Sauce Leopard Bird Blood Hot Sauce Review

Sauce Leopard The Bird Blood

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=MGRUb5I68eI

This is another company that's been on the radar for a while, and another hailing from Colorado. I keep thinking I should do a state by state breakdown of the sauces I've reviewed...maybe someday. Colorado seems to be popping up a lot, though, which suggests a good chilehead scene. I love the name of this company and, of course, cats at all, but definitely big cats, is a surefire way of getting some attention. The literal idea of an actual sauce leopard I also find enormously amusing.

This sauce takes me back to the first time I ever had cranberry compote stuff with orange mixed in. The person did it went way, way too heavy on the orange (most of them are like this) and I took one bite and stared at my fork. I managed to hold my young tongue from letting loose with a "what the fuck is this," but I was definitely thinking it. It was a jarring shock to the system that I, in all my culinary innocence at the time, would never have conceived of someone doing to poor, unassuming, delicious-on-their-own cranberries. Travesty. I spent a lot of time being suspicious any time I had cranberries not out of a can for quite a while. I still prefer just straight cranberries, to this day.

This sauce recalled a bit of that, but more what was possible with the flavor and probably what that clumsy cook of the time (I forget who now, probably an aunt or something) was attempting. Here, it is mostly cranberry flavoring with some very subtle orange notes, enough to be noticed but not to be overpowering, and a creeping bit of Habanero. The interesting thing here is that despite telling you to chuck Granny's cranberries, there is yet another callback to olden times in a texture with more than a passing resemblance to the apple butter my Grandmother used to make (crabapple trees in the backyard and it was all she could do to keep up). This is definitely smooth and silky along the lines of a sauce, but with that definitely tongue feel of apple butter. 

I find the flavor here, while quite nice and lovely, to be also somewhat subtle and delicate, to the point where the sauce flavor notes will get lost in the food I'm having it with. The mouth feel still remains and there may be a slight heat charge, but the cranberry notes, that I want a lot more of, seem to vanish. This definitely reduces the flexibility somewhat notably. Really, though, when we think cranberries, we're thinking turkey and it is absolutely delicious with turkey, which itself is not a particularly hugely flavorful meat. The more neutral or subtle the flavor of the food you're using this with, honestly, the better..just be prepared to use a lot. Heat-wise, since it's Habanero and kind of back in the ingredient list, the heat here is mostly mild, so using a lot is not really going to be a problem for anyone, chilehead or not.

Bottom line: A very intriguing proposition for a sauce and one that, while I find it delicious, I don't know that it's completely, entirely successful. Definitely love the experimentalism.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 8

Overall: 5

Revved Up Spicy Cayenne Hot Sauce Review

Revved Up Spicy Cayenne

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nF4k7hlEgEI

Revved Up is one of the newer sauce companies on the scene, hailing from the desert sands of Las Vegas. I can't think off-hand of many, if any, sauce companies out of Nevada, but I admittedly didn't pay strict attention in the past (and often forget even now). There seems to be some backing behind this company, as the website is one of the slicker (and also more annoying, with kind of clunky scrolling and a pop-up that is very insistent) I've seen, which I suspect is indicative of grand designs for the company. This slickness somewhat applies also to the label, which really tries to pack a lot of information in a small space. 

This is another sauce that I think is confused as to what it wants to be, however. It's on the medium thick side (given the tomato paste, one would expect that), yet comes confusingly with a restrictor cap. Cayenne is the featured pepper in the name, but is nearly the last ingredient in the panel. With Cayenne, the general expectation is usually towards a Louisiana-style or Cajun type of sauce, but here, it's very unclear where this is meant to fit. It also has Worcestershire sauce and molasses, so one might get the idea that it's aiming more at a sort of everyday sauce, but this definitely is not that. What I find most interesting is the idea that the main ingredient is Habanero, which doesn't really show up as flavor and which is not imparting a particularly high amount of heat, either. Possibly the label order is incorrect.

I am inclined to call this a "learning" sauce as this one really drove home that if I see the ingredients molasses, or particularly, red wine vinegar, to be leery. I don't dislike either ingredient, in fact, red wine vinegar is one of my favorite vinegars, if a high quality one, but red wine vinegar also tends to color the flavor of whatever it's used on or in. In the case of, say, a Subway sandwich, this adds and enhances. Here, where it's meant to coalesce with other things, results are a lot less satisfactory. Indeed, without intense agitation, there is a sour "off" note to this sauce, which is probably that red wine vinegar. I don't really understand the point of having both white vinegar and red wine vinegar in the same sauce, but both are here. I think this also calls to mind a discussion as to which peppers go more naturally with which vinegar. I think there's a pretty substantial reason that white vinegar is the standard, as it doesn't tend to color the food and why it's the standard for Louisiana-style sauces. I can't put the finger on the molasses, as it doesn't really show up here (other than in vague hints here and there, depending on what you use the sauce on), same with the tomato paste.

