UPDATE: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58C45GkDM8Y
By now, regular readers should know that I'm all about the bold spirit of experimentalism here, particularly in food and so, if a sauce comes along with a new ingredient, especially an established ingredient in other cuisines, as its new darling boutique ingredient, naturally, I'm interested, particularly if it puts it in a position I had not previously thought of before and probably would never have considered directly. Exceedingly long sentences aside, another result is that sometimes you get culinary marvels, those wonders of flavor that redeem that lust for experimentation. Other times, you get a sauce like this.
It took me a very long time to get a read on this sauce. I wound up filming the video for it, in fact, something I almost never do, before writing this, because I had used up so much during testing and was afraid that I wouldn't have enough to put on camera otherwise. This is a somewhat pricey sauce and I do not care to buy another bottle, but it is good enough that I wanted to do a video support for it.
Part of the trouble is that it treads in two very different, and ultimately dissimilar, worlds. On one hand, you have a sweet soy sauce and the black garlic itself, both two fairly typical ingredients in a number of Asian cuisine styles. But, there is also that Chipotle, which tends to be much more prominent in Mexican dishes. There is a reason that the most you will restaurants doing is using Mexican words to describe Asian dishes, such as a sushi burrito for oversized futomaki. I have never seen the inverse, Asian words to describe Mexican dishes in a restaurant, incidentally, but maybe someday we'll see frijoles y huevos foo yung or something. I digress, but anyway, those styles do not mesh much, aside from specific ingredients, such as Jalapenos or Habaneros being used as a sushi topping.
So, here we have a sauce with very strong and bipolar influences competing. The early part of this bottle was heavy Chipotle, to the point where the far more subtle flavors of sweet soy and the black garlic were largely nullified. No guidance, oddly, was given on its usage, hence the endless experimenting. I found it worked best on ramen, was moderately interesting as a grill sauce and as a standalone condiment, was something I disliked using. It really need to be cooked in or otherwise combined with something, to meld. Forced to stand on its own and it gets either lost or impacts the food negatively (it is not a great-tasting solo sauce). Heat is very moderate, as you might expect with Chipotle being the hottest pepper used.
Bottom line: This is, for me, a rare misfire from a usually reliable sauce company. I don't really understand what they were going for, despite the words "Umami Bomb" plastered everywhere, and this is ultimately a somewhat expensive sauce without an identity, that is both forgettable and skippable.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 1
Flavor: 4
Flexibility: 3
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 1
Overall: 2
No comments:
Post a Comment