Pepper Palace Wok Dis Wei Hot Sauce Review

Pepper Palace Wok Dis Wei Hot Sauce

I may as well start with this...I find this sauce to be problematic, as I think it treads on a too-narrow line of cuteness, right over into leaning too hard on pidgin English (in literal Chinese, the phrase is gibberish). I suspect the company may be aware of this, as the title of the page is called Wok This Way, which is infinitely better. When I picked it up, I thought it was just Wok and didn't see the rest until after I was looking at the sauce prior to opening it. Upon that discovery, I was immediately dismayed as I surely would not have ever picked it up had I found that.

That does not end my issues with this sauce. It is not like it's a great sauce behind a shit label. My initial interest in it was twofold...first, there never seem to be enough good Asian-style hot sauces out there. I suspect this is more of a market-driven facet, but one can always use good Asian-style entries, so it was worth checking out there. The other side is that it used Thai peppers. Now, Thai peppers are one of the few pods that I prefer eating rather than in other format and given the flavor profile, they don't strike me as flavorful enough to make a solid sauce. So, I was quite curious to see what they were doing here...add in some Mandarin oranges and ginger as elements, which I also don't see a ton, and I'm curious...

What I got here was one of the worst sauces I've run across. This isn't like, say, the Swampdragon, and is basically hard liquor calling itself a sauce. This was sour, repulsive, and ruined anything it touched. I did attempt it on a few things beyond Asian foods and it failed there also. It was such that my first usage on Asian food resulted in me loudly shouting at the food I had put it on, something I almost never do. There is no heat at all present here and not much flavor, either, beyond a sort of vinegary nastiness, slightly tinged with soy. This one also has "sugar" as an ingredient, which the company seems fond of doing, and garlic as well. I did not pick up any pepper, garlic, or ginger flavor, and any Mandarin flavor that may have been there was steamrolled.

This will probably be the last Pepper Palace sauce I review here for a bit, as I am now 0-3 with those I picked up, which is a streak unrivaled by any prior sauce company I can think of. This is just a bad sauce. It's been a while, but I'm hauling out the negatives once again for this one. Needless to say, there will be no video. This is already binned.

Bottom line: Utterly useless.

 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: -5
            Flexibility: 0
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: -14

Overall: 0