a job shift in October, my sauce usage has dropped off notably, both due to my daily course of events (several of which see me on the road more frequently - at least for now) as well as not having the same refrigerator arrangement, which severely cuts down on my ability to enjoy the hot sauce at work. Possibly, I will start returning home for lunches (right now I'm building a database of lunch spots, both to increase the coverage on my Yelp account and to have a list of good, reliable spots to take clients) and thereby be able to start picking up again on the sauces, but for now, it's pretty much usage just at home.
I also participated in and assisted Scott Roberts with his Tournament to determine the "One True" sauce, the sauce to end all sauces, as it were, but that tourney seems to have gone by the wayside, I'm guessing because of his recent domicile move as well as a site re-design and perhaps just the normal everyday activities taking time and precedence. I also have joined the staff of a food website my wife is trying to do, though at the moment it is down for an overhaul.
Very little changed on my overall ongoing list for most of this year. Here it is, once again:
*Emeritus Everyday sauce: Trappey's Red Devil
*Everyday sauce: Blair’s Pure Death Sauce
*Grilling sauce: CaJohn's Bourbon-Infused Chipotle Habanero (BICH)
Mexican-style sauce: El Yucateco Green
*Emeritus Asian-style sauce: Huy Fong Chili-Garlic Sauce
Asian-style sauce: Wicked Cactus Wrath Of The Tiger
Louisiana-style sauce: Trappey's Red Devil
Sweet-hot sauce: CaJohn's Happy Beaver
*Wife's sauce: Danny Cash's Salvation Garlic-Serrano and/or Bottled-Up Anger
*= Not looking for a replacement
If that didn't give it away, I may as well just announce now that my Sauce Of The Year for 2013 goes to Blair's Pure Death. While my review of it covers things pretty well, I'd like to add, some months removed, that this is still one of the best-tasting sauces it has been my pleasure to have. I also have been personally and directly responsible for selling about 100 bottles of it in this area alone this year. If there is a drawback to this, it would be the price point, which would do a good job making me go broke trying to keep myself in sauce if I tried to eat this as much as I really would like. I have eaten this more than any single other sauce and it has dethroned the mighty Red Devil as my overall favorite sauce currently, no small feat, considering how many years running Red Devil held that title. Still, from the moment I tasted it, it was pretty much love from the jump and the heat level, while it could be just a touch higher, is nearly right on the level. Finding a sauce like that...it makes all the testing and all the crappy sauces endured worthwhile. Those are the moments we live for. Congratulations to Blair Lazar and I thank you tremendously for making such a fantastic sauce!
Before I go, I thought I'd throw up some site statistics:
Total posts (not counting this): 82
Total views: 2966 (should be 3K+ before the end of the year)
Total single sauce reviews: 59
Total double sauce reviews: 1
Total sauces reviewed: 61
Total unopened sauces waiting on shelf for review and/or consumption: 3
Total opened sauces waiting for review: 0
Total open bottles in fridge: 12
Door sauces: 10
Back of fridge sauces: 2
Highest viewed review: 101 - Valentina's Extra Hot
Highest viewed article, any type: 101 - Valentina's Extra Hot
Most posts, month: 10 - June 2013
Most sauces reviewed, month - 8, June 2013
Once I finish going through the sauces in the door, which will probably be mid-Jan., at the latest, I'm planning on a larger-scale shopping trip through one of the local places to pick up on some sauces I haven't gotten to yet. Unless I order direct, quite a few I'm interested in will continue to remain unobtainable to me, since I don't wind up going to the hot sauce events and probably won't be anytime soon, either. If it is the shop I've never been to, I'll probably comment on the store, if nothing else, via my Yelp account.
I don't really see sauces in 2014 being reviewed on the level they were this year, due mostly to those shifts I mentioned earlier as well as a likely domicile move of my own sometime in the near future. I'm also pretty happy with the current line-up and aside from the Mexican-style sauces, am not really looking especially hard for new sauces. I still generally will look to see what might be on the shelves everytime I visit either a new place or somewhere I haven't been in a while (and I see a lot of new labels, more and more all the time), but things are a bit less urgent currently.
At any rate, I hope you've enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) reading and thank you for coming along.
See you in 2014!
Sunday, December 22, 2013
Saturday, December 7, 2013
Wildfire Hot Sauce Review
Motherlode Provisions Wildfire Hot Sauce
This is one I found in a Whole Foods, though unlike the Archer Farms of last week, Motherlode Provisions appears to be an independent company and not an arm of Whole Foods. There were a few different hot sauce flasks on the shelf and I chose this one because it was the spiciest available.
Generally, when buying hot sauce in flasks, one can be fairly certain, with few exceptions, that they won't be particularly hot and this one is not (in a list of about 20 ingredients, no peppers of any kind show up until #7). Generally also, if you see Arbol listed in the ingredients, you can also look more towards expecting a sort of Mexican table sauce, which is probably where this would more closely fit in. With the use of Piquins, one of the most under-used peppers, along with Pepins, I somewhat had my hopes up that I would see a sort of novel or inventive flair to the sauce, but clearly, they were mostly using the Piquins (appearing here in powdered form) to spike the heat level of the sauce upward.
