Uncle Keith's Code Red Hot Sauce
The story behind this one goes something like me looking at the breakdown of reviews last year and noting that I was missing a number of letters, with "U" being among them. I could not get Google to do the kind of search I wanted in order to find a hot sauce company that started with "U" to complete the collection, but one day, stumbling about on Amazon, it finally occurred to me, after looking for something else entirely, that I had really taken an incredibly stupid tactic for that letter. One of the more common words to start with that is "uncle" and once I searched hot sauce companies that were "Uncle Somethingor other," I started to find a lot of entries. This company looked to be the best proposition there and, further refined, this sauce from the available lines.
On the surface, it is a relatively simple sauce, featuring a couple of superhots, Habaneros, vinegar, salt, with the far less common ingredient of molasses, which I found intriguing. It didn't seem like there was a lot to go wrong there, even with me having less and less interest in Scorpions and still enmeshed in what is becoming a more pronounced battle to come to terms with the Carolina Reapers. Still, even if it was dreadfully awful, such as the lone entry for the letter "X" (see TOC), it would at least check off that box.
What I found here was a slightly sweet, though with a substantial depth of flavor there, combined more or less with the floral Scorpion notes. At times, it reminded me a bit of the Tonguespank entry (TOC, again), which, even though it came up once I was well into my "tired of Scorpions" phase, still was a contender for SOTY. Scorpions can be good in sauces, but it is a very narrow gap for them to shoot into. With this one having that kind of pronounced flavor profile, it does cut down on the flexibility rather considerably. It essentially needs to have a food with a fairly neutral, yet strong, flavor. So, chicken strips are fine, but roast chicken chunks not so much. Pizza and the breakfast burritos I make also pretty solid, but mac and cheese makes me wish I had used something else.
The consistency is sort of runny, not quite watery, but it flows very fast, yet the molasses also makes it simultaneously sticky. It comes with a restrictor cap built into the lid, which is fine, as this sauce definitely needs it. Lots of good little particles floating around, which I dig, some of which are probably things like the Reapers and Scorpions, despite the presence of which, this is a relatively tame sauce for chileheads. I think it's probably on the border of what non-chileheads would find tolerable and likely over that line entirely.
Bottom line: If you like the flavor of Scorpions much more than I do, this will be more enjoyable, but it is a very unique and intriguing sauce, which can work quite nicely within that fairly narrow flavor window.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 2
Flavor: 6
Flexibility: 4
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8
Overall: 5
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