Pepper Palace Kentucky Charred Chipotle Bourbon Hot Sauce Review

Pepper Palace Kentucky Charred Chipotle Bourbon Hot Sauce

The label indicates this one is made, hand crafted, no less, by Pepper Palace itself, in Tennessee. I will note that does not improve things much from some of the other offerings I've tried from them. In fact, if someone read me this list of ingredients and told me they were going to make a hot sauce out of it, I'd have told them to bin it right there and just start over.  This was never going to taste good, so no real surprise it doesn't...

So, why did I buy it, then? The scuttlebutt out there has been that Pepper Palace has been reverse-engineering the hot sauces of various other companies and putting them out there as theirs. So, I thought, given how many sauces I've now done and how ace my palate is, I would be in a good position to find out were this the case. This one, coming in a flask and called itself Kentucky Charred seemed to me to be taking aim more or less directly at something like the much-vaunted BICH (reviewed elsewhere on this blog) from CaJohn's. 

Now, I didn't look too closely at the label at the time, and I like to think that if I did, I would have skipped this, but they are two totally different sauces. In addition to the CaJohn's actually tasting great and working well on the grill, which are major differences already, they pour different, have difference viscosity and share very few ingredients. With Chipotle as the main pepper, it was also never going to be hot and there is no heat to speak of here. Instead, what we have is a sour, foot-vinegary mess that doesn't work on food, either at room temp, on the grill, or if the sauce is chilled. This is, in short, just a poorly-conceived and possibly executed worse sauce. This will not be appearing on the FOH video series as there's no way I want to either go through eating it again or wrecking other food with it.

Bottom line: I don't know where you'd use this...I could doctor it, to try to make it work, but there is not really enough there for me to work with and that's me "fixing" a sauce, not the sauce itself standing on its own. It's been a while since I've done this, but this one gets my rare AVOID recommendation.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: -80
            Flexibility: 0
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 0

Overall: 0

Torchbearer Garlic Reaper Hot Sauce Review

Torchbearer Garlic Reaper Hot Sauce

This sauce appeared on Season 8 of The Hot Ones.

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

Torchbearer is a company I'm definitely familiar with, having been aware of them nearly from inception. Their devotion is to all-natural sauces (including no emulsifiers or suspension agents), which results in some still incredibly, legitimately (as in naturally) hot concoctions that tend to be quite unlike anything else out there, including this. Part of the tendency of those sauces, aside from SOTY 2019 from them, is to clot up in the neck of the bottle and also to have a heat and flavor that shrieks of super hot presence. I'm thinking definitely of Rapture, which, at the time, was possibly the hottest non-extract sauce on the market and which had a tremendous build.

There were no Carolina Reapers at the time (or they'd surely have been in there, I imagine), but Torchbearer definitely makes up for lost time. The Hot Ones is one of those things in the industry, given the eyeballs on it, that's attractive to a lot of makers, so no surprise that Torchbearer jumped on board. I don't know if this was made for the show or if this was just a good opportunity to showcase some of their sauces with the newest superhot kid on the block, but either way, Torchbearer has provided a few sauces there. Given that I'm trying to work my way through as many of those as I can and this is the year of the Reaper for me, had my eye on this one for a little bit now.

Garlic Reaper is one of those sauces that is somewhat hard for me to come to terms with. I've gone through about half the bottle, at this point, and it is still somewhat hard to get a fix on it. The Hot Ones features chicken and, to be honest, that meat does not stand up well to this sauce. There is a richness and creaminess to this, from the oil base, but garlic flavor vacillates a lot here. It mostly takes like scorching superhot. This is not a particularly pleasant flavor, I will note, and it makes the sauce somewhat hard to find uses for. If you try to keep it with chicken, it will overpower what you have. Torchbearer recommends pizza (it's ok) and creamy pasta (much better), as that will stand up to the sauce better and you can even get some of those garlic notes, which should be a lot more forward here, but aren't. I thought part of it was because I was agitating the sauce insufficiently, but, that flavor profile issue has been consistent throughout (and also, if you can't agitate a sauce with half the bottle consumed, something is way wrong). I also found it to be excellent used on burgers and that is probably my favored setting for it.

This, like nearly every Torchbearer sauce I've had, is on the thicker side, though this one is smooth. It pours inconsistently because even though I've cleaned it out a couple times, the neck of the bottle keeps getting clotted up. I'm really unclear exactly why this sauce is so sticky. There are no sugars there (though there are a lot of other flavors that also don't really come through) that I can see. Maybe it's the garlic, possibly. Given that we have Carolina Reaper on board, this is also definitely somewhat blazing and judiciousness is necessary when using it, lest you oversauce. For me, this is a bit more because of the flavor, as the burn catches nearly immediately, but doesn't seem to build further especially quickly.

