UPDATE: Support video available here: https://youtu.be/sx2t-x0BPPEAfter a sustained layoff, finally back to the Superhots and it's one I've been waiting to do for a while. The thing with sauces featuring Superhots is that often, such as in the case of Torchbearer, they will straddle a kind of weird line where they're not crazily flavorful but are full of the piquancy that the Superhot peppers seem to exude, a sort of quasi-bitterness, all while bringing the full mouth fury they're known for. As regular readers know, I'm all about the flavor first and the sauces that load up on Superhots seem to kind of miss this equation. It doesn't make the sauces necessarily bad-tasting, just not as good as other stuff I'd more regularly want to have and so they don't get eaten, unless I'm in the mood for that unique flavor profile.
This one brings some hitters, Trinidad Scorpions, Bhut Jolokias, 7-Pot Primos, Red Savina Habaneros, all pushing near the top of the current record holding SHU levels, two, maybe three of them were previous record-holders, if memory serves. So, this is not going to be a mild sauce. Hellfire confusingly puts it at a 9/10, but their rating scale is meaningless compared to a lot of the other offerings, such as one sauce that seems to share multiple labels and is billed the hottest non-extract sauce. Without drifting too far astream, the hottest non-extract sauce I've had to date is Torchbearer's Rapture, checking in at over a million SHU, which is the only sauce I can recall I've given a 10 for heat. That will be my 10 here, but I don't know where that other sauce from Hellfire falls and perhaps I will get to that in the near future.
Regardless, this one is tempered by an interesting combination of sun-dried tomatoes and a few other extraneous things. The sauce itself almost looks like a mash in terms of flow. It comes out a bit chunky, but the brilliant of using flavor-concentrated items, such as the sun-dried tomato kicks up accessibility quite a bit. I've used this in a variety of settings and it is wonderfully flexible. It doesn't work well in all cases, Mexican food and ramen noodles being two examples where I would not attempt it again, but it is not restricted to the range of chicken fingers, the way a lot of the other Superhot based sauces can be. Indeed, I would put it probably in the same range as Pure Death, one of my all-time highest rated sauces, for flexibility.
Flavor-wise, it is not up that vaunted territory. The flavor is quite good, despite having all of those Superhots in there, but this is not a lip-smacking yummy sort of sauce. This is one that will not let you forget you can easily oversauce something and wind up regretting it. Mouth heat can be strong if a lot is used, but it does not seem to hang in there for a great amount of time. I would put this one at somewhere between 350,000 and maybe a half million SHU, but I believe it is more varietal pepper-driven so other bottles and editions may compromise having an definite reading. There is not any information to this on the Hellfire site, unfortunately, aside from that odd 9/10 heat rating.
Bottom line: One of the more accessible Superhot sauces out there and one of the more flavorful. This is a great starting point for someone wanting to start reaching upwards a bit in their SHU progression with hot sauces and, it should bear noting, a definite SOTY candidate.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 6
Flavor: 8
Flexibility: 9
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 9
Overall: 8
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