Mountain Man Fire-Roasted Habanero Hot Sauce

Mountain Man Fire-Roasted Habanero Hot Sauce

Update: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLY5_GablGw

This chasing around for a Standby Mexican-style sauce can easily get out of hand with me, which is why I was happy during those times when I had a viable candidate. Somehow, I wound up back in it, again, this year and was poking around online trying to find fire-roasted Habanero, since I think I've settle on wanting that more than wanting a smoky flavor. The plan right now is to blend a couple of sauces together and the candidates I have in mind I still need to gather, but that project I plan to start maybe later this month or December...once I can get up to BYT again to collect the necessary goodies. At the time, I had that tentative plan, but also came across this when searching for fire-roasted Habanero as a hot sauce ingredient.

I had never heard of this sauce company, which comes from the mountains of...Florida. Ahem. It did not look to be an especially complex sauce and that is one of the attributes of the Irazu Fire-Roasted Habanero sauce (reviewed here elsewhere), so I thought I would give it a go, both because I had never heard of the sauce company and to just make sure I canvassed the choices a bit more thoroughly prior to moving forward with the blending process. 

The initial flavor here is the nice fire-roasted Habanero blasted with a not very palatable vinegar. It is not listed as such, label cites red wine vinegar specifically, but it reminds me a lot of an apple cider vinegar, which I dislike as a main or even strong flavor note. This is, by far the biggest weakness of this sauce, which is otherwise fine. So, we have both a bad vinegar and far too much of it, which is pretty odd for most Mexican-style sauces. If you can get past that, and you will need to find foods that are relatively strong in flavor profile (which most Mexicanesque foods are, I would suggest), this does have a very lovely heat to it, though pretty far from blazing and the fire-roasted notes are excellent. 

Bottom line: The vinegar is a shame, but otherwise this is an entry into both the fire-roasted and Mexican-style categories well worth checking out.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 3
            Flavor: 7
            Flexibility: 5
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4

Overall: 5