This is not to say it is entirely unpalatable, but rather that it's another sauce that seems to require a lot of agitation to get closer to a smooth mix of flavors, rather than ingredients conflicting and trying to overpower another. It's one that's relatively ok, if you can get the ratio of sauce to whatever you're eating correctly, but if not, this sauce frequently imparts a jarring note to things that I find unfavorable. Heat-wise, despite the Habaneros being first, it's fairly low. 

Bottom line: Perhaps the best explanation is they were going for a gourmet type sauce, in which case the ambitiousness is perhaps overly enthusiastic. It's a sauce that's trying to do too much at once and doesn't quite gel into anything cohesive. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 1
            Flavor: 3
            Flexibility: 3
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 2

Overall: 0

Red Clay Peach Hot Sauce Review

Red Clay Peach 

Note: This the 300th TSAAF full sauce review.  

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

I found this whilst milling around Whole Foods one day, an unusual visit for me normally, but I have found some interesting sauces over the years on those shelves here and there. As is my wont, I generally peruse the hot sauce shelves of any grocery store of which I'm not familiar. Sometimes one lucks out and can find something solid that may not be comes across elsewhere. Most times not, to be sure, but sometimes...

The name Red Clay seemed familiar and it wasn't until I got back online at Amazon to look for something else, a CD, as I recall now, that I remembered where I'd seen the name and it was from a line of hot honeys they'd made, something else I spent some time trying to track down as it seems a lot like that is the hot new trendy market segment. Buying them on Amazon is not a cheap proposition, but is good to find various names to keep an eye out for to do FOH non-sauce content or to watch to see if it goes on sale. When I saw the hot sauce in Whole Foods, it seemed like a good opportunity to check it out, as their honey contains apple cider vinegar, which dilutes me interest both pretty immediately and pretty considerably. Also, it was a peach hot sauce, which, even among fruit-based sweet hot sauces being one of my preferences, piqued my interest even more.

It's a good thing I spent the $4 to get acquire this, as it will save me from having to bother with the hot honey. There are a number of shared ingredients, somehow, which gets away from the concept of pepper-spiked honey, which I want to explore, and into a realm of something else, which I do not. This particular sauce is another that raises the question of whether or not a sauce with no heat can be rightfully called a hot sauce. It does have Habaneros listed, but way at the end. Up front we have sorghum extract (a new one for me), the apple cider vinegar, by far the dominant flavor, and peach puree concentrate, which I feel is kinda sorta cheating. Regardless, it does not end up in a well-flavored sauce. In fact, I immediately opened another after opening this, which is fairly rare. I agitated it considerably, no help there. I tried chilling it, as some sauces seem to have an uptick in flavor when cold, but to no avail.

The consistency is very smooth, probably the best thing about it. It's a lighter consistency than I would have normally expected, which makes sticking to food somewhat of a challenge. On the other hand, this is not a good sauce, so that's less of a downside. Indeed, this sauce is the first of 2022 to challenge my resolve to do a full year of FOH support videos for the hot sauces posted in this blog. This is right on the border of me not doing it, but I probably will. There is precious little heat and the taste is this odd miasma of what I presume to be the sorghum extract combined with the apple cider vinegar and it rather notably drags down whatever foods it's used on. Normally, for fruit-based sweet hots, I would use it on meat and since we're well into grilling season, I also tried it there, hoping to rid myself of some of that overpowering apple cider vinegar taste and get to what I'd hoped was the heart of the sauce, but nope, nothing doing there. 

Bottom line: The worst sauce I've had so far this year and another where I actively question whether someone actually tasted the product before it was bottled and sent out to an otherwise unsuspecting public.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: -20
            Flexibility: 0
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 0

Overall: 0

Hoff Original Hot Sauce Review

Hoff & Pepper Original 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: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z1HQmLhuVU

I've already done the Smoken Ghost (reviewed elsewhere here) from Hoff, so I had a pretty good grasp of what they meant by pointedly declaring they want to be "your everyday hot sauce." That sauce is and was an excellent example of what an everyday sauce should be like, in that it is flexible enough to be used nearly anywhere, ubiquitously, for whatever meal, in short, the sauce you'd reach for daily, as a good standard. I start off unusually by talking about a completely different sauce because the main, and possibly only, difference between these two is that this one does not have the Ghosties. 

