Blair's Mega Death Hot Sauce
Note: This sauce appears on Seasons 2 - 4 of The Hot Ones.
I had this one for a while, ordered shortly after I started doing the FOH videos, when I struck on the idea of chasing down the sauces on The Hot Ones show, which was shortly after discovering that the show existed. I took it out of the box once I got it and watched as the various multi-colored sections of the sauce stared back at me, reminding me of shortly after I first started doing this blog...and put this sauce on the backburner indefinitely. I recall vividly the event that triggered this abrupt halt to a few of the Blair's line that I planned on getting to, referenced somewhat in the Zakk Wylde Stronger Than Death Berzerker sauce (reviewed elsewhere here) review, an event that caused me to re-rate that sauce and swear off of extract sauces indefinitely. I said forever there, but we all know how "forever" and "never" tend to go...
Fast forward to now and my now apparently annual tradition of trying to set myself internally on fire in December. This year was meant to be the year of the Reaper, which does a nice job of doing that far better than extracts tended to do, and often with considerably more agonizing side effects, but...the flavor is better. My motivation is to get more of the sauces from The Hot Ones show done and this one is not only my first sauce in the 10 spot on the show (except for Season 4, where it was in the 9 spot), it also covers three seasons, which means that I have now completed, at least in written reviews, the first 4 seasons. The show, indeed, is my sole motivator with this sauce, as the aforementioned Wylde sauce really made me question how worthwhile it was to fight a sauce for the sake of merely using it up.
I cut off the black label and extracted my prize, another skull keychain ring (I have many of these), then stared at this miasmic concoction of evil. I shook it, trying to break it inside the walls of its glass prison, but when I opened the cap to take a whiff, it was clear the genie in this bottle was too malevolent for something like mere sloshing to do the trick. I probably should not have shaken it, just instead, let the pockets stay where they were, as the combination of Cayenne and Habanero here is beautiful...for maybe half a second before the cold metallic flavor of the extract kicks in at the same time that it strikes with vicious bite.
I admit I was somewhat frightened of this sauce for some time, even though I've long been able to handle extracts. I intensely dislike them from a flavor perspective, and here the nice flavor notes that Mr. Lazar has generated are immediately dashed to ruins by the extract. That is by far my biggest problem with this sauce, and which redeemed my earlier impulse to avoid extract sauces. The metallicy nature of this is highly unpleasant and largely unpalatable. It's hot, sure, and instantly, but it's an old hot, though one definitely restricted just to chileheads. The new hots are equally, if not more, both punchy and blazing, and with generally better flavor, to boot. Like nearly every extract sauce I've tried, this one generally ruins everything it touches and it becomes an exercise in testing one's gag reflex to try to ferret out the quite good flavor notes of the aforementioned peppers amid the horrid, though slightly preferable to Beyond Insanity (reviewed elsewhere here) and noxious dominating flavor of the extract.
Bottom line: This is a stunt sauce, something that Blair Lazar seems well aware of, given the label copy.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 6
Flavor: 2
Flexibility: 0
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 0
Overall: 2
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