Silk City Killer Hot Hot Sauce
It seems like I've been doing a lot of "everyday" sauces, that category of very distinct and separate sauces that all share the same commonality of being flexible enough to use with near-ubiquitousness, hence the use everyday somewhere part of it. This is not intentional, assuredly, and I never quite know what kind of trend a year will take, other than this year, by design, of being more Reaper-heavy than in years past. This one calls back to mind the fairly short-lived trend of the carrot-Habanero sauce, which seemed on the surface to be a very nice blending of things, but was not able to sustain any kind of long-term durability, as a food trend goes.
What this is, in essence, is a spiked carrot-Habanero sauce, stepped on with the combination of Fatalii and Ghost peppers. My love of the Ghost has been fairly well pronounced throughout this blog and I stop just short of saying it should always be used, but the addition of the Fatalii with the Ghost lends heat, naturally, but also a touch of bitterness. There is also honey and fresh garlic in the mix as well, but both are somewhat lost, honey being a fairly subtle flavor for this, though there are little grace notes of sweetness here and there. Garlic can be pungent, but here it only reads but slightly. There is also roasted red peppers, which I adore entirely, but that flavor, another subtle one, also gets drowned out by the main ingredients. This is rounded out by apple cider (lost) and by cider vinegar, the latter of which adds a bit of pungency to things.
Like everything else from Silk City now, this comes in a handy flask, which I love a lot. Coming off of the Badass Jew sauce (reviewed elsewhere here), I was very predisposed to like this sauce, but it called to mind one of the bigger problems with the carrot-Habanero sauce, namely where to use it. It's fine on fish and chicken fingers and such, but I also inevitably wind up wishing I had something else. I did not particularly care for it on breakfast burritos, which is lately my go-to staple use for everyday-type sauces. Carrots just don't wind up being used as part of dishes a great deal, mostly standing on their own as a side dish, so while using them in a sauce is fine, I don't think it speaks to our overall food vocabulary in the same way or sense that something like tomatoes or, say, roasted red peppers do. This one also strays a bit from those old sauces of yore by stepping on it considerably with the superhots, the presence of which I find a bit puzzling, as the combination seems superfluous. Habanero and Ghost, great combination, but Fatalii...I'm still honestly a bit undecided on that one.
I should speak briefly to the heat, while I'm on the subject. The label both calls the sauce "very, very hot, but not stupid hot," with various words in that phrase capitalized. I don't know what the specific SHU ratings of those descriptions are, but will say that while this is spikier than the more common version of carrot-Habanero tended to be (haven't really seen any for quite some time and pretty sure that short-lived trend is dead, dead), it is not what I would call particularly hot, especially for chileheads. Non-chileheads will certainly notice both the bitterness and a stronger bite than normal, however.
Bottom line: While I've been fond of Silk City hot sauces (though I hate their website), this one is sort of a miss for me, but YMMV if you happen to enjoy carrot-Habanero sauce stylings and just wish they had been hotter.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 3
Flavor: 7
Flexibility: 5
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 5
Overall: 5
No comments:
Post a Comment