Wuju Extra Hot
Note: Support video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXWJ5ET5Aog
This is another of the Albuquerque finds from earlier in the year and from a company I'd not heard of before, which reminded me of wushu, though there is no connection. It seems like I never quite seem to come across enough Asian-type sauces and though I don't eat a lot of Asian food these days, I do like to have one around, so I thought this might be a good pickup. What it is another interesting and unique sauce, but one that I think is somewhat challenged by the approach.
What I mean here is that it starts with agave syrup and yellow mustard and from there adds a kitchen-sink list of ingredients, including orange concentrate, brown sugar, mango, chili powder and curry powder, and rounds it all off with cumin. The sauce by itself is rather pleasant, reminding me a bit of a nice sweet dijon, with a back current of the curry and the cumin. I wouldn't want to eat it by itself, but the notes are intriguing. Unfortunately, they vanish entirely once this is combined with food.
I've spent quite a bit of the bottle trying to track down where this would go best and that means it's hit the usual suspects of chicken strips and pizza and burgers and Asian-y foods and grilled meats. It's fine on all of them, but in every case, it seems like I'm just not quite getting to where this sauce wants to go and I'd invariably rather have something else. The strategy with so many distinct and diverse tastes is to come up with a sauce that can have ubiquitous uses and indeed, there's nothing where it didn't work at all. It just underperformed as a food addition. I suppose you could make the case it detracted in those instances where I had to use a lot more of it to get it to read at all, but nothing was outright bad or inedible because of that.
The issue here is wanting to be too many things at once. I don't know enough about Indian food to know if they were making a stab at that, but mustards in general do not go with a lot of things. They need something fairly strong taste-wise to stand up to the pungent punch. The mustard here is tempered considerably, but the addition of more Mexican-y spices seems to move away from both Asian and Indian foods. It's unclear where this is meant to fit and the website gives a veritable laundry list of applications, some of which don't make a lot of sense to me. Mustard on tacos or in hummus? Ahhh, no. I think not.
This is supposed to be the Extra Hot version of the regular sauce, because...I have no idea, actually. The ingredient panels are identical. I suppose this one has maybe more Habanero (I didn't get the Original), but there is not what I would call any sort of heat to this. It is very smooth and consistent and does stick well to foods.
Bottom line: This is one of those sauces where if you happen to like the result of this combination of ingredients, you'll probably wind up using it in a variety of places and being happy with it. It isn't striking a lot of those notes and chords with me and I can't find a natural food fit for it, so YMMV.
Breakdown:
Heat level: 0
Flavor: 6
Flexibility: 3
Enjoyment to dollar factor: 3
Overall: 3
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