Hell's Kitchen Habanero Mango Salvation Hot Sauce Review

Hell's Kitchen Habanero Mango Salvation Hot Sauce

Note: This sauce was provided for purposes of review by Roger Damptz of Burn Your Tongue. Check him out on Facebook or, better yet, head on over to his new online outlet where you can shop the widest selection available anywhere, www.burnyourtongueonline.com.

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9YWmq8_e7g

Hell's Kitchen intrigued me enough with Taco Cat to give this a shot. I seem to have landed on the Habanero-mango train and can't seem to find my way off, but sweet-hot is generally one of my favorite styles of sauces and last round up at BYT, I didn't have too many of the fruity varieties. Once I got it cracked open, I must say this sauce rather surprised me. I was expecting a very present sweetness, as is usually the case with those, but instead, I found a very garlic forward sauce. 

This presents a bit of a conundrum for me. namely do I want or even like sweet garlic (think garlic puree or concentrate) sauces? The answer to that is not especially. I love garlic and don't mind it in sauces, as long as it is part of the parcel, not the entirety. Here, it is so strong and dominant, it tends to overpower the other flavors, which I would really rather be tasting. It is hard to detect mango as a flavor and instead get a rather general sweetness. Indeed, this is a sauce I would go so far as to say I disliked solo. The recommends here are grilled chicken, fish, tacos, pizza and more. My response to that is nope, nope, actually pretty solid, nope, and only if the "more" means more Mexican-styled food. I'll be honest, this works great on Mexican-style foods and I tried it on several of them once I discovered that. 

For the other ones, when you have to rely on the sauce to either mesh with the food or to be tasty enough by itself to hold over until the food flavor comes in, this is honestly a poor choice. It did not mesh with the pizza and the grilled chicken and fish were nowhere near strong enough to stand up to the garlic. I was a bit surprised at the pizza, given that garlic usually shows up in pizza sauce, but with the tacos, there was enough of a forceful presence from the food so that the garlic tone was largely gone and the sauce was then able to accentuate the actual dishes. Heat-wise, this is very minimal. There is very little punch to be had here.

Bottom line: If this had about half the garlic force, it would be an excellent sauce...as it is, this is more representative of garlic-sweet than an actual sweet hot and is not one I found pleasant overall, other than, as noted, on Mexican-style food.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 2
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 2

Overall: 2