Karma Burn After Eating Hot Sauce

Karma Sauce Burn After Eating Hot Sauce

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: This sauce appears in Season 10 of The Hot Ones.

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VefEcVbSkJM

This is an interesting sauce on a number of levels. It's one of the few sauces in the #9 position on The Hot Ones that I've done and it treads a sort of grey area of a sauce I might have been interested in without the show, given that it has neither extract nor onions. The styling is ostensibly more Northern Indian, a cuisine style I admit to little familiarity with, partially since Indian food in general I find largely unpalatable. It also pushes hard at the notion of being a sauce at all. It is thick enough I more consider it a paste than a sauce and flow is nearly nonexistent. I do find a strong degree of amusement in the word play with the naming of this sauce as well, though it is an accurate depiction.

This sauce is unquestionably hot. The company is pushing the idea it is the hottest non-extract sauce on the market, though I dissent to this idea. For my money, that still goes to Torchbearer's The Rapture (reviewed elsewhere here), though there are a few other sauces I've also seen making this claim. It is not quite, oddly, burn while eating, which I find curious as the effects are definitely post-consumption in a lot of respects. There are quite a number of superhots in here, which makes for a very pulpy result. 

What I find most curious is the herbaceous nature of the sauce. It struck me rather substantially of something that might be more heavily in an Italian seasoning setting, such as oregano, yet there is none of that present. It is probably the ajwain, which itself is an herb related to some of the others of the type I mentioned and which evidently is a rather dominant flavor ingredient. There is also something called amchoor, which is a mango powder, green mango, and hing powder, which is another savory ingredient. The last four elements I mentioned I'm not familiar with by name and did not consume prior to this sauce, so I suppose you could say this is also an education burning experience. 

The color is gorgeous, a nice flame orange with some hues tending towards red. Highly visually appealing and appetizing, there is a very nice chili underbase to all of the aromatics, which is a decidedly flavorful one-two punch. The one issue with a sauce this thick is that frequently it will be difficult to agitate the sauce in-bottle, so there will be times when the aromatics are overpowering, rendering it of less usefulness in things like chicken strips. It seems a pretty strong fit for Italian-based foods and is one of the few sauces that really fits into that role well, though it seems outside the intent with the website references the aforementioned regional cuisine and roassted veggies. 

Bottom line: This is another fascinating entry into the hot sauce world that pushes the flavor boundaries. The thickness of it makes me question if it should be called a sauce and the more one finds herbs favorable, the more likeable this will be, but it definitely lives up to its name and is better restricted to experienced chileheads for whom a sauce meeting this description checks the boxes I've mentioned.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 7
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 7

Overall: 6