Hellfire Gourmet Red Hot Sauce Review

Hellfire Gourmet Red

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=9sVo5qnXWR0

Hellfire sauces have been kind of a mixed bag for me. For a number, they're fantastic, great, and wonderful, yet for others, I wind up being confused and would rather have something else. This one, after working my way through one of the most awful labels I've come across (foil and tiny text are..not so great), and finding there was no banned ingredients, struck me as possibly something akin to an everyday-style sauce. What I found once I got into it was anything but.

This is perhaps best considered a kitchen sink sauce, as there are at least a couple dozen ingredients in it, possibly more. At times, this can be good, as the sauce will nicely fit into many taste styles at once, but what happens here is that the various flavors of the sauce blend in nicely with various foods, leaving the remaining ingredients to hang out and clash. By itself, it is a pretty unique flavor, but that winds up putting it more in the category I've mentioned before of having "interesting" or "intriguing" working against usage of the sauce.

It starts with red Jalapenos, always a nice start for any everyday sauce, then goes to tomatillos, so an everyday sauce with perhaps a Mexican-flavor lean. Tomatoes, Cayenne, chili powder, cumin, cilantro, garlic, maybe now a much harder push towards a Mexican-style sauce...except then we have curry powder and coriander, which add some rather strong flavor notes that push off into different waters. 

I tested this extensively on Mexican-style foods, from tacos to carnitas, and the ingredients that blend well with that style did nicely, leaving the other ones hanging out that did not and bringing them more to the fore. I also tried this with eggs, chicken strips, and quite a few other foods, trying to find something that would click, but most of them wound up with a huge cumin read, a flavor I'm not a big fan of coming through prominently, particularly. It's a sauce without an identity (I did see a suggestion on Amazon to try it on stir-fry, but that is not an intended food purpose that I've been able to come across), so it's somewhat of a lost sauce, out there in nowhereland. Heat-wise, there are not any hot peppers in the mix, so it's quite tame, with most of the impact coming from the spices.

Bottom line: I really had high hopes for this one, but the sauce is out of sync with my tastes and is another that seems to me confused...which is the down side of kitchen sink sauces, I guess.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: 3
            Flexibility: 2
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 0

Overall: 1