Bottom line: A very unusual sauce, but unless you like the taste of super hots (or are doing The Hot Ones thing), not particularly a necessary one. They could have had a really nice sauce here, but missed pretty wildly. This is mostly just a creamy superhot flavored sauce, with slight garlic accents here and there. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 4
            Flavor: 3
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 2

Overall: 3

Gindo's Original Hot Sauce Review

Gindo's Original Hot Sauce - [TSAAF Sauce Of The Year 2021]

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=v03lz3Mf5TQ

As I mentioned in the Gindo's Honey Habanero review (elsewhere on this blog), Gindo's is one of those boutique, high-end sauce companies I hear a lot about and all of it favorable. Sometimes, the hype machine can go a bit nuts and things don't deliver on that promise, but with this, my second bottle of what I presume to be their marquee sauces (come in a square 8 oz. bottle), I have a strong suspicion that the entire line does. I went all the way back to the beginning of the blog to check and be sure, but this the first time I have ever had not only two different sauce companies have more than one sauce in contention for Sauce Of The Year (giving away the game a bit here, but yes, this one is definitely in the running), but it is the first time ever that the first two sauces I ever had from a company were also in contention for SOTY. 

So, this is definitely a great sauce. I really like the idea here, of the Honey Habanero featuring the orange Bells (to match the orange Habaneros) and this one, featuring the red Bells (to match the red Habaneros), which lends almost a nice tomato-esque aspect to things. You really get a good idea of the flavor differences between respective colors and I greatly admire and respect that. Both sauces are also reasonably simple, in terms of ingredients, so as to let the actual stars shine. Both also featured numerous references to Blair's Pure Death, though this is probably the closer of the two.

Like the Honey Habanero, this one has precious little heat. Also like that other one, this is really intended more towards the "everyday" type sauce. There's a laundry list of things this should pair well with and I have no doubt of that, as this has worked well on nearly everything I've tried it on. It has a flavor a bit reminiscent of the Blair's Pure Death (also reviewed on this blog), but not quite to the extent it is there. This is really its own sauce and I honestly enjoy eating it and try to chase down all the little flavor accents. It is truly a magnificent work.

Bottom line: If you enjoyed the Honey Habanero, but really want something a bit more savory for your everyday sauce, this one will fill the bill nicely. It is a testament to Gindo's mastery that each flavor preference for that usage is covered both to thoroughly and so spectacularly. Definite SOTY candidate. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 10
            Flexibility: 10
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 8

Pex Peppers Painapple Hot Sauce Review

Pex Peppers Painapple Hot Sauce

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6WxwLLSjVg

I bought this one last year and then promptly forgot about it until a bit ago, when I was casting about trying to get a line on how many Reaper sauces I had yet to do. As mentioned in my End Of Year piece for 2020, I had intended on getting to a lot more Reaper stuff this year, after largely giving the pepper a pass nearly entirely prior. I think this was part of a large collection of Pex Peppers sauces I had gotten while on sale and looking at the flavor profile, which is ostensibly pineapple and Carolina Reaper, I had somehow gotten it into my head that it was actually apple (like green apple) and Carolina Reaper, which did not seem to me to lend itself well to a bunch of stuff, unless I happened to be grilling. 

The sauce kind of reminds me a bit of both the Lemon Yellowjacket and the Wildberry Whoop Ass in that those superhots, Fatalii and 7 Pot Primo, respectively, begin to become assertive, fast in the former, a bit delayed in the latter, things get that old familiar superhot bitter tinge. This one jumps right to that, however, and I suspect it's because pineapple is not an especially dominant flavor. It is also shunted towards the rear of the ingredient panel, so instead, it reads more as a generalize sweet, which is mostly what we have here: a very aggressively bitter superhot that has a non-descript bit of sweetness to it.

What's also interesting is the sauce goes nearly right away to a full-on furnace, but then does not go any further. Unlike the other two sauces, it does not continue to build and the drop-off is nearly as fast as heat dosage. This is a pretty neat trick and I'm not sure how the peppers were managed to be tempered in this way. A lot of what I've described as the "cloying" nature of the Carolina Reapers is gone entirely here, in favor of more of a straightforward superhot bitterness, that could really be almost anything other than Scorpions, which always have that bit of floral note to them. I would put this probably below the Wildberry Whoop Ass in terms of heat overall, though initial heat, it's right there with the others.

On the less happy side, I really wanted this to retain a lot more pineapple flavoring. I love pineapple in my sauces and lament what could have been here. Going for a nice gloppy pineapple that also carries the kind of flavor that you don't want to stop eating would have been a neat trick. Instead, here we kind of have the inverse, where the sauce isn't bad enough not to use entirely, but I can't say it's very high on my list of sauces that I want to reach for, either. I'm sure I can doctor this into more my suiting, but that's not really the sauce being out there like that, then. That's me tinkering and having to modify. 

Bottom line: Pex Pepper has some interesting sauces, to be sure, but this is more of a thud, presenting an interesting aspect to the Carolina Reapers, but missing wildly on the fruit side of things.

Breakdown:

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

Overall: 4