Torchbearer Garlic Reaper Hot Sauce
This sauce appeared on Season 8 of The Hot Ones.
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
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