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.
To this point, I will say the Samfuego sauces have been pretty interesting to me. The approach to hot sauces is unlike anyone else's and the flavors are definitely unique. I'm all about the spirit of experimentation. For me, this has been somewhat of a mixed bag with these sauces to this pint, though, as they often seem not to fit the food I'm pairing them with in a manner I would desire. This sauce also seemed like it would be following that pattern.For starters, calling this a hot sauce seems to me to be a stretch. In the video series, I refer to a phenomenon as a "1 by default," a rating which means it is hotter than nothing, but is not what I would call a "true" one, meaning that as a chilehead, I find some degree of disappointment with the piquancy of it. This would definitely apply to this sauce and "1 by default" is not a rating I use on this blog, so I will have to give it a zero for heat. Taste-wise, it leans a lot towards apple cider vinegar without any being in there, kind of a neat trick, if you like that flavor, and assuming that the ingredient panel is correct.
These sauces also heavily utilize prickly pear, which is a cactus fruit. Like the other desert fruit we're pretty familiar with, agave, there is a very distinctive taste to that kind of sweetness. In here is also dark chocolate and basil, just to make sure things don't ever get too mundane. The sauce in the bottle had separated by the time I got to this, but no wonder, as heavier ingredients like roasted garlic and red pepper wouldn't stay suspended too long, I don't imagine. This is indeed a sauce you have to agitate every time.
As for usage...I'm not a huge fan of this sauce straight. It definitely comes across as a taste more than the sum of its respective parts, but it is not a flavor especially resonant with me. I tried it on chicken strips, which was a bust, then on a burrito, figuring maybe the hatch chile might meld with that, another definite no-go. Eventually, I tried it, almost at random on a Ham & Cheese Hot Pocket and it struck me, even with the nasty dreck that is their cheese sauce. This is a sauce strongly in need of a cream base of some sort. To test this further, I also put it on a pizza and it was much better, melding pretty well, better even than the Hot Pocket. So, this definitely is something you will want to use on a food with cheese (preferably directly on it) or at minimum, with a cream base. That does, however, significantly limit the flexibility.
Bottom line: A very flavorful, though somewhat astringent, sauce that is very distinctive and forceful.Works best with either a cream base or something involving cheese and very limited to not at all outside of that.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 0
Flavor: 3
Flexibility: 3
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3
Overall: 2
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