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
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