Blis Blast Hot Pepper Sauce
This is a bit of an unusual story, in that I don't usually come across sauces in this manner. One day, I was messing about online, trying to keep a pulse on what might be coming down the pipeline. I was looking for spicy snacks for the FOH YouTube video series I do, but somewhere along the line, I wound up looking at lists of what other people thought were the best hot sauces. Most of these lists are mass market commercial sources, meaning non-chilehead, and as such, a large number of the sauces are stuff like Cholula, Tabasco, etc., without any real heat at all to them. Some of them wound up a bit more exotic and had a few sauces that appeared on The Hot Ones, but this, which I'd never heard of prior, showed up enough times that I remembered it. So, I ordered a bottle.
It comes in a very heavy glass container. As you can see in the picture, the bottom of this, for whatever reason, is very thick. It comes from a company who makes a lot of other products that are bourbon barrel aged. This has been a trend in cooking shows for a fair bit, in which you can ideally get the flavor of the booze without the alcohol bite. The idea of aging peppers in such barrels is kind of an interesting one and I was curious to see how such as sauce would play out. The peppers are not generally ones you think of for heat: Cayenne, Arbol, Chipotle, and this also contains another of their products, a maple syrup, also from those same bourbon barrels.
The flavor of bourbon is definitely well present here. There is no actual alcohol, so if you enjoy the flavor of bourbon, but don't like the bite, that is essentially what you get. This mostly reads as a Cayenne sauce, though there are little hints of Arbol. It is definitely a lot thicker than most Cayenne sauces, however, probably due to all the sweeteners, sugar and the aforementioned maple syrup. I'd put it closer to Cajun than a Louisiana-style, but the sample applications would generally apply. It is a very uniquely flavored sauce; I can't say I've had any like it before. That does not mean, however, anything other than it is very individual in flavor profile.
I tested this fairly extensively, including as a grill sauce, and while it was overall serviceable in all instances where I tested it, in no application did I find where I wouldn't rather have had something else. I think this is due to the conjunction between the leading Cayenne and then notes that I would not normally expect in a Cayenne, namely the Arbol and bourbon. The maple syrup and Chipotle are nearly lost entirely. Chipotle often winds up that way, in that makers do not want to overpower their sauce with the smokiness, so they hang back to the point that it's drowned out entirely, which is what I think happened here. Heat, as to be expected, is largely absent, so not much here for chileheads on that front.
Bottom line: This is a very tame overall sauce, highly subject to individual taste. While I don't think it was entirely successful and didn't meet mine fully, this is a very worthwhile sauce to find and try.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 0
Flavor: 5
Flexibility: 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 4
Overall: 4
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