This is essentially a Mexican table sauce, but on the hotter end, as those things go, somewhat slightly, but still noticeably hotter than the Valentina Extra Hot (reviewed elsewhere here). It is a much smoother and tastier sauce than that one and because of the sort of blanket nature of those sauces, this one is very adaptable across a fairly wide variety of foods. It's a good-tasting sauce, but not a great one, probably closer to Cholula in terms of actual taste. Given that it's retailed at Whole Foods, I probably overpaid for it (like nearly everything else in that store), but in terms of the actual sauce itself, it's overall a pretty good value for the money.
Bottom line: If my wife likes this, it might be the Mexican table or general hot sauce we keep on hand. Most of my stuff is far too hot for her and though she doesn't eat a lot of hot sauce, she does have it often enough that a complaint is raised if we don't have some on hand. Of the Mexican table sauce style, this is probably the one I find most favorable, though far from perfect. Definitely worth a try if you haven't had it before and enjoy that kind of sauce.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 3
Flavor: 6
Flexibility: 6
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4
Overall: 5
This is one I found in a Whole Foods, though unlike the Archer Farms of last week, Motherlode Provisions appears to be an independent company and not an arm of Whole Foods. There were a few different hot sauce flasks on the shelf and I chose this one because it was the spiciest available.Generally, when buying hot sauce in flasks, one can be fairly certain, with few exceptions, that they won't be particularly hot and this one is not (in a list of about 20 ingredients, no peppers of any kind show up until #7). Generally also, if you see Arbol listed in the ingredients, you can also look more towards expecting a sort of Mexican table sauce, which is probably where this would more closely fit in. With the use of Piquins, one of the most under-used peppers, along with Pepins, I somewhat had my hopes up that I would see a sort of novel or inventive flair to the sauce, but clearly, they were mostly using the Piquins (appearing here in powdered form) to spike the heat level of the sauce upward.
This is essentially a Mexican table sauce, but on the hotter end, as those things go, somewhat slightly, but still noticeably hotter than the Valentina Extra Hot (reviewed elsewhere here). It is a much smoother and tastier sauce than that one and because of the sort of blanket nature of those sauces, this one is very adaptable across a fairly wide variety of foods. It's a good-tasting sauce, but not a great one, probably closer to Cholula in terms of actual taste. Given that it's retailed at Whole Foods, I probably overpaid for it (like nearly everything else in that store), but in terms of the actual sauce itself, it's overall a pretty good value for the money.
Bottom line: If my wife likes this, it might be the Mexican table or general hot sauce we keep on hand. Most of my stuff is far too hot for her and though she doesn't eat a lot of hot sauce, she does have it often enough that a complaint is raised if we don't have some on hand. Of the Mexican table sauce style, this is probably the one I find most favorable, though far from perfect. Definitely worth a try if you haven't had it before and enjoy that kind of sauce.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 3
Flavor: 6
Flexibility: 6
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4
Overall: 5
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Archer Farms Three Pepper Sauce Review
Archer Farms Three Pepper Taco Cart Sauce
Archer Farms is the food arm of Target, basically the store brand for that chain. In that line can be found everything from canned peanuts to cookies and so on. This one is marketed loosely as a hot (taco cart) sauce and contains both habanero and chipotle peppers. In point of fact, there are about 20 different individual ingredients listed on the label.
For all of those ingredients, I found it baffling that it had so little taste. Not merely in heat - I was expecting at least a slight kick from the habaneros, even if they were further down the list - but in flavor of any kind, especially given the plethora of items that are generally flavorful on their own. What little flavor there is seems to be derived mostly from tomatoes but even that is very weak. The consistency is best described as chunky, but to me, it seems very ill made, considering the bottle. It is barely pourable and I found an entire raisin in a portion I poured out. If they want it this chunky, it would ideally be in a salsa jar instead of this type of bottle (similar to the La Victoria taco sauce bottles). I can't imagine this being even in a tray on any self-respecting taco cart, though.
While I generally find Target to be overall very favorable, like with most chains, their forays into food tend to be dubious. This is a gigantic miss and even at the fairly low price of $3/bottle, a rather considerable waste of money, considering what you actually get. It's a pity, too, as this had the ingredient profiles of what could have been a very interesting sauce.
Bottom line: Avoid. This isn't good even as a condiment.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 0
Flavor: 0
Flexibility: 1
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 0
Overall: 0
Archer Farms is the food arm of Target, basically the store brand for that chain. In that line can be found everything from canned peanuts to cookies and so on. This one is marketed loosely as a hot (taco cart) sauce and contains both habanero and chipotle peppers. In point of fact, there are about 20 different individual ingredients listed on the label.
For all of those ingredients, I found it baffling that it had so little taste. Not merely in heat - I was expecting at least a slight kick from the habaneros, even if they were further down the list - but in flavor of any kind, especially given the plethora of items that are generally flavorful on their own. What little flavor there is seems to be derived mostly from tomatoes but even that is very weak. The consistency is best described as chunky, but to me, it seems very ill made, considering the bottle. It is barely pourable and I found an entire raisin in a portion I poured out. If they want it this chunky, it would ideally be in a salsa jar instead of this type of bottle (similar to the La Victoria taco sauce bottles). I can't imagine this being even in a tray on any self-respecting taco cart, though.
While I generally find Target to be overall very favorable, like with most chains, their forays into food tend to be dubious. This is a gigantic miss and even at the fairly low price of $3/bottle, a rather considerable waste of money, considering what you actually get. It's a pity, too, as this had the ingredient profiles of what could have been a very interesting sauce.
Bottom line: Avoid. This isn't good even as a condiment.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 0
Flavor: 0
Flexibility: 1
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 0
Overall: 0
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