Adoboloco Kolohe Kid Hot Sauce
Note: This sauce appears on Season 8 of The Hot Ones.
I do not understand the fascination with apple cider vinegar. It always smells like sour sweatsocks to me, yet we see apple cider drinks, even gummies. It is one of my least-favorite vinegars, as long-time readers will note. Thus, using that as the platform, even if everything else in the sauce is great, it will render the sauce to mixed results with me, generally. However, it does have a very strong and distinctive taste and this sauce, rather interestingly, tries to play off against it. It's a novel idea, but I'm not sure it's entirely a successful one.
The idea here appears to be simple ingredients: Ghost pepper, the aforementioned vinegar, salt (I assume Hawaiian as this is a Hawaiian company), and garlic.Two of them are also prime components in Blair's Pure Death (also reviewed here), one of my very most favorite sauces. If you're expecting a Louisiana-style or Cajun sauce with alternate vinegars and peppers, you probably wouldn't be far off the mark. This is a very loose, very runny sauce and since there is no emulsifiers, is very prone to separation also.
In the above comparison, which, while imprecise, is more on that not, this is where the flavor weakness of the superhots begins to show. With those other two, you generally have Cayenne, which is one of the better-flavored peppers out there, at least to my mind. Irazu, in fact, makes a Louisiana-style using Naga Jolokia backing up the Cayenne, which works wonderfully. Here, it is just the Ghost, which tries mightily to hold its own against the apple cider vinegar, but succumbs. So, too, with the Hawaiian salt. Garlic is lost entirely, which is a shame, as smoked garlic would have added a really wonderful note here. Alas...
Heat-wise, this is very moderate. They call it Medium-Hot, which is a meaningless term. The Ghost is being used for flavor, rather than heat, so while there is some bite, it is very mild comparatively. Ultimately, I find the way this sauce is constructed to be more interesting, rather than enticing. While you can pick out individual parts, if so inclined, this winds up as the whole being more than the sum of its parts, which I imagine is intentional. Being an interesting sauce, I don't find that it lends itself well or easily to anything I put it on. Without something to bind things in place, separation happens on usage and this is one that needs to be agitated during use. With that separation, though, the actual food flavors will tend to mask or eliminate some of the flavor notes and what is left can be palatable or leave one wishing for something else. If I'm being honest, most of it was the latter for me.
Bottom line: A bold experiment that I don't find entirely successful, this sauce, for me, is one to check out in the name of completeness for sauces appearing on The Hot Ones. As a curiosity, it is hard to see where it would fit into my current rotation.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 4
Flexibility: 3
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 5
Overall: 4
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