Note: This sauce was provided for purposes of review by Roger Damptz of Burn Your Tongue. Check him out on Facebook or, better yet, head on over to his new online outlet where you can shop the widest selection available anywhere, www.burnyourtongueonline.com.
Now, with a name like this, it's pretty hard to miss remembering it, which is a very smart touch from Jersey Barnfire. I didn't know they were the makers of this, in fact, until I started checking out the label and so on. It sounded like it might have been a superhot at the time I first saw it, so I took a pass. I mentioned it at some point to Roger, who also remembered it and threw in a bottle when he gave me the hook-up for review sauces. I also, it should be noted, did not know it was a marinara, either.There is indeed a dearth of sauces on the Italian side of thing. Most of the time, if you're hitting up pizza, you're using something that isn't really intended for that, but which works well enough. Move to spaghetti or lasagna or any heavily Italian-oriented dish, though, and you run down pretty quickly into dried pepper flakes. Sure, this will do in a pinch, but quite a number of us have given a lot of consideration to why this style of food, given its prominence and popularity, doesn't seem to have many sauces aimed at it. This sauce goes a long way towards answering that question, I think. More on that in a bit...
First, though, the brilliance of the labeling here. We see nice slash writing across the front, with a sort of black and white montage, instantly calling to mind something out of a Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett story. The throwback to the black and white days is complete with the text on the back, which is clear intended to be a throwback to mafia mobsters of old. Just touches of absolute brilliance and I was pretty excited to try it as well, for the fact that I don't often run across Primo peppers too often in sauces.
So, I cracked the bottle open and immediately got another throwback, this one to more bygotten days of...let's just say it smelled skunky. How about that? If we're thinking the days of skunk weed, which is a scent pretty hard to forget after you're immersed for a while, and even if it's been multiple decades since the last time, any encounter is instantly recognizable, you're on the money. That the exact smell I got and I checked the label to see if it was also made with hemp or something. It, indeed, was not.
Sometimes something will have a fairly foul odor, but an overall good taste, which may or may not also reflect the smell. Not the case here. My guess is some interaction with the vinegar and the herbs and it seems much clearer now why sauce makers are not aiming anything at the Italian food side of things. I thought for years it was the clash of flavors, but that may be only part of the story. Whatever happened here has resulted in a foulness of flavor. If you can mask the flavor, there is a solid and fairly robust heat, but if you can't disguise this...far, far less enjoyable. I can't say it works a lot better on Italian food than any of the other ones I will usually use, even if it is a marinara. It's possible this is spoiled, but you can get quite a few of the shots at Italian flavoring staples to kind of see what they were going for, but this is a major miss for me.
Bottom line: This is a shame. Unless you really like the smell and flavor of skunk weed in your food, or really want to get a feel for Primo peppers and can't find anything else, steer clear of this one.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 4
Flavor: 0
Flexibility: 3
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 1
Overall: 2
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