Hog's Breath Key West Red Hot Sauce
Hog's Breath, unknown to me at the time when I picked this up, is evidently a saloon in Key West, Florida. They have a fairly odd naming structure to their other sauces, with a hotter version (with different ingredients) evidently being named "Extra" and a Green version, which I presume is called Green. This one, the Red, is basically a straightforward Cayenne-based Louisiana style sauce. The ingredients are literally all that I think are necessary for that style of sauce, which is the peppers (or pepper mash), vinegar, salt. Very basic, sticking to fundamentals, but given that as the case, why did this take me so long (nearly 2/3 of the bottle) to get a handle on it?
There is a world of differences in sauces, even with those 3 ingredients. These are the same ingredients, for example, in one of my all-time favorite sauces, Trappey's Red Devil, but that particular sauce is one the best-tasting of all Louisiana-styles and one of the best-tasting ever. Crystal also has those same 3 ingredients, but is abrasive enough that I wonder if I could de-grease my engine block with it. This sauce falls somewhere in between. It is fairly non-descript and I think that is part of the issue in that it wasn't really memorable enough to me for settle into a place immediately. As it stands now, it is a lot less harsh than the Crystal, but not anywhere near as palate-pleasing as, say, Louisiana Gold, let alone Red Devil. I am not a saucemaker and don't know specifically why this is the case, but I'd hazard a guess it comes down to both the batches and strains of pepper, as well as the actual cooking method.
The sauce itself is fairly straightforward, so I'd probably put it somewhere closer to the Gold than the Crystal, but somewhere between those two. As it is clearly meant to be a Louisiana-style sauce, there is also precious little heat to this, again, very consistent with the style, as is the watery consistency. It also does well on all the usual Louisiana-style applications. Given that this is my go-to style sauce, I tend to use it on nearly everything that does not have a distinctive flavor profile that I think would clash (so no Asian or Mexican foods) and it held up as expected.
Bottom line: Somewhat run-of-the-mill, but overall solid, example of the Louisiana-style sauce, more or less in the middle, with both better and worse examples out there, especially given the price here.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 1
Flavor: 7
Flexibility: 7
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6
Overall: 5
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