Angry Goat Pepper Company Hippy Dippy Green Hot Sauce
Note: This sauce appeared on Season 8 of The Hot Ones.
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=MnhzcW7gik4
If you read through these many blog archive posts (and you should definitely do that), you will find precious few actual green hot sauces. This is mostly as I don't really like green sauces particularly. Sure, I'll order up a Del Taco bean burrito with green sauce here and there or get a carnitas chimi smothered in a nice tomatillo sauce once in a while to change things up a tish, but overall, while I like that flavor when I have it, it's more of a "scratch that itch" and I'm satisfied for a while kind of deal. Also, if I'm being honest here, I don't find green sauces to be a super visually appealing or appetizing color.
This sauce is essentially what I would consider a more or less sweet tomatillo sauce. I see a number of people refer to this style as salsa verde, which is also fine, but I've seen salsa verdes not have tomatillos, which, to me, is the rather obvious differentiator. This one very obviously has tomatillos, no mistaking that mouth feel, so it fits into that category for me. I don't believe I've done another tomatillo sauce on this blog, again, partially because I am not partial to them, but also because they tend not to be very hot and don't quite make it all the way to "hot sauce" for me.
Part of this, I suspect, is that type of sauce nearly always gets too astringent for me. This is probably due to the tomatillos being fairly close in profile to unripe tomatoes, which I'm similarly not fond of. What this sauce does so brilliantly is to add some very nice sweetening elements, that of kiwi, a fruit both unexpected, but also very consistent in keeping with the coloration and flavor tones of the sauce. Angry Goat was an impressive sauce company for me, as I've felt their other offerings (reviewed elsewhere here) held a lot of potential. With this sauce and the incredible blending, I find them now to be very impressive.
The other reason I think of this more as a tomatillo sauce is all of the normal ingredients for that type of sauce, save green chiles, which here are replaced by both fire-roasted Jalapenos and Serranos, are present here. With those latter two peppers, heat is going to be somewhat on the low side, and indeed, this is not even remotely a blazing sauce. There is a slight spark to it, probably somewhere between a 1 - 2 for me, but the heat is not the point. The beauty here is with that sweetness they added, along with the twin oil agents, this is a much smoother, and far less astringent, sauce. I don't think, however, they were trying necessarily to make an actual tomatillo sauce, per se, but adding that ingredient automatically leans hard to that direction. If there is a slight knock here, the oil is a touch overdone. One of the things I hate about avocados is being left feeling like my mouth is coated in oil and there is some of that aspect here, though to a thankfully lesser extent.
The other reason why I don't use a lot of green sauces in general, and tomatillo fewer still, is that they really only go well with one type of food and that is that which spawned it, Mexican or derivatives thereof (Southwestern, et. al.). This is fine as a dipping sauce or splashing in pizza for a change of pace, but it really shines with things like carnitas and al pastor. It is dazzling on fish tacos as well, but there is definitely a continuity of flavor where it performs best and, good as it is there, I honestly do not eat a lot of that type of food generally. When I do, though, I will happily bust this one out, if it is still around, which is a big if. It is one of those sauces flavorful enough that when I use it, I can use quite a bit of it and not have to worry about overpowering, as the meshing is, as they say, some kind of wonderful.
Bottom line: An excellent entry from a very interesting sauce company. Think of this mainly as a brilliant and outstanding tomatillo sauce and use where you would that for best results.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 1
Flavor: 9
Flexibility: 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8
Overall: 6
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