UPDATE: Video support available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8Afeq2AoXI Since Roger has brought back Burn Your Tongue, I do this a lot less, but still like to cruise the sauce aisles at grocery stores every once in a while, partly to see what's new and partly because so many of them stock sauces in such a seeming random and haphazard fashion, it's easy to miss things you may not have noticed and "new" stuff will be uncovered during an aisle shuffle. This particular sauce was one such find and the store had four of their entries (out of 6 for the full line) and all of them were on sale, so nothing ventured, always need new content, etc. etc.
The sauce is...curious. The ingredient panel seemed to me, with its leading of both Jalapeno and Habanero, to be taking aim at a Mexican style sauce, also borne out by the addition of lime. The flavor is somewhat more vinegar-forward than other sauces of that type, so I hopped on the website. There is a short video about the company, apparently out of Des Moines, Iowa, and the story itself is: daughter gets family recipe (and some sauce) from mother, makes some herself, takes to work, everyone wants to buy it, makes more for a Farmer's Market, everyone also loves it and wants to buy it and then the feel-good story hits the road until it winds up on a grocery store shelf 4 states away in Utah. The labels are also very slick and professional, which sort of works against the homegrown feel they're aiming for here.
One of the curious things about all of the sauces in the line (I also have the Ghost, Trinidad Scorpion and Reaper versions - reviews coming in the future) is that they all tend to separate. There is a huge problem with this, actually, as every single use requires agitation. Most chileheads do this by rote anyway, but this is a necessity here and sometimes, you will need to re-agitate during usage. Also, despite this having Habanero as the second listed ingredient (which I'm honestly a bit inclined to doubt), there is very little heat here.
Where I was going with this diversion is that I went to the website to try and figure out what market they were angling towards and this was painted as more of an everyday sauce, that is flexible enough to go with anything. Indeed, a lot of the typical Mexican spices, such as Chile Arbol or cumin, are not present here and this doesn't particularly lend itself well to Mexican style foods. I tried it on a couple and one one, that did have those ingredients, it was pretty solid, but on another, which as plainer, it landed with kind of a thud. As I got into the sauce, it grew increasingly garlic-heavy, with a preponderance on a taste that was most reminiscent of the granulated variety. It's probably a bit much to expect it to be fresh garlic, as the site proclaims, in what is clearly a mass-produced sauce, but concentrated garlic can get away from you. Here, this turns into much more of a garlic sauce than a hot sauce.
That aspect worked well, then, with things where you'd want a healthy blast of garlic, such as on pizza, for instance, but far less well on something like mac & cheese. I also tried it on a breakfast sandwich, which nearly made me want to toss the entire sandwich (which was Canadian Bacon, American cheese, a hash brown and an over-hard egg on English muffin) across the room. I think overall them trying to make this more flexible sort of works against it, as the sauce does not really have an identity nor does it have a good enough flavor to really stand on its own. This is one that really relies on ability to blend in with the food, that food item also needing to be able to somewhat absorb and meld well with intense garlic.
Bottom line: If you don't enjoy a strong garlic flavor, this is a good one to avoid. Flavor is curious and the lime is used well, but the sauce overall is without an identity and ultimately somewhat forgettable.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 1
Flavor: 5
Flexibility: 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4
Overall: 4
No comments:
Post a Comment