I was really curious to see how this would play out without them in the mix and this sauce is about what you'd expect along those lines. It has the same smoothness and mouth feel, but is a little less smokey, less bitter, and a lot less hot than the Smoken Ghost. Flexibility is among the highest for both for any sauce I've reviewed (if I went past 10 in that category, both would be higher), able to easily transition to any style of cuisine. I'm not sure where it wouldn't fit, as I haven't found what that is, again, very unique among sauces. I've had it in both Asian and Mexican-style sauces, where it is functional to different degrees, and a variety of other foods as well. This is not to say it is my preference for many of those foods and indeed is not, but is well-rounded in a way that I would consider the epitome of "jack of all cuisines, master of none," which is precisely what a good everyday sauce should be. My favorite application remains the breakfast burritos I make, but I've expanded the gamut and found it pleasant in most, if not all, of them as well. 

Bottom line: If you want to introduce someone to what is meant by everyday sauce, this is the one to do it with. It's good a bit of punch from the Habaneros, but not enough to be chilehead-only territory.

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 8
            Flexibility: 10
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 7

Overall: 7

Bravado Aka Miso Hot Sauce Review

Bravado Aka Miso Ghost-Reaper

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

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j847B7GDzk

Finally concluded the Bravado sauces on the show (of the ones I will consider doing) and inadvertently saved the best for last. I have a massive respect for the team at Bravado. The labels and sauces are slick and professional and the sauces themselves tend to be pretty rangey. My initial experience with them, prior to this whole The Hot Ones show thing, was considerably less than positive, so much so that I wrote them off entirely as a sauce company, but the show has opened my eyes to that, as well as to a bevy of new encounters of the hot sauce kind that I would probably not have stumbled across without trying to cover the show.

As to this gem, despite a lot of the other Hot Ones sauces from their lineup showing up on grocery store shelves, this one rarely does and I suspect it's because it is so very narrow. If the Black Garlic Reaper (reviewed elsewhere here) was an unami bomb, this one, with tamari and aka-miso and sesame oil and togarishi, is more a strongly Asian-leaning flavor tsunami. That last ingredient, in particular, the togarishi, made up of the sauces I kept on hand and at a lot of for a while, the now departed Private Selection Shichimi Togarishi (reviewed elsewhere here), which was and still is, to my mind, the greatest sauce ever for ramen.I got excited for this when I saw that ingredient, as I've been looking for a solid replacement ever since that sauce went away and was hoping this would be it, but...no.

Naturally, with those ingredients, ramen is high on the recommended list for this sauce, as well. Bravado also does a very nice thing of offering a lot of pairings for their sauces. This sauce defies nearly all of them a bit, though. While the smokiness of the Ghost is very nice in there, pairing exquisitely with the sesame oil. The Reaper adds both substantial roar, as well as a sort of perfumey nature, which I find a bit distracting. In fact, when I first opened the bottle, as there was not enough room to properly agitate the sauce prior to using, it was like taking a mouthful of blast furnace, due to ingredient separation. I dearly love sesame oil, but it does not always mix nicely in with things, particularly water-based things, for obvious reasons, so depending on how the agitation goes with this, you can get a vastly different sauce with each usage. When it's on, it can be quite delicious, with bits of the tamari, sesame oil, Ghost and togarishi showing up in the flavor profile here and there, while the Reaper merrily burns away and imparts a varying degree of that perfume effect I noted earlier. 

Moving this sauce away from ramen, though, leads to often interesting, but frequently confusing results, which is why I suspect it does not show up on the grocery shelves along with the other suspects. The "in" ingredient of the moment, black garlic, does not show up here, though if they dialed back the Reaper and added that black garlic, this sauce would take on a whole new level, I'd suspect. As it is, I like it as a change of pace sauce, as rolling the dice with every usage is workable with this, as the results are usually pretty solid, but the lack of consistency with that flavor also greatly limits the usage (I do not find using this as a dipping sauce for chicken, for instance, to be pleasant). The heat level, which is nicely blazing, definitely limits the quantity of sauce to use, which is helpful. A little will go quite a way with this one and I don't see anyone other than chileheads enjoying this at all. I don't know what the hottest sauce in Bravado's lineup is, but this has to be somewhere close to the top. 

As an aside, in Season 10 of the Hot Ones, it was in the 7 slot, which is usually when things start to get roasty, surpassed only by some of the other higher blazers in the show's history, so Season 10 was probably one of the hottest ones...and which now has me wondering what the hottest season was...hmmm.

