Honey-Do Hot Sauce Review

Honey-Do Tropic Hot Sauce

This is a curious entry, a sauce that has no idea what it really wants to do..or be..or even present itself. It's unclear why the name "honey-do" was chosen, as it doesn't really relate to the sauce and there is additionally no actual honey present, oddly enough. Why choose a name with an ingredient somewhat normally used in the hot sauce world if you're putting out a sauce in that world without that ingredient? It's like calling something Ghost Fire and then not having Jolokias and a sauce so mild it would make Frank's blush. This didn't color my perceptions of the sauce as I did not realize it was devoid of honey as an ingredient until I got more into the sauce testing.

We have a sauce calling itself "tropic", which almost always means fruit and fruit-sauce is inevitably best on lighter meats. Since I was grilling pork, I tried it out on that and additionally tried it further on what is generally the easiest test, the reliable old standby of chicken strips. It honestly failed pretty miserably. I had to toss the chop that was left from the grill, after struggling through the first half and though it was slightly better with the chicken strip, it did not add any heat nor improve the flavor so much as detracting from it considerably. I don't mind strong sauces (Blair's Pure Death, one of my all-time faves, is very strong), as long as it is also tasty. In this case, the sauce wrecked some of the food entirely.

The taste has this sort of odd, astringent quality, almost like they were trying to make a lighter version of A1. My guess is that the mangos were less than helpful here. Mangos in sauces always go one of two ways: either it is a well-done sweet and liveliness or it adds a sour note to things that tends to move things towards the unpalatable. Here, it is the latter, even with the inclusion of the sweeter red Habaneros and raisins. They really should have pitched some honey in there...it would have probably helped pretty considerably, as well as making more sense. There is precious little heat here, though little surprise, given how many ingredients ahead of the Habaneros.

Bottom line: Easily the worst sauce I've had in 2019 and the first, in quite a while, to have to be binned.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 0