Swampdragon Bourbon Hot Sauce
If you are a food reviewer, as I am and have been for well over a decade, and even longer, if you count the informal times, or even if you're just an intrepid food adventurer, as I have always largely been, you will, at some point, experience the sensation of putting something truly awful in your mouth. I have had this happen a number of times and, unless I severely curtail my lust for experimentalism, probably will again a number more before I finally check out. This sauce surely ranks among the worst of anything I've ever put in my mouth.
After seeing it on a local grocery store shelf, I picked this up on a whim. They also had rum and tequila and I think possibly vodka also. I'm no stranger to bourbon and keep a bottle at hand at all times (unless I'm making a drink of some kind, I also prefer it neat, in case anyone is wondering) and naturally went with that, but also considered the rum as well. Vodka I could not see it adding much and tequila I'm closer to the point of avoiding, so they were really not a choice. It was one of the more expensive sauces on that shelf, which I found curious. Another point of curiousity was the ingredient label, which was "Aged Red Peppers," which I assume to be Cayenne (or possibly, but less likely, red Jalapeno) and a non-specified bourbon. Hmmmm.
Those of us who toy around even at the periphery of the culinary world are familiar with the practice of cooking with or using alcohol products in marinades and sauces and so on. Generally, enough heat is used to cook out the "boozy" part, leaving the taste profile behind. Getting too heavy-handed with whatever alcohol you're using can rather quickly and easily ruin whatever dish you're making and it tends to be mostly used as accent. Even in the sauces that do have it - a few from CaJohn's come more immediately to mind - it is used in the manner I've described. In this specific case, the selling point is that rather than taking a harsh vinegar hit, why not use alcohol as preservative instead? What this means is that the booze part is not cooked off and instead, you take an alcohol hit instead of a vinegar hit.
I was tempted to say that the company appears to be very careful not to indicate which brand of bourbon is being used, which I find somewhat suspicious. I imagine it is something they are buying in large quantities of and are likely worried more about a price point than smoothness, for instance. Certainly, all bourbons are not created equal. After pondering this some, I don't believe that I could take one of my finer bourbons and craft a hot sauce with that as at least a co-equal flavor driver, so it probably doesn't really matter how harsh the actual alcohol hit may be. This is just something that conceptually is a moderately intriguing idea, but in actual practice...
I tried this on quite a number of things. If I happened to have it on something hot enough or if I let it sit long enough to let some of the alcohol evaporate, it was vaguely approaching a Louisiana-style sauce, though one I would call more middle of the road. There is not really any heat here, but that is not really what most Louisiana-style sauces are after. When this sauce was used right out of the bottle, the best I could hope for was the alcohol being a distraction. At worst, it was vile and often disgusting.
This sauce never wound up either complementing the food or improving it, but rather universally wrecked everything it touched. There's just no escaping that you're taking a booze hit with this rather dreadful concoction and most of the foods I use with hot sauce do not work in that setting. Maybe someone out there likes mac and cheese or pizza or chicken strips with whiskey dumped on it, or someone who dips fish sticks or chicken wings in the glass of booze, but that person is definitely not only not me, but also no one I'm aware that I either know or know of.
Bottom line: This is a mess, an absolutely noxious, and somewhat ill-conceived, concoction. Best use for this would be as some sort of novelty gag gift. Definitely not usable on food and my bottle has already been binned.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 0
Flavor: 0
Flexibility: 0
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 0
Overall: 0
No comments:
Post a Comment