Bottom line: Another very solid, and quite hot, sauce from Bravado, fitting in a fairly narrow-ish culinary niche. If unami is your jam and you don't mind the sometimes perfumey nature of superhots, this is one of the better sauces in Bravado's lineup and probably my favorite overall from them. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 5
            Flavor: 6
            Flexibility: 4
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 6

Overall: 5

Jersey Barnfire Roasted Peach Habanero Hot Sauce

Jersey Barnfire Roasted Peach Habanero

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI6T7OAvIAQ

Since the first sauce I had from Jersey Barnfire, not counting the misfire that was Murder By Primo (reviewed elsewhere here), I was very interested in trying more sauces from them, but that review came August of 2019 (Smoked Ghost Taco, reviewed elsewhere here), so despite my interest, it took me some time to get there. Partially this is because Roger at Burn Your Tongue keeps bringing so many fascinating new ones around and there are still quite a lot on his shelves for me to get caught up on every single sauce I want to do, but also because I throw in archive sauces for the FOH series and The Hot Ones show sauce project and it becomes really easy for something to fall out of mind, if it is not also in sight at the time I happen to be perusing those hallowed shelves.

Anyway, thanks again to Roger and his penchant for being partial to peaches, I wound up on that bandwagon as well and now my ears perk up when I know peaches are used in a sauce. I've tried to catalog as many peach sauces as I come across that meet the criteria, though as I get closer to the end, it becomes tinged with sadness, akin to Alexander's lament that there would soon be nothing left in the world to conquer. 

For this sauce, it is another beauty. When I see a word referencing fire in some way in the title of one of the Jersey Barnfire sauces, I now take it to be an indication that I will be in for a pretty good sauce and that is definitely the case here. While this is not a delicious sauce on the level of the Twisted Peach Reaper from Eddie Ojeda (reviewed elsewhere here), which remains the absolute pinnacle of any peach hot sauce I've had, this one is very, very solid. It doesn't have tons of ingredients, mostly peaches, sugar, Habaneros, and vinegar, which come together to gorgeous effect. Roasting fruits and vegetables tends to bring the inherent sweetness to the fore and clearly they chose some incredible fruits for the batch used here.

The vinegar as the second ingredient strikes me as cutting a bit more of the sweetness out of the sauce than would be appropriate for a grill sauce, but the flavor is still there. If you like peaches, this can be used nearly anywhere other than cream-sauces and heavy tomato sauce dishes. The sauce has a smooth consistency that is perhaps pushing being slightly too runny, but just barely, if so, and it does stick pretty well to foods. It's brilliant on pizza and meats, which is probably where this would normally go anyway, but you could easily use it as a dipping sauce for Asian foods. Heat-wise, it is quite moderate, so probably wouldn't be satisfying on tacos or Mexican-style food in general, but as far as a fruit-based sweet hot sauce, which peaches in general except at, this is another excellent one.

Bottom line: One of the better fruit-based sweet hot sauces out there. Perhaps not the outright best of the sauces featuring peach as the fruit, but definitely up towards the top. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 2
            Flavor: 10
            Flexibility: 7
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 10

Overall: 7

Delaware Sauce Whiskey & Molasses Hot Sauce Review

Delaware Sauce Whiskey & Molasses

Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP95ikks2_U

Delaware Sauce is a company that just came across my radar this year, somewhat randomly when I stumbled across it in a store looking for other things. Here, we have a sauce that should taste like a Louisiana-style Cayenne sauce with a whiskey (Eagle Wingz) and the fairly specific taste of molasses. That is, indeed, nearly exactly what we have. I had hoped, when I bought it, for something with a higher sugar content, since I'm more in grilling mode these days and my eyes is now looking for sauces to use during the actual grilling. However, there is insufficient sweetness here for that and interestingly, grilling, more than anything, really brought forward the whiskey notes.

As a Louisiana-style sauce, if one were prone to molasses, it would be probably be better received. I'm fairly neutral about it overall, but don't love the flavor as a standalone. Here, the molasses sort of overrides everything else, including the vinegar, to become the dominant flavor, but not by a great extent. There are whiskey notes drifting around here and there, but they are not prominent. I will note that the sauce works better on red meat, which is a bit unusual for Louisiana-styles. The Cayenne is also a bit lost in the shuffle here, as the molasses and vinegar are the two main dominators. 

This naturally cuts down on the flexibility of this sauce considerably. It struck me as an interesting idea, hence why I picked up a bottle, and there are shades here of the Uncle Keith's Code Red, which also used molasses and which I found rather intriguing, but while that sauce had some complexity here, it is a lot less so. While I like the idea that one can pick out the various notes of the components, though Cayenne and whiskey a bit harder to pull out, I don't find this goes with a lot of things very well. Heat-wise, of course, being predominantly a stepped-on Louisiana-style sauce, there is precious little of it. 

Bottom line: Hitting the liquor in hot sauces trend with a take on the Louisiana-style, this one struggles to complement foods well with its flavor notes, which often skew too heavily in one direction or another, but somewhat rarely a tasty one. 

Breakdown:

            Heat level: 0
            Flavor: 4
            Flexibility: 2
            Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3

Overall: 2