Zatarain's Cajun Hot Sauce Review

Zatarain's Cajun Hot Sauce

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXYfM7PKung

Zatarain's, the company mostly known for questionable-tasting riffs on various Cajun dishes, has followed up their dried food offering by adding in a substandard sauce that riffs on the Louisiana-style sauces to complement (presumably) the various offerings on grocery store shelves. Obviously, I'm not a fan of their "food", but Louisiana-style sauces are not particularly complex and are a favorite of mine and I had given up on the Sweet Baby Ray's by then and was in need of a replacement. I will nearly always gamble a couple bucks on this type of sauce, as long as it does not contain any of the dealbreakers. It's a weakness of mine, I guess...

As for this one...if you love that canned and bottle garlic, this may be for you. If you love powdered garlic a lot, this may be for you. For me, I definitely have some strong affection for garlic, cooking & eating entire cloves at a time, but I can only tolerate the processed stuff in small doses. Here, they clearly are aiming high with the garlic content, to the point where it rapidly overpowers everything. The pepper mash and vinegar are meant to be the stars of the show and a lot of products makes this same error on this type of sauce. It is, at heart, a more simple sauce and complicating it rarely leads to improved results. Mostly it leads to what this is...the next bottle I'm going to punt on and boot.

Aside from the taste bumble, there is not a great deal of heat. The bottle is pretty large, but that only matters if the sauce is any good, which this is not. I did like the chunks of pepper in there, but they could cut the garlic in half and still be pushing too much. It literally overrides everything else and detracts from the food entirely. There was one or two things that it was passable with, but that's not why I'm buying sauce and definitely not why I'm eating it.

Bottom line: I didn't expect a lot from Zatarain's and this about hit the mark. I might use it if there were nothing else there and the food needed some Louisiana-style sauce love, but would never pay for this again. If you like the processed garlic a lot, you may enjoy this more, but not a good sauce.


Breakdown:

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

Overall: 1